Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Calorie Bomb

With the economy sucking as much shit as it currently does, more and more people have been wanting to get into home cooking. In a just and sensible world, this would be a nigh-universal skill that everyone would've learned in childhood. As it stands however, a lot of people have basically never made anything more complicated than a PB&J at home.

If you're one of those people, this article is specifically for you!

A lot of people who want to get into cooking at home, be it to escape the wicked grip of the Burrito Taxi or because the Trader Joe's Frozen Chicken Tikka Masala, as insanely good as it is, just tastes vaguely pathetic on the twelfth night in a row. And, quite reasonably in my opinion, their first venue to learn how to cook is social media.

And look, social media is great! It's one of humanity's crowning achievements, that is my honest and sincere opinion. It's where I've met basically all of my favourite people. It's the reason I know I'm trans, and it's how I learned to play bass. The modern Internet makes the Library of Alexandria look like SkyMall, and social media is no small part of that. But it is also a land of perverse incentives galore. When clout means money, there's a cold hard reason to get clicks and a following at any cost, even if it means misleading your audience.

The overwhelming majority of cooking videos on any social media website, be it YouTube or TikTok or…a third one (do people still use Instagram?) are going to be oriented more towards getting clicks/views than towards actually teaching you how to cook. Even the most well-intentioned recipes will be only that, recipes, teaching you what to do but not how or why to do it.

And this is before we get into the problem of the economics of home cooking, both in terms of finances and in terms of energy. Maybe you can do 40 minutes of attending cooking five days a week, and if you can that's awesome and I hope you enjoy the food you make. But for most people, coming home from work just to have to throw on the apron and spend an hour cooking a sauce and fresh meat and vegetables all from scratch just for a single portion, when Burrito Taxi is right there…

These are the two pain points for beginner cooks that the Slop-Mush System for Effective Home Cooking aims to fix.

1. How to actually learn to cook while cooking, rather than simply following recipes to the letter.
2. How to cook in a way that's respectful of both your time and your wallet, not requiring you to spend 40 dollars on ingredients for a dish you'll only make once.

What Is: The System?

The core principle of the Slop-Mush System for Effective Home Cooking is as follows:

Most foods which are good for making at home, on weeknights, when you're tired and you simply do not have That Dawg in you, can be distributed into two categories: Slop and Mush.

Thus, the usefulness of the system derives from two functions: the ability to rapidly assess if a recipe or a food item is good for making at home, or whether it should remain the domain of restaurants and weekends, and the ability to discover new recipes and food items to make at home via the guiding light of the Slop-Mush dichotomy.

What Is: Slop?

Slop is any food which, as the name implies, can be slopped into a plate or a bowl with little thought or effort given to serving or presentation, and enjoyed immediately. Slop is generally procured in large, relatively homogenous batches, and keeps well when refrigerated or frozen, rather than only being good for the 15 minutes immediately after coming out of a pan.

Some Examples of Slop: Pasta Marinara, Pulao/Plov/Pilaf, Chilli Con Carne, Beans and Rice, Tuna/Chicken Salad

All of these foods (with the exception of the pasta in pasta marinara, which is generally better to make fresh) refrigerate and reheat admirably, with no real degradation in quality (and at times even improvements), making them prime candidates for cooking in large batches and refrigerating or freezing for quick, easy meals for days or weeks to come.

They're also all exceedingly cheap. They all utilize simple, staple ingredients that can be bought in bulk and store for ages without spoiling when stored properly, and all of them lend themselves admirably to experimentation, extension, modification, and folding-in of various sorts of leftovers.

"Slop" style foods are excellent for home cooking, because they frontload both labour and cost into a single, relatively manageable instance. Minimal thought needing to be given to orders of operations or presentation makes them highly accessible even to beginner cooks, and readying a frozen/refrigerated serving requires as little or less effort than many microwaveable products.

They' also make for great food simply on their own merits, because they can be seasoned and adjusted to the cook's precise tastes. This is more of an advantage for slightly more experienced cooks with a better understanding of their own preferences and how to reach them, but even for beginners, the ease of exploration and experimentation allows them to actually develop those skills, rather than simply following the preferences of whoever wrote the recipe they're following.

What is: Mush?

Mush as a category somewhat deprioritizes long-term storage in favour of hot, fresh, soft, comforting food, great for sick days or simply times when you feel kinda bad and wanna eat something that warms up your body and your soul.

