How Kitchen Savvy Are You? Learn How To Prep Food, Make Tasty Meals & Nourish Your Familyhttps://www.pexels.com/photo/food-kitchen-cutting-board-cooking-3329/
Learning how to become a whizz in the kitchen doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be a great chef, or even want to be one. Instead, it means that you can cook smart. Being kitchen savvy can not only mean that you start to create interesting and tasty meals, but that you can do it in no time at all, with minimal effort, and ensure that your family is nourished as a result.
To become kitchen savvy, you have to want it. It’s no use hoping you can start to make waves with your cooking if you’re not prepared to put in a little bit of effort. But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you’ll be spending lots of money or slaving over a stove for hours on end, just simply putting your mind towards making your usual kitchen experience much more efficient.
If you want to cook more, enjoy your cooking more, or focus on providing a series of healthy, easy, and tasty meals for your family, you’ve got nine, simple to take on pointers to work with.
Healthy
As a parent, you can often want to provide healthy and wholesome meals for your family. But, you can often be met with obstacles, such as time, or fussy eaters, that can make it tough. Although the idea of whipping up healthy, homemade meals for your family each and every night may seem hard, it can be relatively easy to achieve.
Nourishing
When you first start to think about creating healthy meals, what image are you met with? More often than not, it will be of lots of fruit and vegetables. While that would be relevant to the idea of making healthy food, it doesn’t have to be your only option. Instead, it may help you to think of healthy food as being nourishing. Your aim for cooking a healthy meal will be to nourish your body. So, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re preparing foods that are not only good for you but balanced too. It can help to focus on getting in 5 portions of fruit and vegetables per day and will give you an idea of what to center your meals around.
Hygienic
You may feel as if this point is obvious, but you’d be surprised by how easy it is to undergo unhygienic practices when you cook. It’s important to make sure that you’re watching how you handle raw meats, cleaning down surfaces, storing food safely and using the right equipment for both uncooked and cooked foods to help prevent cross contamination. Sometimes, you might need to go beyond your own kitchen to protect your family from bad hygiene practices too. There can be foods, or goods that you buy at the store, that experience a number of hygiene or allergy issues. The best way to ensure that the food you’re eating is healthy and safe is to learn about recalls and keep up to date with relevant information that you may need to know on the subject.
Beneficial
Alongside nourishing and hygienic, you’re also going to want to make sure that you focus on using beneficial foods in your meals. We often think we know what foods are good for us, but we don’t always know what that’s the case. But, when you think about what super healthy foods can do for our bodies, in terms of helping us grow and protecting us, it can really improve the way you think about food. Plus, by knowing more about how foods work and how they can benefit your body, you can work on improving your cooking too.
Easy
When you struggle to find a love of cooking, it can be down to the amount of time and effort you think you need to put into it. Although you can often feel like cooking a homemade, healthy meal will take up a lot of time and thought, it doesn’t have to. You can make the process of cooking for your family as easy as you want it to be.
Quick
When you’re a busy mom, you often need the act of cooking to be quick. When you haven’t got all day to stir, sweat, or season, you need to be able to whip up something healthy and tasty in a matter of minutes. Sometimes, that need leads you to use unhealthy, microwavable meals – but there’s really no reason to go to the dark side, or even stay there. There is a wide range of recipes for busy moms out there; you just need to take a few minutes to find the right ones for you. Then, once you’ve found your feet, you’ll be able to make meals for your family that is both nourishing and delicious, and take you no time at all to prepare.
Simple
If the idea of complicated cooking scares you, it can often stop you from making anything at all. While takeout can be an easy alternative, it can often get quite costly – especially if you’re ordering in healthy meals, as they can sometimes be more expensive than junk food. Instead, in order to provide a wholesome meal for your partner and children, you’re going to want to focus on simplicity. Even if you don’t believe cooking can be simple, it really can be. All you need to do is use less. You can create a wealth of warming meals by using five ingredients or less. In fact, there’s a whole section of the internet just dedicated to these simple, tasty meals – giving you the inspiration you need to start cooking from scratch.
Efficient
When you want cooking to be easy, you want it to be done without having to put in a lot of effort. Therefore, when you’re making new meals, you should focus on efficiency. What can you make in advance, or in bigger batches? By being clever with your cooking, you could save yourself hours of cooking the very next day. For this reason, freezable recipes should be your best friend. Cooking for your family doesn’t have to be complicated, it really can be easy as reaching into the freezer!
Tasty
If your kitchen struggles often come down to taste, you can start to get disheartened why you cook. Although cooking will always take a bit of time and attention, sometimes it can be down to the love that you put in when you cook – either that or the seasoning that you might be missing out! But to learn to create tasty meals, you’re going to want to focus on three key areas.
Experiment
Firstly, it’s time that you started to experiment with your cooking. Again, that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of time on prep, slave away over the stove, or devote all of your free time to become a culinary genius. In fact, it really can be as simple as trying new things. If you find yourself making the same old recipes, recreating foods that your Mom always made, or sticking to one set style of cooking, you need to start experimenting. Trying your hand at something new could be all it takes to spice up your cooking. And, if you’re starting to wonder what that something ‘new’ could be, then looking to different cuisines could really help out here. Not only will you be able to quite literally spice up your meals, you can introduce new and exciting flavors to the dinner table.
Rehearse
Then, as you start to try new things, you’re going to have to prepare yourself for rehearsals. Practice does make perfect after all. If you’re really serious about making good, healthy food for your family, it is going to take some work. You might not need to put hours in, but maybe go easy on yourself after your first attempt at making something new. And, if you really want to earn your stripes, why not think about cooking more at the weekends, or preparing a few meals in advance – that way, you’ll be ticking off your efficiency task at the same time.
Branch Out
And finally, to start creating tastier food, you might need to work on branching out a bit more. Just like the need to experiment, if you find yourself sticking to the same old recipes, using the same old ingredients, and even the same old equipment, it could be time for you to shake off the familiar and try something more exciting. Because experimenting with the kinds of foods you make would be quite boring if you don’t shake up the rest of your cooking process, wouldn’t it? If you’re using to making wholesome mains, why not try out sweet and light desserts with a new piece of kit? If you love to make Italian food, why not see what equipment you can find to make the process all the more easier? There’s so much choice available when it comes to kitchen gadgets; you just have to head out to your local store, read a few reviews online and find the right new cooking equipment that could make your job in the kitchen a little more fun.