No motivation to cook? Here’s how to keep yourself nourished no matter your mood | Canada Voices

In the darkest days of pandemic lockdown, Margaret Eby would edit stories about the joys of preparing homemade tamales for Food & Wine magazine but could only muster up the strength to put string cheese, an apple and stale trail mix on a plate for lunch.

She’d attended culinary school and had worked in food media for years, but depression made it difficult to eat, let alone cook. Still, she had to find a way.

Her new book You Gotta Eat reads like a cookbook written by an empathetic friend, aimed at those who are grieving, exhausted or navigating mental health struggles. Without ingredient lists or strict directions, she explains how to zhuzh up a can of soup, how to turn a fridge full of dips into dinner and gives permission to make popcorn a meal. She spoke to The Globe and Mail about her unconventional approach to cooking when it feels like you simply can’t.

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Michael Pollan has this famous mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” And you say, let’s just stop at that first one. Tell me about that.

When you step into the kitchen and you’re already having to worry about everything else going on in your day, and in the world, bringing the additional pressure of having rules like, “Am I eating enough plants?” “Where is this coming from?” can just be so hard to deal with. This book is partly a cookbook, but it’s a little bit of a pep talk, and it’s a little bit of a permission slip for the times when you just need to feed yourself. You don’t need to solve the world’s problems. You don’t need to impress social media. You don’t need to do anything except get some sort of food in your body, some reasonable amount of nutrition, so that you can keep going.

See recipes for warm soups and more

A lot of people think there isn’t forgiveness in cooking, like if you don’t have this ingredient, you can’t possibly make this dish, but there’s so much forgiveness in your approach.

Some recipes you really need to stick the letter – mostly pastry – but for most cooking, and particularly for the cooking in this book, it’s actually so forgiving. That’s how every recipe gets made: you’re just messing around on the edges of making something and finding what tastes good to you.

There are limits to this approach, but you should feel permission to adapt a recipe to your circumstances and also your flavour preferences. If a recipe has a shallot in it but you don’t love shallots, you don’t have to include it. It just won’t taste like shallot. It’s not an emergency.

In this book, you come from such a place of vulnerability. You say, “My husband would bring me a piece of fruit and stand there and watch me eat it.” How did you get to be so open about sharing when you were in a dark place?

It took a lot of work. I credit that enormously to therapy and I have a dear friend and a wonderful writer, Kat Kinsman, who has done an enormous amount of work in mental health space for chefs and food writers.

One of the real joys of putting this book out into the world is what response I’ve gotten from people who struggle both with the things I do – depression and anxiety – but all different kinds of things. People who had a brain injury, or there was a friend of a friend who gave a book to someone who had recently lost their husband and was very deeply grieving.

You have this recipe for a sandwich that is white sandwich bread, mayo, salt, pepper, sliced tomato. And you say, do not try to fancy this up with rustic bread or torn basil. You’ll ruin it.

I genuinely believe that there are some dishes where if you make the fancier version it’s actually worse. I think there’s something to be said where you embrace ease and joy and comfort in the kitchen. You know what’s great? Grilled cheese. The simple comfort of American cheese and white bread is profound and excellent and doesn’t need improvement. There’s beauty in the very simple, in the very unadorned, as well as the things that take you five hours that are more traditionally celebrated.

This book isn’t organized like most cookbooks, where it’s appetizers, main courses, desserts. It’s more about how much energy you have today. Tell me about the decision to organize the book that way.

I really wanted to focus on what part of cooking feels possible to you today, and so the organization starts with assembly only. You can’t turn on the stove? Don’t worry about that. We have some jars, we have some cans. I want to acknowledge that recipes involve more than ingredients or equipment. They involve a time and energy commitment to find those ingredients, cut them up and also wash whatever it is that you’re using, which is almost never accounted for when you read traditional recipes.

There is quite a bit of stealthy culinary instruction in here that I love, like your two-ingredient mug cake recipe where you say, hey, if you don’t have eggs and sugar in your house, you can use ice cream, which has both ingredients in it, and mix it with flour to make cake.

That is one thing where having a culinary background comes in handy. I was also very proud of myself when I was like, “Do you know what salsa is? It’s just cut up vegetables.” I think once you break things down into their components, you can sort of see through the matrix, and then you’re like, “Ah! I can make a soup using that.” When you can look at what things are doing in a recipe, then it’s a lot easier to substitute them. A big part of cooking is even if you fail, it’s probably edible and delicious in some capacity. And if it’s not, then Bagel Bites exist.

This interview has been condensed and edited.