Learning how to cook from scratch is a huge asset

One doesn’t have to be a Michelin-star restaurant cook, but life is so much easier when you know the basics of preparing your meals. Why am I saying this? It is pretty straightforward. Let me explain.

 

Why cook from scratch?

 

It is not only useful when you move out of the house of your parents and you don’t have to rely on pre-cooked meals from the supermarket. You might be thinking that it is a great thing to be able to cook something for your new boyfriend. Maybe…

 

But have you ever checked the label on any pre-cooked meal? This is exactly where things are starting to become scary. No, I am no ultra-healthy cooking advocate who is trying to convince you here about the usefulness of cooking from scratch. I am very far from this.

 

What I have in mind is that if it is not necessary, it might be a good idea to make a priority cooking something from ingredients that are not ultra-processed and have not been sitting on the shelf for months because their best-before date is somewhere around next Christmas.

 

If you have ever checked the label of any pre-prepared meal, if you haven’t, I encourage you to do it the next time, there are ingredients that you have no idea what they are, how to pronounce, or what to imagine under that name and you have the slightest idea what they do to your body. To me, the label looks more like a chemistry exercise. That scary it is.

Let’s check the opposite extreme

 

Living in Spain gave me this amazing possibility of buying a lot of fresh and relatively cheap things to eat (compared to Canada where I lived before). If you have ever been on holiday to these southern states in Europe, you know that the local cuisine is based on using a lot of fresh things and don’t overcook them. No, I am not talking about holidays in Italy and stuffing your mouth with pizza every day 😀 But still, genuine Italian pizza is a very different thing from what you buy frozen in plastic from Walmart. That is a fact!

 

Fresh produce everywhere!

 

Sure, it is awesome to have all these things at every corner, I confess, I love the local markets that are flooded with fresh produce – from fruits and veggies to meat and amazing seafood. I wish I weren’t allergic to the last one.

 

Sure, it is wonderful to have it around, but if you don’t know how to prepare all that, you are doomed. Here comes cooking as a crucial skill. You don’t have to be able to prepare elaborate meals and spend five hours daily in the kitchen. Most of the things we eat here are far from that. But if you buy a fish that was happily swimming in the sea at midnight early in the morning, it would be a great idea to have some kind of basic idea of how to cook it for lunch. This is what I am talking about.

Sure, we have canned and frozen things here as well, but it is not the same. If you live by the sea/ocean, you know what I am talking about. I am not saying anything at all against freezing or buying canned things. Again, at all. Very often it is very convenient to preserve food and having these things at home is easy. You never know when you will need them.

 

What I have in mind is that if it didn’t go through a factory, it didn’t have a plastic wrap around it, it was just picked up somewhere in the field or thrown from water, and it is likely without any additional preservatives or chemicals. This is important. This is what you would like to eat.

 

Food like this is not likely to do you much harm. If you buy bell peppers or tomatoes, they are crunchy, red, fresh, and healthy. If you buy some pasta sauce… do you know what the veggies looked like when they were put inside to cook? You can only imagine. Or better not.

Chemicals, preservatives and EXXX 😱

 

Then we have all the preservatives and chemicals and lovely added sugar. It is everywhere. Would you believe that if you buy frozen veggies to prepare some basic wok dish, you will find added sugar there? I couldn’t believe it. WHY??? It is the same with bread! Why there is added sugar in bread??? It makes no sense! Pizza has it, boiled potatoes in bottles have it – yes, you can buy such a thing, all the sauces in bottles, even sausages have some amount of it. The list goes on.

 

Here in Europe, there is a huge conversation about these EXXX (add any number you like) chemicals added to food. Many of them are innocent, sometimes even useful, but some are borderline carcinogenic or we know that eating them in larger amounts is a highway to a creepy diagnosis sometime later. You don’t want this. What is more, what it does to the behavior of kids, that is another problem. And all the allergies? Where did they sprout from???

 

Convenience vs. responsibility

 

I don’t say that I don’t have a bottle of pasta sauce at home. Sure I do. You never know when you will be in such a rush and starving that throwing some pasta into a pot and pouring this sauce over, will be your live savior. Sometimes you just can’t avoid this. But it tastes funny at best and I wouldn’t eat it every day.

Freezer and preparation = easy life

 

I have a big freezer. That is a thing that makes my life so much easier. Freezer? Why? I have a lot of pre-prepared things there. When I do my monthly shopping, I prepare things to cook. What I mean by this. I take a recipient and I put there everything that I would put in the pot. From meat to lentils, veggies, and even condiments. And I freeze it. And then, when the time comes up, I take out one of these “magic” boxes and throw them in my slow cooker/pressure pot. Voila… fresh food in half an hour is on the table. Cooked from scratch, almost no chemicals and additives. Miracle!

 

My beginner cooking? 😂 Trial and error!

 

But again, you have to know how to prepare it, so that the result is what you had in mind. How did I learn this? I don’t have any cooking school or anything like that, indeed. My mother was not very useful in this either. Many years ago I bought myself a basic cooking book and made all the meals from page one till the end 😂 I mean it! This is how I learned what I like and what is yuck. And how to do it.

 

Practice makes perfect

 

Obviously, with time I made some changes to the receipts and made them more me-friendly. I have lived abroad for many years, so I learned how to cook things from places where I was/am living. Sometimes the results were really interesting (at best), sometimes it was straight away inedible 😀 but I learned how to do things. Now I am even able to make my bread (it also goes to the freezer).

 

Cooking is not a rocket science. It is only about practice. If you start slowly from very basic meals, it gives you some confidence and you can start exploring more difficult adventures. Who knows where it will take you, right?

My new life – new challenges

 

And now, as a bariatric patient, I find it crucial to be able to prepare my food. Life is not only about scrambled eggs. I changed some of the meals I was used to cooking to make them more healthy or lighter. It is a game changer.

 

No, I don’t eat pizza from a store, but if I really feel like it, I make my version based on a wholegrain tortilla, and crushed tomatoes, I cover it with ham and some chees, and sprinkle it with fresh basil. And the result is NOM! It has just ⅓ of calories compared to the original one and it is much smaller, so I can finish it all. No, it is not a genuine Milano pizza, but it stops the cravings. And this is what counts. It doesn’t have much ultra-processed things, no added sugars, and very little chemicals. This is what counts for me now.

 

Can you cook yourself? How did you learn it? Are you a good cook? Or do you prefer microwave pizza and Coca-Cola? Let me know 🙂