Your first meal cooked for yourself might be pasta with butter. That’s not sad. That’s a start.

A first version is allowed to be plain. Pasta with butter is not a sad meal, it is a working one: you got hungry, you made food, nobody did it for you, and the whole sequence ran. Holding step one to the standard of step fifty is the most reliable way to never take step one.

So make the easy thing this week and eat it without commentary. Next time add one item: garlic, pepper, something green, an egg on top. Five rounds of that and you have an actual dish, built by adding one thing at a time.