---
aliases: ["Cooking"]
Is A: Topic
---
# Cooking

Cooking covers Italian home cooking, meal preparation, and the ongoing experiment of making good food efficiently. It spans traditional recipes, weeknight shortcuts, and the occasional ambitious weekend project — always with an emphasis on fresh ingredients, simplicity, and the quiet satisfaction of feeding yourself and others well.

## Why this matters

Cooking is one of the few activities that is genuinely restorative after a day of knowledge work. It engages the hands and senses in a way that writing and coding do not, and it forces presence — you cannot think about newsletter metrics while searing a steak. It also connects directly to [[topic-nutrition]], since controlling what goes into meals is the most reliable lever for eating well as an endurance athlete. Beyond the personal benefits, the discipline of following a recipe precisely or improvising with constraints is a surprisingly good analogy for creative work.

## Key resources

- Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" — the definitive reference for Italian home cooking
- Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat — foundational principles that make improvisation possible
- Serious Eats (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) — the best resource for technique-driven home cooking
- Italia Squisita (YouTube) — Italian chefs explaining traditional recipes with precision
- [[topic-nutrition]] — the complementary topic on how food choices affect training and cognitive performance

## Notes

- The best weeknight meals have five or fewer ingredients and take under 30 minutes — complexity is not the same as quality
- Meal prep on Sunday saves decision energy during the week, but it works only when the recipes are things you actually want to eat on Thursday
- Italian cooking at its best is an exercise in restraint: good ingredients, minimal interference, and respect for the technique
- Cooking for others is an underrated form of generosity and connection — it builds relationships in a way that a dinner reservation does not
- The overlap between cooking and engineering is real: both involve managing heat, timing, and dependencies in sequence
