Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
We all eat food, and all our food requires at least some time, money and/or effort to arrive at our mealtimes. So why not join the wave of people embracing this need, and try these ways of really getting to love what you eat?
Learn how to cook like a chef – and confidently feature fresh produce in your favourite meals
Have you ever been a little intimidated by the art of cooking? This feeling might be holding you back from trying out new ingredients in your favourite meals, or even just adding vegetables unless the recipe calls for it.
If you buy lots of fresh, seasonal vegetables from Farmhouse Exchange, you’ll probably want to be confident you can make the most of them in your meals – including the varieties you haven’t tried before.
Fortunately, learning the fundamentals of good cooking principles can help you out a lot. Sure, you might learn some new recipes. But learning good cooking principles is about getting the best out of all your ingredients and flavours – especially fresh, seasonal produce.
Learning the skills of the home chef will help you improve and adapt many of your family-favourite classics. Meals you’re already familiar with such as pasta dishes, stir-fries and soups can all become easy to ways to confidently experiment with lots of new flavours and fresh ingredients.
When getting started on this journey, it’s hard to beat the knowledge of a good book. Here are some popular books about cooking that can help impart expertise to a home chef:
- Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Samin Nosra presents her 4 fundamentals of making anything taste good. Each fundamental will add a significant lift to your meals.
- How to cook everything: a minimalist and straightforward approach to cooking, well, almost anything! Friendly and helpful reading for both the beginner and the adept.
- On Food & Cooking: a decades-old classic that presents a comprehensive range of traditional and modern methods of cooking, and a deep understanding of ingredients.
- The flavor bible: promises to help you go beyond the recipe and learn how to balance a wonderful palate of tastes and sensations in every meal. Learn how to take one flavour, and combine it with something else to create a whole new experience.
“Eat (real) food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
We all know that eating well can help you feel good about yourself, and keeps your body healthy and thriving. But trying to deliberately “diet” can end up being ineffective, and just getting in the way of enjoying good, nutritious food.
There’s a simpler strategy you can try for getting good, healthy food into you:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
This is Michael Pollan’s simple 7-word plan from his best-selling book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. By “food” Pollan means real food. He excludes any “food” that has a complex ingredient list or is advertised on TV.
Focus on eating food that your great-grandmother (or someone’s great-grandmother) would recognize. Or, in other words, the sort of simple and hearty home-cooked meals that are becoming increasingly popular again in recent times.
Invest your time in creating home versions of your favourite foods
Lots of people have recently been rediscovering the joys of creating pantry classics in their own kitchen. It’s a rewarding way to spend your time, it’s usually a lot healthier to eat, and the taste and enjoyment of your own home-cooked foods is in a whole other league compared to what you can buy at the supermarket.
- Try making your own bread – you can start simple using oven-baked recipes, invest in a bread maker, or learn how to make sourdough bread?
- Pasta – there is a stark difference between home-made pasta and the basic pasta you get from the supermarket. You can try it out by making pasta with everyday kitchen utensils, or get a pasta maker to help you.
- Harness the powers of fermentation: lots of delicious foods come from fermentation, so learning this process could be the key to making your own delicious yoghurt, alcoholic Beveridge or sauerkraut. Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation is a good introduction to this world of cooking.
Bonus tip: make the most out of your food “waste”
Every year, a third of the food produced by humans is lost or wasted. Food that ends up in landfill produces heaps of greenhouse gasses as it decomposes (to say nothing of the energy it took to produce). But despite our best efforts it can be hard to stop producing food waste from our kitchens.
The key thing to remember as any gardener will tell you: food scraps are not trash, they’re a very special treasure… when put to use as compost.
Do you live in an apartment with no garden to improve? No worries! Ask a friend who is into gardening, or your local community garden, if they would be interested in an occasional delivery of food scraps. They will love you for it!
Don’t worry, it’s easy. You can buy a compact indoor, self-contained, no-smell composting system called a Bokashi composter. A Bokashi is great because you can add any type of food to it – including meat, dairy, pizza, anything! Give the composting food a quick feed every day, and in a few weeks you will get a block of amazingly high-quality compost that gets dug into the soil or added to an outdoor compost bin. You will also get bonus liquid compost that can be used to feed plants and be a natural and effective way to clean out your drains!
Many people have found composting their food to be surprisingly fun and satisfying. It’s also just a great way for you and your household to be more proudly involved in the food production process, regardless of how much food you grow yourselves!
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