Essential Health Skills: Learn to Cook
Cooking is easy, take your time and experiment and I guarantee you will be happier as a result!
Few skills are as important to a healthy, long and fulfilling life as the ability to cook your own food. Of course, baking your own bread, muffins and (healthy) deserts is just as rewarding as well!
Why cooking your own food is essential to happiness
If you spend all your time eating at restaurants, you may notice that it can get mighty expensive after a while, considering a typical meal is north of 10 dollars even the fast food variety. You eat three times a day (on average) with snacks in-between so you can easily spend over 50$ a day if you don’t know how to cook. If you do know how to cook, this is what your cost will be per week and I guarantee you that the food will taste better, be healthier and give you far more self-esteem. I think, unless you are independently wealthy and have your own chef, learning to cook is one of the easiest roots towards happiness and contentment with your life.
Cooking 101: It doesn’t need to be complicated
If you have NEVER cooked in your life or the extent of your experience is pressing a few numbers on the microwave, let me be the first to tell you that cooking nutritious, healthy meals is even easier! Go to your local library and in-between all those fancy “Martha Stewart” books, there is bound to be a book with the most basic of recipes. It isn’t hard making your own macaroni and cheese anymore than it is to slice some pork and cook it along with a can of beans. If you want to get a bit more fancy, slice and cook some streak, thrown in some pasta with some sauce and you have a very easy meal indeed that took very little time to prepare. The fact is, most foods are actually quite easy to prepare if you have an oven, a few stainless steel pots / pans and a willingness to experiment.
Creativity and Cooking
There a lot of creative things you can do with your time, but none so challenging as creating your own recipes that you LOVE and can’t get enough of. I might get a recipe from a friend and usually, within a few months, modified it enough to call it my own. I do a lot of experimentation in the kitchen, usually in the “adding stuff” department. For instance, you might buy a jar of pasta sauce well, beforehand, cook a mixture of onions, chunks of steak, shrimp, marbled cheese, garlic, green peppers, mushrooms and yes, some real tomatoes too… THEN add the pasta sauce and bring everything to a boil. The nice thing about creating your own recipes is you can modify them to suit your exact tastes. If you hate spicy food, no problem, as you are creating many things from scratch, you can simply omit it… this comes in very handy for food allergies as well.
Why don’t you cook?
My guess, other than a fear of fire, the second most popular reason for not cooking your own meals comes down to time. Cooking a fantastic pasta meal takes 20-30 minutes about the same amount of time as ordering a pizza but with the added advantage of being able to cook enough for 10 people! If you are alone, why cook for so many people? Well, you got a freezer don’t you? Freeze the extras and eat it during your lunch or other meals… it will save you a fortune and I am sure you feel much better eating your food than the crap that passes as meals your friends might be eating-out on.
The Bottom Line
Cooking is NOT difficult and can be a highly rewarding part of a healthy lifestyle.
