Tips to Start Cooking From Scratch TODAY
In this post, I want to talk about tangible tips and resources to start cooking from scratch, especially as a mom of young kids, and how to navigate the social media landscape that often portrays unrealistic goals and at some points, can just be plain discouraging.
This blog contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate and affiliate, I will make a small commission on purchases made from links in this blog.
If you clicked on this post, I’m guessing you want to start cooking more for your family. I started that journey a few years ago, but I’ve been expanding my cooking skills little by little over the last 10 years. I want you to sit on that a little bit, because if you are coming from a point where you’ve never cooked before, or you're just beginning your journey, I want you to know that it is normal for these skills to take time and to become part of your daily routine.
We don’t learn these skills overnight, and some aren’t taught anything growing up. So for my first tip, I recommend picking one skill to master, and then focus on the next. So maybe that’s woking on you’re knife skills to become more efficient in the kitchen, or maybe it’s perfecting a great sandwich loaf for your family (and YES, this can be from commercial yeast. Not everything has to be sourdough, despite what instagram will tell you). It might take a few weeks, it might take months. But that’s okay, because this is a marathon, not a sprint.
If you’re watching creators that are making homemade bread, cookies, goldfish crackers and a Sunday night roast all in one day, I want you to remember a few things. One, those people likely have been working years upon years to have the skills to do all of those things efficiently and quickly. And secondly, they are getting paid (or hoping to get paid eventually) to make content like this. Not everyone, myself included, is making homemade brownies by fermenting our own cocoa beans. We have to separate the online from reality. They also likely have help with kids behind the scenes, whether that’s hired or from a spouse.
But this doesn’t mean that cooking from scratch often is NOT an attainable goal. We just need to meet ourselves where we’re at in the NOW. So how can we get homemade meals on the table every night?
Tip number 2: Pick core meals that you can master in an hour or less. I think we often think that we need 100 different recipes a week, myself included sometimes, especially as a food content creator. But I’ll tell you, we have some sort of burritos and pizza every single week. The meat might change or toppings are different, but my family loves it and we often don’t get sick of it easily. I can also whip things out quickly because it’s muscle memory. It helps reduce the overwhelm.
Speaking of overwhelm, I almost never cook more than 4 times a week. If I am in the kitchen putting in that work, I am making double recipes so that we have leftovers for lunch or dinner another night that week. Picking recipes that double easily to have leftovers or to toss in the freezer, will make your life so much easier and reduce the stress of cooking every night. If you don’t like leftovers, I recommend going the freezer route and pulling it out when you are too tired to cook or don’t have much going on in the fridge.
My next tip is to seek out good (and often free) resources to help you achieve your goals. There are so many great youtubers that put out great free content on cooking. I also frequent the library A LOT and grab new cookbooks to get inspiration. Once in a while, I find a cookbook that I learn so much from, that I’ll actually buy it to have for my collection. I personally really like the Milk Street cookbooks as well as America’s Test Kitchen, along with a ton of vintage cook books I pick up along the way. Here is a link to all my favorite books, but I encourage you to check out your library first if you have the time in your schedule.
Something that I often have to remind myself to go back to when I get overwhelmed, is to prep my food when I can. This can be as simple as cutting up a bunch of onions and garlic at the beginning of the week if I know I’ll be using a lot of recipes with them, to as complicated as grilling up tortillas, prepping homemade noodles and baking breads. It varies every week for me depending what I’ve planned and what kind of time I have. Remember, you don’t need to be perfect. Some weeks just getting something on the table is a win.
If any of you still think I never feed my family boxed mac and cheese on occasion or that we don’t grab a Costco pizza when we’re exhausted. I’m really sorry I’ve had you fooled. I know that I feed my family nutritious meals 95% of the time, so I don’t worry about the days when I just need a dang break. And you shouldn’t either.
The next thing I can’t recommend more is to keep a stocked pantry full of basics. I’m talking flour, rice, beans, tomato sauce and the sort. There are endless things you can make with these, and when you have food in the cabinet, you can challenge yourself to make new dishes instead of ordering take out. Getting comfortable with all the different ways to prep these foods will do you such a service long term in cooking from scratch.
Lastly, you may want to consider investing in tools that help you be more efficient in the kitchen. But I caution you not to jump the gun on this. Make tortillas 5, 10 or 20 times before even looking at a press. I have made them for 2 plus years now and I’m just now considering getting one. Otherwise, my $8 roller has done just fine. Same thing for noodles. I’ve done them by hand even when I had a hand crank one. It just wasn’t as useful as I thought. Now that I will have 3 kids soon, I will probably invest in a kitchen aide attcachment, but only because my family loves noodles and I know I will actually get use out of it. I will link my favorite tools here, but just know that most of these things you can find thrifting if you’re on a budget. I am a big fan of single tools with multiple uses. As you start cooking more, you’ll figure out what will be useful to you!
If you have any other tips, I’d love to hear them in the comments below.
If you want to watch this in video form, you can watch it below.