No, really. I’m learning how to make yummy, nutritious dinners (but I’m a long way off). All throughout when I began to cook for myself-nights in high school when my mom wasn’t around or in college, I’d always just make easy stuff for myself: soup, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, quesadillas, that sort of thing. Lots of carbs and cheese.
And now that I’m married, I’m cooking for two people, and sometimes I need to plan out a little better than just throwing something together for myself when I happen to be hungry.
I’ve taken baby steps. Or rather, I took giants steps and then got overwhelmed and tripped and fell over backwards and now am taking baby steps. See, the first few weeks we were married, I broke out my Pioneer Woman cookbook: The Pioneer Woman Cooks and tried to conquer the world. I made twice baked potatoes, pan fried pork chops, all kinds of yumminess. And then I realized that I had created this standard that normal, not fresh-from-the-honeymoon me couldn’t live up to.
After that, I went to warming up various frozen or canned things and throwing them all together on a plate to make decent meals. Then I learned a recipe here and there, perfected them, and then cooked them too much. Now I’m somewhere like…I make one labor intensive component, one semi-labor intensive component, and one no brainer. Por ejemplo:
A while ago I got home from the store and cut up almost all of our fruit and made it into a beautiful fruit salad:
The rest of the grapes and things like that I washed and put into snack baggies for things that Taylor and I can grab and go-it’s really helping us to eat more fruit!
Now fruit salad is not DIFFICULT to make, just time consuming. PS-I poured orange juice over the fruit so it wouldn’t brown, but I’m an idiot and the bananas got all nasty. Don’t put bananas in fruit salad that you intend on noshing on for a few days.
Then I put some Alexia potatoes in the oven. MAN DO I LOVE ALEXIA PRODUCTS.
Sometimes I do cut and season my own fries (I love making sweet potato fries), but that would be the labor intensive part of the meal, and I already did that for this meal, so bagged fries it was.
And then, shamefully, I warmed up pre-cooked turkey burgers in the microwave and we wound up with this:
Hubs had his with a bun but I was off super processed carbs that week so I had mine without.
Now I realize that this is not the fanciest of dinners, but it’s just an example of the process I go through to make our dinners FOR NOW. But I really want us to start eating healthier, which means a lot less pre-packaged/processed things and more raw, fresh ingredients. I’ve been picking up recipes here and there, and hoping to get better and better at this. If you have any suggestions about recipes or even just more tips like putting our fruit in baggies to encourage us to snack on it, please feel free to leave a comment! Oh also if anyone would like to give me free lessons on taking good photos with my point and shoot. That would be helpful too.
I am SO in the exact same spot. I did the same thing when we first got married – Made awesome labor intensive meals and set this standard I could never live up to when I started working full time. Then I started cooking the same 5 or 6 meals over and over again and we got sick of them. And then David started having class until 9 PM so I stopped cooking all together (because we all know it’s no fun to cook for one person).
We just got back on the healthy/no fast food bandwagon this week and so far we’ve had sloppy joes, chicken enchiladas, roast (slow cooker meal!), and spaghetti – All of them are pretty easy and are ready within 20-30 minutes of walking in the door. I’m planning to post recipes more often now that I’m cooking again. For sides we do a lot of salads, fresh fruit, frozen veggies, and some canned vegetables. Those ‘vegetable steamers’ are so easy and are good!
Sorry for the novel! I can just totally relate!
What a great start! I’m not creative and we don’t have cable so cooking is my outlet. I’ve learned how to make my labor intensive meals on Sunday and use scraps of that throughout the week. Example: Sunday is almost always our whole chicken day (and save that chicken for stock!). That way we have chicken for the week. So far we’ve made chicken’n'dumplings, stir fry with chicken and we plan on doing a leftover pizza. Meal planning has definitely helped walk the line between fresh/healthy and disastrous/marathon cooking! It seems like you’re doing great! Can’t wait to see some of your meals
We have a hard time eating healthy if we leave meals until the last minute, so we’ve been using weekends to cook up a few meals beforehand, and then planning slightly simpler meals (like spaghetti squash) for nights when we’re out of our pre-made stuff. It’s worked pretty well so far – we’ve made lasagnas, quinoa salads, veggie burger patties, a sweet potato and leek casserole, and other really tasty things that have kept well.
This is a great way to make cooking easier!!!! I also LOVE making sweet potato fries (we need to compare notes on these, I’m always looking to improve mine) and I love Alexia products too! Mmmm their seasonings rock. I find that any sweet potato fry you buy though tastes fake. The best ones are homemade.
Mmm Alexia! I like buying some of their roasted potato products every once in a while when we want a starch in our lives.
I think you’re off to a good start! I think that the most important thing is to do some sort of meal planning each week. I don’t specifically lay out each and every meal that I’m going to make before I go to the grocery store…I actually try to let it “come to me” when I’m at the store (which I know most people don’t like to do). I like to see what is fresh and on sale in the produce aisle, and I formulate my game plan off of those ingredients!
Now I want fruit salad…that looks yummy.