Okay, let’s begin by addressing the elephant in the room: what is”variety-spice”? So, there’s an old idiom based on a line from William Cowper’s poem “The Task” that states “Variety is the spice of life.” There are a few areas of my life where I find this to be absolutely true, but the main area, is food (you know, food…spice, get it?). As much as I enjoy cooking/baking (and eating of course), I am easily bored when I eat the same foods cooked in the same way over and over (disclaimer: I am not a chef; I’m merely someone who enjoys making and eating good food). There are various ways that I get inspiration for new meal ideas, such as:
- Chatting with a friend or family member (or seeing their food pictures on social media)
- Flipping through a recipe book (this is even better when there are pictures)
- Watching cooking shows/videos
- Trying to replicate a meal I ate at a restaurant/food court
- Pinterest (I think this is the one I use most often)
I love Pinterest: I get outfit, makeup, hairstyle, food and motivational inspiration there. However, I often found myself falling into, what I like to call, the Pinterest vortex. I’d just start scrolling through recipes without rhyme or reason, pinning them to my food board, and one hour later, I’d still have no clue what to make for dinner. Of course, by that time, I was both hungry and impatient (and perhaps mildly “hangry”) and I’d end up making something that I wasn’t really feeling for, but it was quick, easy and at the tip of my brain because I made it regularly. Does this sound familiar (and also incredibly unhelpful)?
After many repeated trips down the vortex, and a food board filled with attractive, but untried recipes, a systematic method started to form. I’m still working on it (the pull of the vortex is as strong as that of an ice-cold drink on a hot day), but I think I’ve made headway. So here, in a nutshell (or whatever type of shell fits your Pinterest aesthetic), is how I use Pinterest:
- I search for recipes involving a specific ingredient. For example, I love quinoa, but I found myself using it the same way all the time. So the day before I planned to cook it, I searched for quinoa recipes and selected different keywords as I went along to narrow it down (like “healthy”, “quick” etc).
- I look for “healthier” versions of foods I already like. For example, “healthy pancakes,” “healthy cookies” etc. If I know the way I want the recipe to be “healthier” I simply search for that (wholewheat bread instead of white, oatmeal cookies instead of plain cookies etc).
- I search for different ways of cooking particular foods. For example, I know I like the flavours of Mexican foods, and I wanted to try something new with black beans, so I looked up “mexican black beans.” This also led me to recipes for black bean burgers, which I would never have thought about, but tried and enjoyed. I’ve done the same with greek food and cajun food.
- Sometimes I want a quicker, or easier way to make a particular item, or I want to leave out/substitute a specific ingredient. Examples of these searches are “eggless pancakes,” or “chocolate chip hot cross buns” (because I am not about that raisin/currant life).
- I look for new combinations. Sometimes the issue isn’t that I’m fed up of a particular item, I just want something else to combine it with.
I hope that the system I’ve developed after several trips down the vortex provides some inspiration and assistance (and variety-spice) with your cooking and baking!
Peace, love and sparkles,
The Unicorn of Awesomeness.
Shespeaksandwrites 