Bad Manners: Hungry as Hell

Introduction

Everyone loves to cook, until they don’t. This is one of the biggest things we’ve learned since the release of our first book, Bad Manners: The Official Cookbook, almost a decade ago. Everyone wants delicious, life-changing, healthful food, but when it’s 7:45 p.m. we’ll frantically reach for the chips and make depressing microwave nachos. Our goals, preferences, and plans fall apart under the weight of everyday life. We want jeweled rice and homemade soup but only leave enough time for dino nuggets.

You can’t manifest dinner. We’ve tried.

There’s just too much shit to do before you sit down to eat. All the technology we’ve brought into our lives under the guise of ease have turned into attention and time thieves. We endlessly scroll as we wait for room-temp takeout to appear at our door. We swear this is faster than cooking for ourselves despite all the signs to the contrary. We build communities with brands instead of each other. We save recipes we’ll never make time to cook, bookmark workouts we’ll never even start.
We are starving for real food and real connections.

We’re hungry as hell and bet you are, too.

Modern food media isn’t making any of this better. Even legacy names are being lost in a quagmire of conspicuous maximalism, wellness snake oil, and functioning as a megaphone for the latest campaign from major food brands. Ten years ago, it wasn’t this bad. The plant-based food revolution was gaining momentum in large part due to independent voices entering the food fray thanks to blogs. You know, like us. It felt hopeful. But now what was seen as a fringe way to eat is considered big business. We’re tired of reading articles about far-flung restaurants with $700 tasting menus, new lab meats years from viability, and watching videos of beautiful food that’s too costly and time-consuming for anyone not chasing clicks to prepare. It’s f***ing exhausting. We’re tired of arguing whether a hot dog is a sandwich, whether you should describe your diet as “plant-based” or ”vegan.” When all food is branded, who talks about cooking dinner? With the explosion of alternative meats, cheeses, and all the other lab-based bites, what the f*** is worth eating? Food doesn’t have to be this complicated.

That’s why we wrote this book. We want to bring the revolution we helped give voice to almost a decade ago a new, more personal bent.

The only thing left for us to do here is get your ass in the kitchen.

Not just occasionally, but as the default. Learning to cook smart, healthful dishes will benefit you for the rest of your life, whether you’re still cooking our recipes or not. When you eat real food, you give your body the building blocks it needs to create the best version of you. We’re gonna start slow. We want you to be excited about your meals, even though it can feel like a slog to start cooking. We know that often the fastest food, regardless of its healthfulness, is a kind of mercy when you can’t be bothered to make one.more.goddamn. decision. Let us help. We’ve been doing this cooking thing for a long time, and we’ve got plenty of tricks to help you have a better relationship with food. Stick with us and soon you’ll be able to whip up a fast, healthy-ish meal without even thinking about it. Fast doesn’t have to mean flavorless.

If you consider cooking a soulsucking, almost optional chore, then naturally you’re gonna hate this shit forever. But that’s just your perspective, and it could use an adjustment. Cooking food for yourself and anyone else is an act of love. When you do it for yourself, not only are you emphatically prioritizing your needs—what tastes good to you and what you need to feel satiated—but you’re also giving yourself resources for a better life. You can build a world where you run on mystery meats and artificial colors, or you can plan for a future full of all the vitamins and minerals that come from real f***ing food made by you. You’re preparing something delicious that will fuel you and the people you love. And the more you cook, particularly with us by your side, that shit is just gonna get easier and easier. Plus, you’ve been making that same dump-and-stir casserole for how long now?

Sounds like your palate could use a goddamn vacation.

You owe it to yourself and all the delicious food you’ve never tasted before to give cooking a real try.

We believe that real, everyday cooking shouldn’t be hard. Weeknight meals shouldn’t take Herculean efforts of prep on Sundays or hours in the kitchen to get made. Who the f*** has that many storage containers anyway? No one wants to eat leftovers from the same motherf***ing meal four days in a row either. We hate how cooking for yourself has become something people think you need days of planning to pull off. All these common cooking hacks do is turn you into a joyless kitchen assembly worker and take all the fun out of eating. On average, people today spend half as much time in the kitchen as a generation ago. That’s why grandma could whip up dinner in 30 minutes with whatever the f*** was in the fridge. SHE HAD PRACTICE. We understand that most of us have barely any time to begin with. Our schedules are f***ing packed from dawn ’til dusk. That’s why all our recipes for weekday foods take less than 45 minutes to make, start to finish. Yup, from chopping to chomping. We want everything you make to be bringing you some sort of healthy something, but at the end of the day the food needs to be craveable and practical.

The longer weekend recipes are just as important to building your skills in the kitchen as their faster brethren. Grandma could cook fast because first she learned to cook slow, you know? When you block out time in the kitchen to cook some longer recipes, you learn so many tricks that will make you a faster cook when pressed for time. You can perfect your stovetop multitasking, your chopping techniques, your mise en place all without looking at the clock or someone in your family crying about how late dinner is. When you get confident at cooking slowly, then it’s no big deal to speed that shit up. You never know when hunger will come knocking, so those skills have gotta stay sharp.

So you’re on board, but we can feel your hesitation about eating so many plants. We get it. Most of us grew up with broccoli, salads, and beans that were cooked with open hostility. They all tasted like shit because no one took the time to learn how to season and cook them properly. Vegetables, like anything we eat, are only as good as you make them. We’ve all had terrible, bland chicken and dry-as-f*** pork chops, but somehow, we don’t blame meat for that, just the cook. Well lucky for you, we’ve been cooking exclusively vegan meals for over twenty years so we have all the know-how you need to make your meals so f***ing delicious you’ll forget you ever hated to cook. The fact that these dishes are more healthful than your average meal will help you keep the momentum going when all the fake fluff you’re used to eating would have let you down. In fact, you might have noticed that none of our books calls for any ingredients like this. Sure, some are f***ing delicious, but that’s not how we like to cook. We use minimally processed, accessible ingredients because they’re both cheaper and better for you.

Eat that fake shit when you’re out in the world, but when you’re cooking with us, you’re cooking some motherf***ing plants.