Author with a disability writes new cookbook for people like himself
'Everything out there was written by able-bodied people and none of them worked for me,' says Jules Sherred
If you live with a disability, you likely know that cooking can sometimes be exhausting.
Recipes that are labelled "easy" by a regular cookbook may take more time, energy or mobility than an able-bodied recipe writer can understand.
But there's good news: a man in Duncan, B.C., has just published a cookbook designed specifically for people with disabilities.
Jules Sherred, a disability advocate, food photographer, and recipe developer, has just published Crip Up the Kitchen: Tools,Tips, and Recipes for the Disabled Cook.
He spoke to the CBC's Kathryn Marlow about it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Tell us about your new cookbook.
It is exactly what the subtitle says. There's three sections in the book. The first section has tools that I recommend that you equip your kitchen with, including pricing so that people can prioritize what they need for the kitchen based on their financial means.
The second section is tips, and it has everything from how to organize your kitchen and your pantry so it's the most efficient, especially if you have disabilities that affect your ability, like cognitive ability or your fatigue levels and pain levels, just to cut and save time, meal prep and planning, in a way that's not typical, I look at it at like a month instead of a week, and using cooking as a tool for dealing with anxiety.
WATCH | Jules Sherred demonstrates how to use his cookbook:
To watch this video with closed-captioning, click here.
And then the recipes section, which is 50 recipes organized from the least amount of time and effort it takes to make them all the way to the most where it requires every single ounce of energy you have. And then there's an appendix that includes an outline on how to prepare and stock your pantry for surgery recovery so you can have 46 meals ready to go if you know that you have an upcoming surgery and you don't want to have to worry about what happens afterwards.
Why did you want to write this?
Because I am disabled and I was having a really hard time finding tools and tips and recipes that were actually by a disabled person for a disabled person that actually worked. Everything out there was written by able-bodied people, and none of them worked for me. And none of them worked for my friends who are also disabled.
They were all very misleading when even something like "this is an easy recipe; it takes 15 minutes to prep," and me with my mobility issues, I'm still there prepping 45 minutes later. I'm in so much pain, and I'm just ready to "Nope" out of the whole process before I've even had a chance to start cooking it, and then I would like sometimes spend a week recovering afterwards because they would just wipe me out.
I think for people who don't know what it's like to be a person with a disability in the kitchen or a person with brain fog or fatigue, they might think, oh, this is just a matter of simplifying recipes. Is that it?
No. So at the very top, I have, like how much prep time, how much cook time, how much rest time, so it has a more fulsome idea of how much time someone's going to spend cooking.
And then I have how to store it, which is so people don't have to think about that. And there's complete nutritional information for people who have special diets, and they need to know if this meets those requirements. And then this is where things really change.
There's a reminder to gather equipment, and then it includes the equipment list for people with brain fog or certain neurodivergencies where option paralysis is an issue or they have just a really hard time figuring stuff out. There's no guesswork. They don't have to spend an hour and a half trying to figure out what they need or are cooking, realize they don't have something they need, then get distracted while they're trying to find that thing and then their food is burning, so it's all there.
Anytime that an ingredient is used twice in the recipe, usually, they get broken up in the recipe, and it only shows the one measure in the ingredients. Everything, all of the ingredients, are broken up so that you don't get surprised with a step that you didn't prepare for in the recipe.
And then, when we get to the steps, the steps are really broken down. So it's like one step per step instead of the usual where it's like one step, but there's 10 different steps hidden within that one step. So everything, like the recipes, looks like they're more steps, but it's more broken down.
I tried my best to identify common points of failure during the cooking process and eliminate those wherever possible so they don't have to do any extra thinking.They just have to sit down with the cookbook, and they are more likely to succeed rather than fail because the recipe doesn't think about the way that their brain functions differently than "the norm" (laughs) — we're all normal in my brain but you know, society doesn't think about these differences.
So that's one thing that I was really proud to be able to do with this cookbook.