Post Reports — “In a cooking rut? 'Try This.'”

Date: July 3, 2024
Host: Martine Powers; Guest Host: Christina Quinn
Guests: Becky Crystal, Aaron Hutcherson, Joe Yonan
Episode Theme: Understanding your 'kitchen personality' as a key to enjoying cooking more and escaping food ruts.

Brief Overview

This episode launches the new season of “Try This,” the Washington Post’s audio course series. Host Christina Quinn, along with Washington Post food team members Becky Crystal, Aaron Hutcherson, and Joe Yonan, explores how discovering your unique ‘kitchen personality’—which blends your habits, preferences, and tendencies both inside and outside the kitchen—can revitalize your cooking and make meal preparation more enjoyable, less stressful, and suited to your real life. The team offers practical guidance and relatable wisdom to help listeners identify their cooking style and break out of dinnertime doldrums.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Redefining Cooking: From Pressure to Pleasure

• Start Where You Are: Cooking doesn't have to be magical or transcendent every day; sometimes, it's just about “eating to eat and cooking to cook, and that's fine.” (Becky Crystal, 02:39)
• Release the Pressure: The team acknowledges that the expectation of joyful, cinematic cooking is unrealistic:

  "If you're thinking that it should be this... romanticized, wonderful process, that's almost putting more pressure on yourself when there's reality to contend with."
  — Becky Crystal (03:36)

• Honesty First: The first step to enjoying cooking more is self-honesty about one's own likes, needs, and limitations. (Christina Quinn, 04:08)

2. Discovering Your Kitchen Personality

• Begin With What You Love to Eat:

  "The first question... when you're trying to figure out what kind of cooking you like to do is what kind of food you like to eat the most."
  — Joe Yonan (04:30)
  Picking dishes and cuisines you genuinely crave serves as a motivator and practical anchor.

• Accessible Aspirations:

  "Especially food that's fairly accessible for a home cook. Right?... You don't want to decide that your favorite food to eat is at Noma or Minibar or a Michelin three star restaurant that has foams and centrifuges and stuff."
  — Joe Yonan (04:48)

• Learning From Others: Asking friends, relatives, or even restaurant chefs how they make certain dishes is encouraged and rarely a “faux pas.” (Joe Yonan, 05:49)

3. Marrying Cooking Methods With Personality

• Intersection of Eating and Cooking Styles: Joe describes himself as a “tinkerer”—curious about process, fond of deep frying, drawn to hands-on experimentation.

  "I love frying... and I also love Mexican and Tex Mex foods... it satisfies the curious, geeky part of my personality."
  — Joe Yonan (06:34)

• Following the Recipe vs. Freestyling:
  • Instruction-Lovers: Becky Crystal aligns with cooks who enjoy structure and rule-following:

    "Anyone who knows me... will know that I'm a rule follower. And so I think if you're that kind of person, cooking's probably gonna go great for you because... you just go step by step and follow it along."
    — Becky Crystal (10:03)

  • Experimenters: Aaron Hutcherson enjoys improvisation and surprise:

    "I know some other people that [furniture] falls apart after two weeks. So I think you need to find recipes that are more or less forgiving, depending on the level of attention to detail that you're willing to put into cooking."
    — Aaron Hutcherson (07:56)

4. Kitchen Personality Archetypes

• Tinkerer: Loves to experiment, monitor the process, and tweak as they go.
• Rule Follower: Thrives on step-by-step instructions and precision—usually successful with well-tested recipes.
• Planner: Invests in meal prepping, spreadsheeting cook times, and prepping ingredients ahead—a ‘Planner McPlanerstein’ (Joe Yonan, 10:50)
• Set-It-and-Forget-It Type: Enjoys automation (e.g., with the Instant Pot), prefers to let gadgets do the work (“if you're somebody who enjoys, like, you set it all up, you put it in, and then when it's done, it’s done... those might be the kind of things that you would find really helpful.” — Joe Yonan, 11:24)
• Improviser/Short Attention Span: May do better with flexible one-pan dishes and recipes that are hard to mess up.

5. Tools, Gadgets, and Habits

• Gadget Preferences: Your affinity (or aversion) for kitchen gadgets like the Instant Pot can reveal your cooking style.
• Lifestyle Carryover: Your planning style, love of lists, or capacity for “tinkering” in daily life may be mirrored in your approach to cooking.

6. Tactics for Breaking Out of a Rut

• Cookbook Clubs: Like a book club, but everyone cooks from the same cookbook—it forces you to try new recipes and reduces decision fatigue. (Joe Yonan, 12:25)
• Host a Dinner Party: Setting a date and inviting people over can spark motivation.

  "The other thing is inviting people over. It forces me to get off my butt and get into the kitchen."
  — Aaron Hutcherson (12:59)

• Community Over Perfection: Sometimes, the act of sharing food—perfect or not—boosts joy and creativity.

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• The Relatable Reality Check:

  "Your kitchen is dirty, your kid is in the other room, you got home late from work... sometimes you do it because you have to do it and you get it done and that's it. Maybe another time you can stop and savor it more."
  — Becky Crystal (03:36)

• On Restaurant-Style Aspirations:

  "Who actually says, my favorite food is foam?"
  — Christina Quinn (05:05)
  "God, I hope no one. I do. I do. I do hope no one says that."
  — Joe Yonan (05:11)

• Acknowledging the Rigid and Freewheeling Cooks:

  "Maybe that's where you know you thrive—in the land of precision and concrete instructions... Or maybe you don't like to live or cook by the rules, but you love the surge of confidence you get from feeling prepared."
  — Christina Quinn (10:24)

• The Recap That Sums Up the Spirit:

  "When cooking feels like a chore, it's okay to accept that and just make something that will fill bellies..."
  — Christina Quinn (13:27)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:17–01:41 — Martine Powers introduces 'Try This' and previews the episode’s focus.
• 01:41–02:39 — Christina Quinn introduces the Try This course concept.
• 02:39–03:36 — Food team discussion: letting go of perfectionism and embracing practicality.
• 04:08–05:49 — Defining your kitchen personality via food preferences and learning from others.
• 06:34–07:56 — Joe and Aaron discuss matching personality with cooking methods.
• 10:03–11:24 — Becky and Joe explore rule-following vs. tinkering in the kitchen and the significance of kitchen gadgets.
• 12:25–13:27 — Cookbook clubs and social cooking as rut-busters.
• 13:27–14:36 — Recap and preview of the next class (how to build your ultimate recipe repertoire).

Flow and Takeaways

The conversation is warm, inclusive, and validating, combining expertise with real-life empathy. The hosts and guests demystify cooking, emphasize flexibility over perfection, and offer several entry points for rediscovering the fun in food preparation. Whether you’re a rigid planner or a spontaneous experimenter, recognizing your “kitchen personality” can make daily cooking feel less like a slog and more like something tailored to your strengths, quirks, and real-life context.

Next episode tease:
“Up next, in our second class on how to enjoy cooking more, we’re going to help you identify the handful of dishes you should make over and over again and how to take them to the next level.” (Christina Quinn, 14:00)

For continued inspiration, subscribe to “Try This” or follow the Washington Post’s recipe guides for more classes and practical kitchen wisdom.