Too often, putting dinner on the table can feel like work. We may struggle to slot cooking into our busy schedules or feel pressure from social media to plate photogenic meals. Or maybe we just have no clue what we want to eat.

Meera Sodha knows all of these challenges personally. As a cookbook author and columnist at The Guardian, she develops recipes for a living. And a few years ago, she stopped enjoying food.

“I’d love to tell you there was a single neat reason for why this happened, but like life, the truth is messy,” she writes in the introduction of her latest cookbook, Dinner. “This loss left me feeling empty. Food was how I spent my days and paid my bills. It was the language I spoke fluently.”

For months, Sodha struggled to get out of bed. Her husband, Hugh, cooked and cared for her and their two daughters. Then, one day, he asked if Sodha could make dinner for him.

“It wasn’t really him asking me to cook him a meal,” she tells Food Network. “It was him cracking under the pressure of having to look after all of us and needing someone to look after him. And I found that with the first thing that I cooked, which was a Malaysian dal, I felt this very simple joy in cooking again, and I felt like I had fresh air in my lungs, and my fingertips felt fizzy.”

This was a turning point, and Sodha wanted to explore it. She began cooking again with a new rule: Her food would be for herself, not for her job. Her goal was to figure out what she liked to eat, and Dinner was the result.

“I found in just writing it down, I felt a sense of purpose and a sense of achievement with cooking,” she says. “I re-found my sense of pleasure in taking time to cook again. I think I was really looking for the joy in cooking again.”

In contrast with the cooking she’d done professionally, Sodha realized she didn’t need to make anything elaborate or colorful. The recipes in Dinner are straightforward. They tend to rely on staples like tofu, beans, pasta and rice. All of them are vegetarian or vegan, and any of them could serve as a quick, filling weeknight meal.

“I found real comfort, initially, in just cooking eggs, making dals,” Sodha says. “That’s what I was really drawn to. I wanted very simple, flavorful home cooking, and things that were easy to achieve.”

As she cooked, Sodha began viewing dinner as a creative process rather than a chore. She still finds it a welcome break from distractions, especially screens. She made pasta from scratch the other day, and the process forced her to slow down and be present in the moment.

“So often, unfortunately, we don’t have time to be able to take pleasure in [cooking],” she says. “What was so lovely for that half an hour that I was making pasta was my hands were sticky with dough, and it was a really beautiful thing to be able to let go of everything else, a bit like taking a bath or going for a swim. There’s no possibility to be on a screen when you’re cooking.”

Of course, not every night can be a homemade pasta night. In fact, most won’t be. It’s perfectly fine to throw something together from pantry ingredients or heat up a frozen meal, especially when you’re short on time or energy. But regardless of what you’re eating, Sodha believes it’s meaningful to approach dinner as a chance to enjoy food rather than as another item on your to-do list.

“I think dinner,” she says, “can be a source of great power and a source of great joy.”

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