Lightning Book Review: Crip Up The Kitchen

I’ve loved to cook since I was a kid. I wanted to grow up to throw fancy dinner parties like my aunt, complete with appetizers and an elaborate dessert. And I did give some pretty awesome dinner parties, with menus and coordinated table decorations and so on.

Then I got sick with ME. I still love to cook, but now it’s a Chore. Some days I’m too sick. Some days I have the energy to cook, but I have to make a choice between expending my energy there or something more fulfilling. I’ve tried batch cooking and freezing meals ahead. I’ve tried eating the same meal three nights in a row. I’ve tried to make convenience foods a little bit healthy (Tip: add broccoli.) But I’ve always felt like I was figuring it all out on my own, and I was never satisfied with the energy/nutrition balance.

Enter Crip Up The Kitchen by Jules Sherred. Sherred writes the blog Disabled Kitchen and Garden, and describes himself as “a gender noncomforming autistic disabled trans man,” with multiple health issues. He was frustrated that there were no resources about cooking and gardening with disabilities that were actually written by disabled people, so he started the blog to fill the gap. Crip Up The Kitchen is his first cookbook.

I pre-ordered Crip Up The Kitchen for the subtitle alone: “Tools, Tips and Recipes for the Disabled Cook.” I was hoping for some hints on how to cook more efficiently, or maybe some new recipes for stocking my freezer.

Y’all. This book is so much more than that.

Sherred writes, “The kitchen is the worst room in the house if you are disabled. I’m about to change that and make life easier for everyone.” *praise hands*

This book explains it all: what you need for your kitchen, how to organize it, how to meal plan and meal prep, how to cook safely, how to store food, and how to right-size your cooking to the amount of energy you have. The advice is customizable based on an individual’s disabilities and food requirements.

An electric pressure cooker, like the Instant Pot, is the foundation of the methods in this book, along with an air fryer and bread machine. That’s the only downside to the book, as all the recipes rely on one of those appliances. I only have an Instant Pot, but there were plenty of tempting recipes for that equipment alone.

The recipes in the book tend towards Asian cuisines, including Thai and Panjabi. There are also dishes that will be familiar from Western cultures, including chicken stew and matzoh balls. All of the recipes rely on strong spices and flavors.

I tried the Effin’ Good Chili recipe, and it was fantastic. There are some foods, like chili or pot roast, that really benefit from a long, slow cooking time (like in a crockpot), but the Instant Pot offers the advantage of much faster cooking. I thought I had to choose between the best tasting chili and fast/convenient chili, and I was never happy with either choice. However, Sherred’s chili recipe splits the different by incorporating strong flavors to overcome the impact of the faster cook time, and it came out great.

If you follow Sherred’s methods for prepping and freezing ingredients, cooking will get even faster. This is a cookbook worth reading from cover to cover for all the suggestions on how to manage cooking with disabilities. My copy is now full of bookmarks for all the recipes I want to try. I highly recommend this book!