A bissel about me
Welcome to Boylabusta. A sorta, not quite, kinda, food blog. So to answer your question, yes this is another website where you’ll want to scroll past a long (and boring) intro story to find that one recipe Google told you was going to be here.
This is, I think my third blog in a lifetime of intermittent blogging. But with the reboot of Gossip Girl, and a remake of She’s All That, it felt like blogging is coming back stronger than a nineties trend.
During my post college years I blogged about the malaise of being a twenty-something with a bachelor of arts and little direction, then in my early thirties blog I blogged student-debt, I someone stumbled my way into an MBA, and now I’m rebranding as a food blogger who lives in Brooklyn! If Boylabusta isn’t a living testament that “It Gets Better” than I don’t know what is.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a novice cook.
In Grade 7, upon my urging, my parents sent me to Jewish sleepover camp. It was something that all the cool, read straight, kids did and therefore I felt I needed to go too. As family lore goes, and as the receipts prove, I was very unhappy with their acquiesce. I may have sent letters begging my parents to take me home [my father may have kept said letters in his nightstand for years]. They did not take me home. The next summer, traumatized from spending 4 weeks in a communal cabin in rural Ontario, I made an agreement with my parents; I could avoid sleepover camp as long as I cooked the family dinner 3 nights a week. I don’t know how I thought of this, nor why my parents agreed, but thus began decades long flirtation with weekday meal mastering.
When I moved to New York (as a side note, I once said this to someone and they clarified that I meant New York City and not the state, and I stood there confused, thinking who talks about New York State as a monolithic entity, slash who randomly decides to move from Toronto to, I don’t know, Utica?) everyone was like, “LOL you’re never going to cook.”
A friend of a friend (one of those people you meet for coffee when you move to a new city because someone introduces you via email, “you’ll love each other”) advised me to save the number of my local bodega in my phone ASAP. The year was 2014, grocery delivery and Seemless were still relatively novel and Andrew Yang hadn’t muddied the water on what a bodega is.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you will wake up hungover every Saturday and you’ll want to order a breakfast sandwich directly from your bodega even tho your delivery fee will cost more than the sandwich.” Welcome to New York bitches!
For the most part these warnings were right. I didn’t cook a lot during the first few years of my New York existence. There was too much to do: Broadway, work, making friends, dating. It didn’t help that I met my now husband who hadn’t met a delivery service he didn’t love.
A few years ago during our Christmas vacation, I declared to said husband that I was instituting weekday home cooking. I ordered some new cookbooks for inspiration and started collating a list of one pot meals and put them into a Google Sheet. I got really, and I mean really, into sheet-pans. Like many New Year’s resolutions, results wavered, but we decreased our reliance on Uber Eats significantly.
My consistency changed when COVID hit. In the early days of the pandemic (the bean hoarding stage) going to the grocery store, an almost daily activity pre-pandemic, became fraught with unknown risk. Figuring it was better to meal-plan, and order as much as I could at once, I would sit down on Saturday, rifle through my Google Sheet, make a comprehensive grocery list and pray that Fresh Direct still had delivery slots available. I eventually bought a white board, wrote out a weekly meal plan, and posted them to Instagram. It was, I remind you, a pandemic, and the white board was the most excitement I could muster. When I told husband that people liked the white-board, he was unconvinced.
But truthfully, people were amazed by this. “You must spend hours cooking?”
Someone I hadn’t spoken to in ages asked me if I had quit my job.
Spoiler alert: I have not quit my day job.
The truth is that during the pandemic, cooking dinner became an important part of my day. I suspect, psychologically, it was a control issue: grocery shopping, meal planning, became one of the few things I could control during a time when nothing else felt controllable. But even without delving into my psyche, cooking dinner became the ONLY separation that existed between my day job and evening. When days of the pandemic blurred together in a series of never-ending Zoom meetings, dinner preparation became a daily ritual, during a time when too many rituals just stopped.
I respect that cooking and “lifestyle” blogs can seem frivolous. A lot of what we post about ourselves on the interwebs can also seem frivolous. This blog, and let’s see how long I can keep up with it, isn’t going to solve world hunger. But I do think that food is more than just frivolity. There’s a commonality in the experience of gathering, cooking, and eating that all humans experience, no matter who we are, where we live, or how we vote. Although this may seem high-minded, it feels like in this period fraught by a never-ending global pandemic and increasing political divisiveness, cooking is something that we can all speak a common language about; there should be, I hope, no partisanship around sheet-pans.
There is a lot of privilege in all of this I realize. The privilege of having enough money to buy fresh food, the time to cook, the space in which to do it. There’s no real way to get around that, but I do hope that this blog can at least inspire some people to cook a little more.
Wait? So where are the recipes?
The home page of Boylabusta has a fairy comprehensive list of one-pan, or easy-ish weeknight meals. Most of them I’ve collated from cook-books, websites, and other food bloggers. The list is filterable my protein, cooking type, etc… I’ll continue to update this. The recipes can be found by clicking on the Source link.
Weekly (or bi-weekly) I’ll let you know what I’m cooking next week in the “What I’m Cooking” section. I’ve also added a few of my favorite cooking tools in the “Fav Tools” section.
Welcome!