12 Jul Before You Cook

As promised, all July we will be sharing cooking skills and tips in hopes of breaking down some of the fears and barriers to keeping you from cooking at home.

Because we live in such a rural environment, traditional take out and all the other fun new things like Door Dash and Uber Eats are not available to us. So, we cook at home almost 100% of the time.

Seriously.

With kids. With jobs. The farm. Volunteer commitments. Fitness goals and more.

And, I believe you can too.

But, before you even cook one thing, here are a few details you should know.

Tools: You don’t need every kitchen gadget on the planet to cook good meals. In fact, I am under firm belief that any tool in your kitchen that only serves on purpose (… excluding a wine opener) are unnecessary. I am talking about your garlic mincer (use a knife) or herb stripper (you have hands). Things like that.

I wrote a post years ago about keeping a minimalist kitchen and you can find it here. It’s not to be trendy or even money savvy or green… I keep a simple kitchen because in order to cook great meals, I have all that I need in just a few items.

Meal Planning: I am a firm believer in meal planning. The old adage, “Fail to plan? Plan to fail” rings true. Without a plan, it’s too easy to scrap any plans of cooking in favor for going out or getting take out.

I plan our meals every Sunday and shop on Monday. More on shopping in a bit, but I feel like one of the biggest perks to meal planning and one shopping day is all the time saved. If I went to the grocery store every day… something would have to give. It would take so much time!

I love to use our meal planner; but, I also really enjoy the Cozi App. It’s a shared calendar that Adam and I both have access to and you can link recipes directly into your day’s events. So many of the recipes we use are from Pinterest or our favorite blogs so this is super helpful. (And, saves me so much phone storage. I used to take photos of recipes to access them or text them to Adam if he beat me home…!)

Ingredients: This is going to have advice for two sets of ingredients.

The first are your pantry staples.

These are things you should have all the time in order to create good meals. They can be items that don’t go bad quickly like pasta and olive oil or items that are perishable, but used often. For us, these are items like garlic and lemons.

It will vary for your family but here is a short list of common pantry staples in our home:

olive oil

vinegars (Red Wine and balsamic are our favorites when cooking)

salt and pepper

Spices (Our top three are turmeric, crushed red pepper flakes, and dill… oh, and Everything but the Bagel seasoning. Seriously. So good on anything.)

Canned beans

Chicken stock (in the freezer made from chicken frames)

Tomato Paste

Tomato Sauce

Rice (Cauliflower rice is beginning to take it’s place and we keep it in the freezer)

Pasta

Flour

Sugar

Garlic

Onions

Lemons

Butter

Milk

Eggs

Parmesan Cheese

Dijon Mustard

The second, is for procuring the ingredients needed for your week’s plan.

Make a list before you shop. Check out what needs to be used up and work that into your meal plans and also look at your staples and see if you need to replenish anything.

As for where to shop? I am loving shopping The Market Store in Kokomo every Monday and I also get a MarketWagon.com order in on Monday’s too. (Won’t arrive until Thursday… so, I have to keep that in mind.) Obviously, we love local shopping options… but, they are hard places to have a list because sometimes you can’t count on what will be available. Keep the meal plan fluid incase something you find excited you… and, know it’s okay to go mainstream too.

We are not local purists all year. We try. But… Our kids love bananas and avocados. So, I supplement what we need with Kroger or Meijer. (Via Click List if I can because… It’s awesome.)

And, of course, much of our shopping is also done at home. We have freezers full of meat that we use every single day. It just takes an element of prep to pull items from the freezer a couple days in advance to ensure the meat has time to thaw. This is usually done on Sunday and Thursday.

How to Read a Recipe: I really dove into this on this blog post from years ago. It includes helpful photos to make it easier to understand how to read a recipe.

The Cliff Notes version?

Read it (!) in it’s entirety (!) when you meal plan… meaning days before you plan to cook. See if anything needs to marinade over night. And, really understand how long something will take to create. You can thank me later.

Where to find recipes? I love Pinterest, but the library is also a great place. Kokomo’s library system has so many excellent cookbooks (new ones too!) and any food magazine you can think of. (You can rent magazines… and they are all also found online. Real Simple and Martha Stewart are favorite places for recipes.)

A few of our favorite blogs are Pinch of Yum and Skinny Taste. And, we cannot forget our favorite… good old fashioned cookbooks!