Mush foods do also generally tend to keep acceptably, but they're ill-suited candidates for bulk freezing. Nonetheless, the qualities which make Slop accessible for beginner home cooks without large quantities of disposable income also persist in the Mush category: inexpensive ingredients, great extensibility and room for experimentation, and cooking processes that require minimal attention or babysitting. This lack of care tends to result in a final product that is often quite soft and "mushy", hence the name of the category, but never to an unpleasant degree.

Some Examples of Mush: Soups, Stews, Pot Roasts, Frittatas, Khichri, One-Pot/Baked Pastas, Casseroles

Mush foods in essence just amount to "dump a bunch of stuff in a pot/pan/casserole dish, and let 'er rip till it tastes good". While they refrigerate decently well for a day or two in most cases, they are generally best hot, fresh, and paired with that delectable feeling of accomplishment you get as a beginner cook when enjoying a delicious and fresh home cooked meal.

How To Use The System

Now that we understand what Slop and Mush are in this context, how can you apply this dichotomy?

To determine if a recipe is effective for home cooking, apply the following two-step assessment:

1. Does the recipe utilize staple ingredients that can be bought in bulk? (Bonus points if you already own the ingredients!)
2. Can the recipe be scaled up to a large enough batch for leftovers without degrading in quality?

If the answer to both questions is "Yes", the recipe is most likely effective for home cooking.

To determine if the recipe is Slop, ask:

"Does the result of the recipe degrade meaningfully in quality when frozen and reheated?"

If the answer is "No", the recipe is most likely Slop.

To determine if the recipe is Mush, ask:

"Does the recipe require greater steps than simply dumping a bunch of things in a vessel and cooking them?"

If the answer is "No", the recipe is most likely Mush.

Please note that these are not rigid categories, nor is this a firm dichotomy. The point of this is not to be a taxonomy of all good home-cooked foods, but to be a heuristic by which a fledgling home cook can assess how best to spend their time, energy, and money. There are food that are both Slop and Mush. There are foods which are neither, but still make for good home cooking, probably, but I haven't found any yet in my rotation. Deploy the system to help you, and abandon it as soon as it begins to hinder instead. That is not its purpose.

Recipe Discovery with the Slop-Mush System

While coming up with new recipes from relatively whole cloth is a somewhat advanced exercise, and best attempted once one is comfortable in the kitchen, I'm not your mum and I can't stop you if you try. Instead, I will attempt to equip you with three guiding principles with which you can compose new recipes of your very own, at minimal personal cost.

#1: Use What You Have

Avoid coming up with recipes that require a bunch of ingredients you don't have/haven't used before. When designing a new recipe, stick to familiar ground, and combine elements from existing recipes that you can try at relatively trivial personal expense. You can expand your definition of "familiar ground" by experimenting with ingredient additions into an existing recipe, but trying to do it with an all-new dish using ingredients you don't understand will more often than not be disastrous.

#2: Keep It Simple

Don't overload yourself with complicated technique. Remember that if you want this recipe to be something you can make regularly, it has to be something you can toss together when tired, hungry, and impatient. If it needs babysitting or precision or really in any way requires you to do much more than set a timer on your phone and scroll Bluesky or TikTok while laying on the couch, it's probably not gonna end up in your weekly rotations. Keep it simple, keep it easy, and be kind to your future self.

#3: Understand the Fundamentals

Coming up with a new recipe is really cool, and I'm proud of you for doing it! Trying to reinvent the fundamentals of cooking from scratch is less so. Before coming up with an entirely new recipe, make sure you're comfortable with your grasp on the basics of the recipes you already know. What ingredients form a good base of what flavours? What herbs, condiments, and toppings pair well with what substrates? What does it taste like when something isn't sweet, salty, savoury, spicy, or sour enough, and how can you fix it? You don't need to know the whole book on gastronomy, but you should have a solid grasp on what you like to eat.

Go Forth and Conquer, My Soldier

Equipped with these tools, you now have everything you need, even as someone who's never done more than toast bread before, to find good recipes, execute them, expand upon them, and handle the logistics of feeding yourself and potentially even your housemates. There are multitudes more to be taught and to be learned, and if this post ends up helping someone, I might actually go to the effort of writing up another article going over stocking your pantry, fridge, and spice rack, and how to get the most out of modern post-industrial food availability. If that's of interest to you, you can reach out to me on Bluesky to tell me you liked this, or you can just use any RSS Feed reader of your choice to subscribe to this website's Atom feed (I personally Feedbro, which I've found to be perfectly satisfactory for my uses).

Until then, may your Slops be filling, your Mushes warm and comfy, and your savings downright kingly compared to eating out regularly.