Starting From Scratch: How to Become a Home Cook
Home-cooked family meals have been making headlines a lot lately -- most recently as the subject of an entire issue of the New York Times magazine. There have been dueling online editorials portraying home-cooking as an oppressive, anti-feminist institution as well as its exact opposite, with the kitchen as the place where feminism begins. Then there are the pragmatists, who have deflated the puffery around the home-cooking debate with an obvious but important point: Whether you like to cook or not, our families have to eat something every day. And few people would argue against the fact that the something we prepare at home is more likely to be healthy than the something we buy from a restaurant or microwave from a box.
But what if you're a novice in the kitchen? Where to begin?
In formulating my answer, I thought to consult the folks at the James Beard Foundation -- an organization whose mission it is to nurture America's culinary traditions. So when I found out that the organization's executive vice president, Mitchell Davis, was going to be holding court at an event to promote the U.S. Pavilion at EXPO Milano in 2015, I sent my colleague to pick his brain for tips about how to get started as a home cook, assuming you're starting from scratch.
1. Keep it simple. This isn't "Top Chef," people. It's Tuesday night dinner. Since Padma Lakshmi isn't showing up at your place to break bread, set the bar accordingly. Davis opines that home cooking has been a casualty of the spectator sportifcation of professional chefs, deterring us from the kitchen by overwhelming us with an inflated sense of what constitutes "cooking." In fact, he says, the ideal for homemade meals feature foods that can be made quickly and simply.
I couldn't agree more. My entire weeknight dinner repertoire consists of simple meals that basically require mixing a few ingredients together, boiling water or turning on an oven. Turkey meatballs cooked in unadulterated canned crushed tomatoes and served with spaghetti and boiled green beans. A five-minute chickpea stew made from canned garbanzos and served atop rice. Baked salmon served with quinoa and cauliflower. Broiled skirt steak with roasted potatoes and broccoli. The "Top Chef" contestants would undoubtedly turn up their noses at my pedestrian pantry ingredients, too-dull knives and inferior cookware. As if I care. My family has learned to love all these meals over time, and that's all that matters to me. If my simple recipes don't inspire your palate, ask around in your circle of friends to see what their winningest weeknight meals are.
2. From scratch-ish is good enough. You'll still get the health benefits of a from-scratch meal if you use some "value-added" convenience items from the store to save time. Such items, according to Davis, can make regular home cooking more attainable by reducing the time commitment required and complexity of recipes. There's no shame in using pre-chopped onions, pre-peeled garlic, canned tomatoes or beans and boxed chicken stock if that's what helps you get a meal together quickly.
3. Start off slowly: Master one meal, once per week. Rome was not built in a day, and it's unrealistic (and unnecessary) to expect you'll go from take-out queen to June Cleaver overnight. I recommend picking one night per week to start with and choosing a single, simple meal to prepare on that weeknight for four straight weeks in a row.
This approach has a few benefits. First, it gives you a concrete goal to work toward that's not too overwhelming: You don't have to morph your DNA into that of a devoted "home cook," you just need to make dinner every Tuesday for four weeks. Grocery shopping becomes more predictable with a set, recurring menu. And weekly repetition of a recipe increases your speed, efficiency and confidence in the kitchen. You may muddle through your meal the first time, but the second time you attempt it, things will go smoother. At week three, your family is getting used to the meal, and your kids may even start to actively like it. By week four, you'll probably be operating on autopilot. And just like that, you have a reliable home-cooked meal in your repertoire. That's when you'll pick another weekday and another meal, and repeat the exercise.
4. Begin dinner prep the night before. If your domestic life is anything like mine, surely you'll agree that 6 p.m. is no time to start cooking dinner from scratch on a weekday. Exhausted as you walk through the door after a long day at work, your hungry and wired children are agitating for your attention, affection and referee skills. If you've got little ones, you may also be up against the clock for baths and earlier bedtimes. For these reasons, I find it most effective to prep the majority of my weekday dinner meal the evening before -- once my kids have gone to sleep and the kitchen is quiet and calm. For folks who own a crock pot, night-before prep is practically a religion.
For me, night-before activities typically include: combining ingredients to make a marinade for steak or a glaze for fish; baking a batch of meatballs or braising some chicken thighs in a pot; simmering a pot of brown rice, pasta or quinoa while I catch up on Facebook; pre-chopping vegetables so they can be quickly steamed a la minute at dinnertime (veggies taste better when served just-cooked rather than re-heated). Since I pick simple recipes to begin with, I rarely spend more than 10 to 15 minutes of active time at night pre-prepping tomorrow's meal. Less if I delegate the marinade or rice-making to my husband.
Day-of activities typically include: cooking the pre-prepped vegetable and re-heating my pre-cooked proteins and starches. (Proteins that can be cooked within 10 to 15 minutes, such as thin steaks, burgers or fish, I'll cook the day-of.) With the most time and attention-consuming activities completed in advance, I can usually get a home-cooked dinner on the table within 15 minutes of walking in the door after work.
5. Define success narrowly. One of the deterrents to home cooking I often hear about is the frustration surrounding "wasted efforts" when one's family rejects the meal they have prepared. Having been on the receiving end of my fair share of "yucks," I certainly understand the frustration -- but I don't let it deter me from continuing to cook for my beloved little ingrates. Because when it comes to home cooking, I define success as getting a single home-cooked meal on the table to be shared by all members of the family and consumed without the distraction of screens. Period. In other words, success has everything to do with what's in my control (getting the food on the table), and nothing to do with what isn't (whether anyone else eats it).
This is because the benefits of family meals derive from several factors, and all of them are achieved once food is placed on the table around which an attentive family is gathered, regardless of what happens next. First, there's the matter of nutritional quality: Whatever you prepare at home is almost certainly going to be more nutritious and balanced than something taken out from a restaurant. And your family can't learn to love healthy meals unless they're being offered healthy meals. The second is the importance of everyone eating the same food, which acculturates children into their family's cuisine and enables adults to model healthy eating behaviors. The third is the family dynamic around the dinner table -- shared conversation around a shared meal at a time when our lives are so increasingly fragmented and our attentions are so divided. No TV in the background, no parents texting or checking e-mail on their phones -- just eating, chatting and catching up with the people you love. (In this context, one can see that getting angry about how little one's cooking efforts are appreciated or badgering one's children to clean their plates might undermine the value of family dinners to begin with.)
The best-kept secret about cooking is that there is no secret to cooking. Following a recipe is far easier than any number of things we do in our daily lives -- from assembling a piece of IKEA furniture to memorizing all those texting acronyms. Our human ancestors have been doing it for almost two million years, and the average American has far more cognitive ability and education than Homo erectus when he learned how to cook food well enough to evolve a larger brain. All you need to get started in the kitchen is to believe yourself capable (because you are!), pick a recipe and just decide to make it happen. Like everything else in life, you'll get better with practice, and may even come to enjoy it more as you build up some skills.
Talia Kasher, a master's degree candidate and dietetic intern at Columbia University's Teacher's College, contributed to this article.
Tamara Duker Freuman, MS, RD, CDN, is a registered dietitian whose NYC-based clinical practice specializes in digestive disorders, celiac Disease, and food intolerances. Her personal blog, www.tamaraduker.com, focuses on healthy eating and gluten-free living.
