Learning to Cook: Join us on our Journey

I have a confession to make. I can’t cook. In this age where it seems like any parent who ever serves their kids pre-packaged, frozen meals is guilty of a crime, I am definitely a felon.

Sure, I enthusiastically pin healthy, whole food recipes on Pinterest, swearing that I’m gonna cook them one day. I read Mommy blogs that brag about pureeing organic, non-GMO veggies and sneaking them into homebaked muffins so their kids will eat them. You know how I sneak vegetables to my daughter? I put a tomato on my kid’s sandwich. I might add some bagged spinach for extra credit. But that sandwich also contains regular, processed lunch meat and bread. The horror. I don’t own a food processor, either.

How did this sad state of affairs come to be?

It’s not that I don’t want to learn how to cook. I am just a true child of the 80s and 90s, a time when Hamburger Helper and TV dinners were the saviors of working parents. This was before we started to realize that processed foods probably weren’t that good for us. So, several times a week, we sat down to a meal that required little more effort than boiling some pasta and adding meat and pre-packaged sauce mix. I can only be thankful now that TV dinners were rarely served to us. My mother thought they were gross and too expensive.

Neither of my parents really knew how to cook, either. My dad once said that the only thing he knew how to cook was a boiled egg. My mother could make decent, though overly sweet, baked goods, but knew little about cooking anything else from scratch. In fairness, her mother didn’t, either. In fact, my maternal grandmother’s primary method of cooking was to boil everything in a pot until it nearly fell apart. And my father’s mother was known for accidentally leaving plastic packaging on food and cooking it. My father told stories of sometimes biting into mouthfuls of plastic at meals.

Is it little wonder, then, that I never learned to cook real meals from scratch?

Now it’s time for a change.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that all processed foods are evil. As a matter of fact, cheese is technically a processed food, and I won’t be giving that up anytime soon. I’ve just come to believe that eating freshly cooked meals made from whole food ingredients is better. They’re  certainly better for our health. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the increase in the use of cheap, processed foods happened alongside an increase in the rates of obesity and “lifestyle” diseases like Type 2 diabetes. But don’t just take my word for it. Check out this article from the World Health Organization that discusses the link between processed foods and the obesity epidemic in Latin America.

And even if there weren’t about a million other ways that minimally processed foods are better for us, they also taste better? The homemade cookies your granny made for you probably did not come from a box.

Having said this, I have decided it’s time for me to change the way my family eats. I want to eliminate, as much as possible, ultra-processed foods from our diet and replace them with fresh, whole foods. To do this, I must learn how to cook.

Join me as I learn how to cook!

Fortunately, though I’ve never made them, I still have collections of recipes from mine and my husband’s ancestors. Thanks to the internet, I also have the ability to look up modern recipes that call for whole-food ingredients. My plan is to teach myself how to make both meals and desserts from scratch. My daughter will also be joining me on this journey because I believe it’s important that she learn how to make meals for herself. I don’t want to send her out into the world completely dependent on processed foods.

I’m also inviting you, my readers, to join me on this experience! 

Here’s how things will work. Each Monday, on Twitter and Facebook, I will announce the dish or dishes I plan to highlight for the week. Then, on Thursday, you will get to follow along with me as I try my best to prepare these items. I’ll share the recipe with you, and blog about our culinary adventures here and on our Facebook page (link here). I’ll be totally honest about how things turn out, and I will share pictures and video of our experiences, too.

So, if you want to join us on our journey to a healthier way of eating, be sure to follow our page. As I’ll be posting different things on Facebook (including some live video), I highly suggest you give our Facebook page a follow, too. This way, you won’t miss anything.

I know that a lot of you are also busy parents who want to eat healthier, too. I hope that you will learn along with me. Even if you consider yourself a good cook already, I hope we can provide you with some new recipe ideas and that you enjoy sharing our learning experience.

To find out what this week’s recipe will be, check our Facebook page at 5:00pm EST tonight. We’ll put a message out on Twitter this evening, too.

Thanks for joining us! We hope to see you again soon!

Learning to Cook