Tag: home-cooked meals

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Why Cooking at Home Is Important

As mentioned in a previous post, convenience foods are everywhere nowadays and cooking from scratch has become quite rare. Who has the time to prepare home-cooked meals on a daily basis? We are always on the go, and weekends can be just as busy as the rest of the week. What we don’t realize, though, is that when we reach for convenience foods and on-the-go meal options, we do not necessarily fuel ourselves with real food – with nutrient-dense food. Only home-cooked meals made with whole foods can give us the right nutrients required for proper metabolic function. 

How to Make Homemade Dinners in No Time

You don’t have to cook every single day in order to obtain an optimal level of health and wellness. Most of us have busy schedules and aren’t able to set that time aside each day. Instead, you can implement a few different strategies into your weekly routine in order to obtain the same goal. Here are a few tips to make cooking easy, as explained in How to Be Well, by Dr. Frank Lipman:

  • If you usually don’t cook much, just make one or two dinners a week at first. Pick some very basic recipes.
  • Set some time aside on the weekend (“put it on your schedule”) to prep several dishes for the week. You can store these in the fridge or freezer, as required. 
  • Use a few essential time-saving tools like a slow cooker or pressure cooker, a steamer pot, an enameled cast-iron skillet or stainless-steel pan, an immersion hand blender, and maybe a veggie bullet.
  • How about Cooking Without a Recipe? Simple primal/paleo meals and snacks take no time to put together.
  • When cooking, always make extra so you have leftovers for the next day.
  • Meal kit delivery options like Blue Apron, Sunbasket, Green Chef, and Hello Fresh are yet another way to help you cook more often at home.

On a Final Note

Don’t forget to make kitchen time fun! Cooking can be the perfect time to listen to a podcast or some relaxing music. Cooking with friends and family can also lead to sharing new cooking techniques and ideas, along with a few laughs. What is your favorite strategy to cook more from scratch?

Until next time!

Reference

Lipman, Frank M D. How to Be Well: The 6 Keys to a Happy and Healthy Life. Houghton Mifflin, 2019, pp. 52-3.

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Nowadays

In today’s world, convenience foods are everywhere and cooking from scratch has become quite rare. Who has the time to prepare home-cooked meals on a daily basis? We are always on the go, and weekends can be just as busy as the rest of the week. What we don’t realize, though, is that when we reach for convenience foods and on-the-go meal options, we do not fuel ourselves with real food – with nutrient-dense food. We fuel ourselves with processed foods that are filled with toxic chemicals, labeled or not labeled. Only home-cooked meals made with whole foods can give us the right nutrients required for proper metabolic function. Home-cooked meals are the meals that sustain health and wellness.

What cooking at home can lead to

In a recent Bulletproof podcast, “What the heck should I cook, Dr. Hyman?”, Dr. Mark Hyman states, “If people just got off the crap and started eating real food, and literally unplugged from the industrial food system, their health would dramatically improve.” He adds, “We would reverse climate change. We would end social injustice and poverty. We’d have money enough for free education, and free healthcare for everybody, and can support the neediest among us with no effort, and have lots of money left over to do cool stuff and create new science, and solve all the world’s problems just by cooking at home.” These are strong statements and I encourage you to listen to this podcast which highlights so many truths we have become oblivious to.

What to use in simple home-cooked meals

Home-cooked meals imply cooking with whole foods, which means using nutrient-dense ingredients that have not been tampered with. To find out what to buy to prepare home-cooked meals, you can check several of my previous blog posts: What to Buy Organic, Which Fish are Okay to Buy, How to Source Beef, Why Eating the Egg Yolk is Perfectly Fine. In What are Ketones? I list several healthy fat options that can be consumed as snacks, as well as which oils to use for cooking. My article on The Primal Blueprint Food Pyramid sums up this list of nutrient-dense foods to use in home-cooked meals.

Strategies

You don’t have to cook every single day in order to obtain an optimal level of health and wellness. Most of us have busy schedules and aren’t able to set that time aside each day. Instead, you can implement a few different strategies into your weekly routine in order to obtain the same goal. One strategy you can implement is to set some time aside on the weekend to prep several dishes for the week. You can store these in the fridge or freezer, as required. Also, something that I was doing a lot when my children were growing up, is to cook a meal big enough to cover at least two dinners. Like that, when there are after school activities to attend, dinner doesn’t have to be an end-of-the-day ordeal.

In summary

It may seem impossible at first to change the way we have approached cooking in our day-to-day life. But if we take it one step at a time, we can enjoy home-cooked meals every day. As Dr. Hyman highlights, not only are home-cooked meals made with whole foods better for our health, but they are also better for a host of other issues we are dealing with in today’s world. Home-cooked meals sustain health and wellness in so many ways!

You can also find me on Instagram.