Nik Sharma Offers His Top Tips for Home Cooks to Fight Recipe Fatigue

Cookbook author Nik Sharma is no stranger to the challenges of recipe and cooking fatigue: His latest cookbook, Veg-Table , is focused on putting produce at the center of the menu, which can require more prep and clean-up, two of the more time-consuming aspects of cooking. When I cook, for example, I’m either listening to my favorite soundtrack, or I’m watching a show—something on design, or something silly like the “Real Housewives.” But it has to be something unrelated to what I’m doing at the moment, so I don’t get fatigued and bored and tired and fed up. One of the things method writers do a lot is to get inspiration from other people or countries.

So when you travel or go to a restaurant, try to remember things that you enjoyed. It doesn’t have to be always the dish that creates the memory for you.

Even in California, you can get the same things all the time in season. Spices are the easiest way to revamp a meal, to make something familiar more exciting—you roast potatoes with salt and pepper one time, then in harissa the next time, and maybe the third time use garam masala. One of the pressures, especially in countries where we’re privileged enough to get access to elements all the time, is that there is a shame around buying canned foods and frozen foods.

If you buy a whole vegetable, depending on the time it takes to get from the estate to the marketplace, the nutritional quality keeps decreasing as soon as it’s pulled off from the plant. If you’re actually going to sit and cut everything, it’s OK to prep the night before.

If you want to spend time on a few hours on a Saturday or Sunday prepping for the week, it’s totally fine to prep and freeze. And people don’t like to do this because then they have to wash more dishes—and the mental notion of washing a lot of dishes is just off-putting.

Just have the ingredients in front of you at the table in the kitchen and work with them. “No one’s coming to your house to judge you. Instagram, Pinterest, and all these things are all responsible for this desire for everything to look perfect—and of course I’m partly responsible for it too, since I always have to take a good photograph or video to sell the product.

Another thing home cooks hear all the time is, “You have to use kosher salt—Morton or Diamond.” It’s nonsense, as that’s not going to make them a better cook. Telling people to use something so specific, when it’s not going to make them a good or bad cook—it’s silly.

We do a lot of this to ourselves—we’re trying to replicate what’s online or what’s in a restaurant, and you don’t need that at home. When you’re entertaining or feeding your family, don’t go overboard, since at the end of the day, you actually want to enjoy the meal and spend time with them. One of the things that I enjoyed as a child was always being asked to be part of what I call transformational steps in preparation.

You’re actually involved at the end and, as a child, you can say, “I made that.” Not everything needs to be made at home.