I am only cooking for myself, but I feel this too. I have lost much of my cooking mojo and have been making 2-3 things on a Sunday and just eating them all week. Not sure how I got here, as I do love a project, but weekday exhaustion wins most days. To think I used to hate leftovers. In addition, I am not interested in adding more cookbooks to my shelves, unless they are baking books. So, it has to be available from the library, and sometimes the whole COTM can pass if it’s new and popular before I get the book. I like the idea of one project and one more basic for an extended time.
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I don’t have kids but cooking day in and day out is pretty much my life. It’s hard to eat out as a celiac vegan! And usually not worth it food-wise, so I don’t do it unless I have to (travel with no kitchen). Last time I ate out while not on a trip was… pre-pandemic. I am incapable of giving local restaurant recs because I haven’t been to one in four years. Generally I’m find with that, and I’ve looked to COTM as a way of giving some direction to my cooking. I am horrible at meal planning (well, I just don’t if left to my own devices), so COTM kind of forces me to plan and get organized. And I’ve discovered some books along the way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
I have to say that right now, though, it feels like more of a burden. Not the cooking, but COTM. My creative energy is being directed to my pottery and getting ready for my first show this spring. I have a LOT to do. So it’s been hard to focus on COTM, especially when the books haven’t been to my liking at all. But I feel like I have to keep my participation up or it will go away altogether. Now that I write that, I wonder if I’ve fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
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Yeah, honestly I don’t know how you do it. It’s impressive.
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COTM is something that I’ve always enjoyed since I first joined Chowhound. I don’t participate each month as some cuisines just don’t appeal to me but I do read the threads regularly in any case. I’ve added several cookbooks to my collection as a result of COTM–Union Square Cafe, ad hoc at home, Mexican Everyday, Deep Run Roots, Fish Without a Doubt, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and Verdura. Many others that I already owned became COTM and I enjoyed reading other people’s experiences and opinions of the dishes they made.
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I, sometimes, feel like that as well. I think things like this naturally ebb and flow. Normally, this occurs at different times. I think Covid reset us all to ebb all at the same time. So, most of us are all slumpy. I don’t foresee that being a permanent condition, however.
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I tend to lurk, unless I already have the cookbook or it’s a website that looks appealing. But, even when lurking, it has been a helpful series of threads. Between my job and my current health, I don’t always have the energy to cook along, but I enjoy watching what others post! If March is going to be difficult for some to participate, maybe doing a thread to let others get caught up on previous books would be good (as others have suggested).
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I empathize with these personal stories of stressors and losing cooking mojo. They help me not feel alone in that. Thanks!
I had to stop working suddenly in 2007 after we lost summer and after school care for our son, newly adopted at age 7 from foster care. Then we had to start homeschooling 4 years later after 4 “therapeutic” schools retraumatized him.
Although I never knew would my “free” time would start or end, it was appropriate that I did all the cooking since his dad was working 50 to 60 hours a week. That’s when I had time for COTM and project cooking. Son has significant food trauma in addition to his other severe trauma. Some years ago he began “preparing” his own [very] limited list of foods. So I was free to do all the global and often highly spiced and mostly vegetarian cooking that his dad and I enjoy.
Since his dad retired 3.5 years ago, I have been a single parent in terms of trying to prepare our son for his adult future and managing numerous services, most of which have been ineffective and many of which have been destructive. We parents were born the same year as his biological maternal grandmother and it’s imperative to get him set up since we are 44 years older than he is.
And I was surprised that I also became the single cook for the parents after his dad’s retirement. Older adult male knows how to cook and has prepared about 10 dinners in 4 years.
So I need to conserve my limited energy as the single parent for our son’s current and future planning and services. This is a full-time job that I will probably never be able to retire from. Recently 3 services that had great potential started falling apart.
I have hopes that these highly stressful situations will improve, at which time I’d eagerly embrace cooking again. We aren’t there yet.
Take care, everyone. This is a wonderful community and we are all facing challenges.
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You’ve worked hard for years on COTM, Mel, and I deeply appreciate it. I fully understand your energy being directed elsewhere.
I’ve also really admired the pottery in your beautiful food photos over the years. I’d love to see any photos of your first pottery show. If there will be links, please DM me! Best wishes.
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Thanks for posting that, I had found the Manhattan version in one of the books, and didn’t realize there was a New England version.
