February occupies a kind of awkward space on the culinary calendar.

It has been long enough since any New Year’s resolutions that any special diet may have been ditched, or if you are especially dedicated, you are sticking with it despite the extreme fluctuations of willpower. A lot of people won’t have any holidays on the calendar that are associated with a certain kind of food (although there is Valentine’s chocolate), and it is still cold enough that most are turning to comfort over style when it comes to what they consume.

As a result, it is pretty much an anything-goes kind of mindset in the kitchen for the shortest month of the year. Many may argue that this is the case when they are cooking in any other month as well, but it seems to be especially relevant right now. It is a time for experimentation, and even if those experiments turn out to be gross, you can say that you tried something different and tried to push those boundaries while everybody else was confining themselves to the same four safe meals on permanent rotation.

Here to help you with all of your daring feats in the kitchen is the world of cooking memes. They remind us that there is a whole world of culinary exploration out there, and the only thing we have to do to discover it is push ourselves to make the first step. It’s more enjoyable than sticking chicken fingers in the air fryer, that’s for sure.