About Me
I cook most of the time in our home. It is not that I take great pleasure in cooking, I do take great pleasure in eating reasonably good food. My goal is to eat better than I have in the past. Not all at once, a little improvement each week (or month) is better than no changes at all.
I came to cooking later in life. I really didn’t care what I ate when I was single, but with two you kids, half the time, I decided they needed to eat better than I did. I had not put too much thought into what I ate prior to the kids.
I had seen information that health-related diseases were overtaking the country. The latest information tells up 67% of women and 75% of men are either overweight or obese. Our kids’ generation will not live as long as our generation. I put some thought into home cooking. Who teaches us home, school, or maybe friends. My kids were in middle school and they were not learning the skills there. I started to observe soccer, baseball, and other kids’ activities and came to the conclusion that weight seems to run in families most of the time. The next question was; if the cook (usually the mother) did not learn at home did she just continue the bad eating habits? Probably passing them on to their children.
My first real experience was on vacation at a lake, just the 3 of us. The first morning I was up early and cooked a hearty, healthy breakfast. Got the kids up, fed them, and cleaned up. About 5 minutes later the kids came in and asked what was for lunch. It was lunchtime. So we ate out about half the time for the rest of the week.
I decided that I conquer this chore. How hard could it be, a few basics like inventory and a process? A little planning and off I went. I was not given much latitude as a child, if it was on the table we ate it. It does not seem to be a common practice today. I would have never guessed that someone could pick a very small piece of cooked onion out of a spaghetti sauce, and thus it was deemed unfit for their consumption. So we add texture, flavor, and volume to the equation. I would just go online and figure out how to do this. Not so easy, it seems like millions of recipe sites and all degrees of meal planning.
So it was trial and error. One question I had was how to measure a cup of flour (scoop and level with a straight object). Very straight forward and a little silly now, but I didn’t know.
So it is from that perspective that I will start this project.