I havent participated in COTM often because I just dont have the time to go around looking for exoctic ingredients. I got this idea from instagram. I pick one of the books i do have each month and cook 3 recipes from it. Have kept it up now for about 8 months.
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Your commitment to this has been remarkable. Maybe some kind of a reset or handoff is possible but this is a much smaller forum than CH was. I am challenged by re-sizing and reconfiguring my commitment at my church for example -as well as observing the need for a generational transitionwith a garden related organization I work with. Everyone’s relation to their communities and the work they do is unique , but I hope you dont have to bail out or continue with the sense that the weight of (this) world is on your shoulders!
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Yes, the fact that we are simply a smaller group is a large part of the issue. It means if we have a book that even a few people don’t want to cook from at all, participation will be low. It’s a smaller pool of people to recruit to coordinate (which we HAVE been doing). The February book is a great example of the problem. It finally got selected in a month when almost no one even voted. So few people voted for it, and few people are cooking from it. We have to expand the appeal, but without losing our identity. If the books get too basic, you will lose people who (like me) want a challenge. If the books are too exotic, we lose people who just want to get dinner on the table. I am hoping a mulit-book format would solve some of that. I can’t wave a wand and make HO a bigger platform. We have to find a way to make COTM inviting for the people that are already here.
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Personally, I have not been able to do much intentional cooking for the past six months or so due to life circumstances, so I haven’t really been able to participate in COTM when I would have liked to. I’m hoping that’ll change soon, but it’d still be unpredictable, so the longer reach of quarterly periods would probably best suit my circumstances too, these days.
As far as institutional concerns (so to speak), COTM has been going for seventeen and a half years(!)– ever since @redwood2bay dreamt it up and got it going in September 2006 – but despite periodic discussions and dwindling participation even in the last few years on CH, it never really evolved. With an even smaller regular and occasional cohort, we’d ideally not only facilitate more participation among ourselves, but attract more people to join us, and this is all a long-winded way of saying that I’d bet moving to the proposed quarterly, multi-book format would be more likely to do that since it would allow people to dip in at their own pace.
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Hi all, chiming in again as your friendly coordinator!
Once the conversation about the future of COTM started, I figured I should let things play out for a bit before deciding what to do in the immediate.
Two things have come about in this thread: There were not enough nominations to vote on, and there’s an emerging consensus that folks want to try switching to a quarterly, multi-book format.
So here’s where we’ve landed: We’re going to simply let things ride in March, and start anew for April, when we’ll have three even quarters to take us through the rest of 2024, and plenty of time for nominations. So use this next month as an opportunity to keep cooking from Ethiopia or to revisit any of our past titles.
In March, I will start a nomination thread for our Spring Quarter (April-June) 2024 Cookbooks of the Month, and we’ll embark on the next life of our communal cooking project.
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Thank you Caitlin, for all your work on this (and Mel as well).
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If it is decided to have 2 or 3 options in each quarter, I would like to suggest possibly having one of them be a “golden oldie” from the CH days. Don’t know how much interest there is from those that cooked from them previously.
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Trying to impose categories on the selections will make the nomination process much more difficult for the coordinator. We are trying to do the opposite. So we’re going to start out with no categories, and plenty of coordinator discretion, and see how that goes. You are, of course, welcome to nominate previous COTMs from back in the CH days. We are really hoping we’ll see a variety of books nominated.
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Since we have a free month coming up, I’d like to encourage everyone to come over to our current COTM thread and maybe give Ethiopia a try. It is really a much easier book to cook from that you might imagine. And you really don’t need to track down any hard-to-find ingredients. Take injera out of the picture, you don’t need it to enjoy the other food. You also don’t need to make a dozen dishes for a full Ethiopian spread. Saregama posted a meal where she had made one vegetable dish from the book as a side in a normal meal. The vegetable dishes tend to be pretty simple and and most DO NOT require any special ingredients. You can find a lot to cook with no berbere, no spiced butter. Just simple, simple seasonings like garlic and ginger. I cooked four vegetable dishes plus injera last night in two hours while also following an online pottery workshop. Three of the vegetable dishes called for nothing more exotic than turmeric, garlic or ginger. They were soooo easy. Way easier than anything in that Diana Henry book we just did. The Kindle version of this book is currently $3.99, so you aren’t risking much giving it a try.
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Hey, COTM people, it’s time to nominate books for the first in what I hope will be many successful quarters!
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