From the Archive: I Don’t Feel Like Cooking

Sarah Gailey -

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

I'm still on sabbatical, so some of the weekly digests will be from the Stone Soup archives! I hope you enjoy these old favorites as much as I do.

Also, here are some things that may interest you:

-gailey

I Don’t Feel Like Cooking

First published on May 31, 2023 as part of the Personal Canons Cookbook.

This is what I make on nights I don’t feel like cooking is a phrase that makes me immediately suspicious of a recipe. Honestly, it doesn’t matter what comes next. Whether the recipe is innovative or exhaustingly dull, easy or difficult, promising or disappointing—it’s going to have a hard time winning me over.

This reaction of mine is both manifestly unfair and decidedly common. I suspect that I-don’t-feel-like-cooking recipes hit the wrong note so frequently because, like a lot of tech startups, they don’t really know what problem they’re trying to solve. The phrase “I don’t feel like cooking” carries a lot of hidden potential meanings, and those meanings vary enormously from day to day and from person to person.

There’s not one recipe that can help with DFLC across all contexts, but there are a lot of recipes that can help within specific contexts. To get deeper into this, I polled some experts (read: the friends of mine who were online while I was thinking about this) and dug into my own recipe archives, searching for the relationship between effort and output. Flipping that DFLC rock over revealed eight distinct issues, each of which has a different potential solution.

These underlying issues and possible answers aren’t comprehensive, but they might offer you a decent starting point next time you hit the Don’t Feel Like Cooking wall.

Read what to do when DFLC strikes…

Prosper with Dragons

Nicky Drayden and Suyi Davies Okungbowa are creating a cooperative, post-apocalyptic, Afrofutures card game… with dragons. In a post-apocalyptic world, disasters lurk around every corner and only a combination of human ingenuity and dragons can fend them off. Players must strategize to use their limited resources to befriend dragons while preparing for inevitable floods, locust swarms, tornados, and more. Dragons can aid in dealing with the destruction, but that help might come at a steep price.

Prosper with Dragons is a cooperative card game for 2-4 players, ages 10 and up. Games last about 30 minutes. 

They just created a new funding reward tier! The new $99 "Patron of Dragon Art" tier includes (in addition to the full card game) 4 original 8x10 dragon art prints. Go check it out!

CURRENTLY READING:  You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney

As the pandemic forced us to socialize at a distance, Kelsey McKinney was mourning the juicy updates and jaw-dropping stories she’d typically collect over drinks with friends—and from her hunger, the blockbuster Normal Gossip podcast was born. With listenership in the millions, Kelsey found herself thinking more critically about gossip as a form, and wanting to better understand the role it plays in our culture.

In You Didn't Hear This From Me, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling. Why is gossip considered a sin, and how can we better recognize when it's being weaponized? Why do we think we’re entitled to every detail of a celebrity’s personal life? And how do we define “gossip,” anyway? As much as the book aims to treat gossip as a subject worthy of rigor, it also hopes to capture the heart of gossiping: how enchanting and fun it can be to lean over and whisper something a little salacious into your friend’s ear.

With wit and honesty, McKinney unmasks what we're actually searching for when we demand to know the truth—and how much the truth really matters in the first place.  

Order on Bookshop.org

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Everyone in Foss Butcher’s village knows what happens when the magic-workers come; they harvest human hearts to use in their spells. That’s just how life in her kingdom works. But Foss, plain, clumsy, and practical as a boot, never expected anyone would want hers. 

When a sorcerer snags a piece of Foss’s heart without meaning to, she is furious. For once a heart is snagged, the experience is . . . well, unpleasant. So, Foss finds herself stomping toward the grand City to keep his enchanted House and demands that he fixes her before she keels over and dies, or whatever happens when hearts are Snagged. 

But the sorcerer, Sylvester, is not what she expected. Petulant, idle, and new to his powers, Sylvester has no clue how to undo the heart-taking, or how to do much of anything really, apart from sulk. Foss’s only friend is a talking cat and even the House’s walls themselves have moods. 

As Foss searches for a cure, she accidentally uncovers that there is much more to the heart-taking—and to the magic-workers themselves—than she could have ever imagined . . . 

Order on Bookshop.org

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

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In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

—gailey