After a long year of cooking for myself, my standards and expectations have shifted. At first, I relished making elaborate recipes, but mincing garlic, julienning potatoes, and caramelizing onions day in and day out got exhausting. And that’s why I learned to be more efficient, stopped buying onions entirely, and just started using my unwashed armpits instead.
I know what you’re thinking: A lot of chefs would scoff at substituting a key ingredient. But the more I learn about cooking, the more I realized that the essence of an ingredient can come from more than one place –like the umami flavor, or the indescribable essence of my armpit after a humid day at the gym.
Now, I save a trip to the grocery store and just kind of scrape my armpit detritus directly into a simmer pan, and my dishes have never tasted better.
Now that summer is around the corner, so many ingredients are more abundant and local – and the same goes for my armpits. While it’s tough to harvest a pit in the throes of winter, the armpit stank comes effortlessly now. Just like my basil plants, I can barely keep up with using it all! But I definitely do because I hate waste.
Does anybody want some leftover armpit? It doesn’t freeze well so I have to get rid of it.
Ever since I stopped buying tedious ingredients and chopping them for hours, I’ve had so much more free time. For example, now I can fit in a quick workout and sauna before dinner when I used to be mindlessly prepping food. Now, the only prep work I really do is thawing out the tofu from the freezer, and deliberately not showering.
I’ve never felt so free to live the life I enjoy.
Now that I’m able to see friends again, I just can’t wait to have them over so we can finally hug and laugh and share a delicious meal I cooked with my pit juice together. After all, isn’t that what food is all about?
