Want to change the way you cook? Here are three things to do before you start.
Are you feeling motivated to cook more food from scratch? Don’t run to the pantry and start purging all of your pre-packaged foods! Here are three evaluation questions to work through before you start making changes to the way you cook.
Take inventory of your shopping and eating habits.
Is there something you buy often that is creating a pain point?
For us, it started with cereal. We have three kids, and would buy two or three boxes of cereal per week. The kids would make themselves a bowl of cereal for breakfast, sometimes accompanied by a peace of fruit, and I loved how they were able to handle this independently. Here’s what I didn’t love: cereal was, to put it as dramatically as possible, a gateway food. Cereal requires milk. Three kids pouring their own quantities of milk into their own cereal bowls is a lot of milk, so now we’re buying two boxes of cereal and enough milk to go with it. If you’ve started your day with a nice bowl of Captain Crunch lately, you can already anticipate my next problem – it isn’t very filling. So after eating their bowls of cereal at 7:30, the kids were ready for a snack by 9:30. Now we’re keeping a fully stocked snack section in the pantry with granola bars, mini muffins, cheese crackers, etc. so the kids can grab a snack independently. I’ll walk through all of the financial implications of this cereal snowball in a future post, but suffice to say, it was really adding up and I was ready to make a change. So I made an announcement: “Kids, we are no longer buying cereal.”
2. What do you like to cook?
Do you already have a few good recipes in your lineup that you can pull out more frequently?
I did not announce our moratorium on cereal while the kids were enjoying their daily bowl of Lucky Charms. Instead, on the afternoon after coming to this decision (and talking it over with my husband, who also enjoyed frequent bowls of cereal), I made banana bread. When I say “banana bread” I’m sure you have an idea in mind of what I’m referencing. Abandon that idea, friends. This is a full on banana cake, laden with both chocolate and butterscotch chips, with a thick layer of crackly sugar on top. The morning of the big announcement, we had banana bread for breakfast. So when I delivered the news about the cereal, it was immediately followed with, “instead, we will be eating banana bread from breakfast more often.” For my kids, hearing that their daily cereal would be replaced with something even more delicious went a long way to soften the blow. Then, we made a list. I asked everyone to start naming their favorite recipes and foods that I made, and I jotted them all down. That was our starting point - we needed to make more of those things.
3. What is your motivation?
Be honest with yourself and the people that eat the food you make. You can refer back to your motivation when evaluating whether switching to ingredients-only cooking is really worthwhile for you.
Every person will bring different motivations to the table. Here are just a few possibilities: you need to save money on groceries, the foods you eat leave you feeling bloated and sluggish, you want to eat more wholesome or organic foods and stay away from all of the mystery chemicals. Maybe the thought of cooking from scratch feels like a joyful aspirational experience that you want to cultivate. Whatever your motivation, write it down and keep it in your proverbial back pocket to serve as your evaluation point when making a decision about whether or not to cook an item from scratch on any given day. If you are tired after a late night and your motivation in cooking from scratch is to eat healthy, there may be another way to achieve that goal that doesn’t require time in the kitchen. If your goal is financial, is there room left in the budget to grab a meal out, or pick up something simple that will save you time today? The food you make and the meals you eat exist to serve and nourish you and the people that eat with you. Cooking from scratch should be one of the means by which you can reach your goal, but you always have the freedom to find another way to make it work on any given day.
For our family, transitioning to an ingredients-only kitchen has been extremely rewarding. Our initial motivation was cut back on our grocery and restaurant spending, and we consistently save between $400 and $500 per month compared to previous year’s spending. But after a few months of cooking from scratch, I noticed a change in my motivation. As I settled in to a new rhythm of cooking and became more confident in the kitchen, I realized I was cooking this way because I enjoyed it! If you want to know more about what the early stages of our transition to ingredients-only cooking looked like on a practical level, check back next week for Part 2 of this introductory series where I will share 3 starting points to consider as you transition to ingredients only cooking.
