Learning to cook for yourself has to be up there with some of the most important skills on the planet, like vegetable gardening, the ability to think and problem solve, literacy and inventiveness.
Being able to prepare your own food from scratch means that you can wrest back the power from the manufacturers who supply the supermarkets. Suddenly you have complete control over the ingredient list of the foods you’re eating because you are using mostly single ingredients to create your individual style of cuisine.
In the old days, women knew how to cook. They learned it at their mothers’ knees. Food was often simple, even rustic, but filled with goodness and prepared with that special blend of time and caring that I believe is missing from many of the products we eat today.
Today we have a number of interesting challenges. Genetically modified produce is one of the biggies. Farming practices are vastly different to days gone by. Many of us are food snobs … and the menus of restaurants reflect that, with their ever-more-maddening descriptions of food. Talk about obfuscation!
One of the greatest advantages of our time, though, is ready access to information. In a few minutes we can find out how to make our own sweet and sour sauce to go with lightly cooked Asian vegetables. We can do curries from scratch. We can learn to prepare a myriad of dishes from YouTube clips and recipe sites. We do not need to be slaves of bottled simmer sauces and packet pastas. We can discover that pasta making only involves egg, flour, salt and water. Or even simpler, semolina flour, salt and water. We can make our own artisan bread with just flour, yeast and water—then refrigerate and let time do the rest of the work right up until the time when we pull out a bit of dough and bake it. This is rustic indeed, but delicious and fun.
So we have the power. What we often don’t have is the time. But everyone is blessed with the same 24 hours in a day and the way we use those 24 hours is about choices. Ah, the crux of the matter. We must choose to cook from scratch. We must schedule time for buying produce, making sure we have the right kitchen utensils for the task. We must commit to cooking for ourselves.
Preparing food is a procedure that requires some effort a number of times a day. There are ways to streamline the process—cooking a number of meals at once and freezing or combining the ingredients for future slow cooker meals and freezing them until the night before you want to cook them, for example. Or getting your shopping delivered to the door is an option for some people. That said, even the most efficient kitchen requires considerable time spent on meal preparation. The effort is amply repaid by the quality of food on the table.
Not doing your own meal preparation doesn’t mean you’re too busy or too important for the task. It means you haven’t thought through your priorities. The health of you and your family needs to be number 1—and the food you eat plays a big role in that.