Deana Birks

This is the book I needed and didn’t have years ago. Somehow I always managed to over complicate menu planning, grocery shopping and cooking to the point that it was an impossible task. And we all know what happens when meals become impossible: pizza or another burrito bowl.

Here’s what I was doing in my mind: we have this number of family members who are these ages and genders. They need this many calories per day. I need breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for the entire week for each person. And I need it to come in under this dollar amount. Oh, and while I’m at it I should go ahead and plan for the entire year. I’ll just make 52 lists at once and I can repeat it each year.

No wonder I found it overwhelming to the point of impossible. All I had to do was get us something to eat but I complicated it to the point that I’d need a degree in nutrition and to become a master chef, as well as an expert in personal finance and project management.

Oh, and did I mention that you have to eat every day? Several times a day? Forever? It’s not like you can take a two week break to plan a strategy and then do some shopping in preparation for when you start. You have to eat dinner tonight. Even if you move across the country or sprain an ankle or have two funerals to attend in the same week, you still have to figure out dinner tonight and every night. This was the first book in the getting dinner on the table genre that made me feel seen Kendra Adachi says,

Allow me to hold your metaphorical face in my metaphorical hands as I say this: of course you’re exhausted. Of course you are. Life in the kitchen doesn’t provide any breathers to figure out what you’re doing or what you need. Meals just keep coming no matter how much you need them to slow down.

This book walks you through how to figure out what you personally need in your kitchen for your life and your goals. Remember getting your first cookbook and buying the stuff it recommends you have to have and then you end up never using some of it? This book is the antithesis of that, because Adachi knows that you are not a clone of her.

Probably the most helpful part of the book for me was the part on how to prioritize. I now use this in other areas of my life as well. She says,

Any time you need clarity on what matters, ask yourself these three simple questions: 1. What could matter? 2. What does matter? 3. What matters most?

As an example, let’s think about what could matter when you shop for food: price, quality, convenience, selection, experience, sustainability, and if a place has grocery pickup or shopping carts shaped like racecars for your toddler. Those could all be important, right? However, there is no grocery store on earth that can prioritize all those things. None.

Every store has to prioritize something, or it won’t survive. The same is true for you. You have to prioritize. If you try to tend to everything, you’ll tend to nothing—at least not well. You have to drill down to what matters most to you, and the first step is listing all the possibilities. 

That’s where I was going wrong. I was trying to prioritize ALL THE THINGS so I could get an A+ in Kitchen. When what I needed to do was figure out how do get something other than French fries into my autistic son and something gluten free for myself.

Adachi advocates a sort of Buddhist middle path between what she calls the Genius Way (that’s when you try to do everything perfectly) and the Lazy Way (when you end up getting fast food delivered again because your genius plans were unsustainable). She describes the Lazy Genius way as being “a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don’t.”

This book literally has a whopping 358 highlights on my Kindle because it resonated with me so much. I really, really needed it. I only wish I’d had it years ago so I could have just relaxed sooner.