Cooking More at Home Means Developing Systems, Not Memorizing Recipes.
The recipe community pretends that one-off meals are the pinnacle of home cooking. And if you open a cookbook or browse a few food blogs, you will see mostly this. But for people who don’t have kitchen experience yet, this is wildly ineffective.
Let’s say you want to make a typical one-time dinner recipe. Think about this process for a minute. You have to pick a recipe, stop by the store on your way home from work, choose all the ingredients you need (because there are always a few secret, fancy ingredients in this great recipe that aren’t at home), then we go home and finally we cook.
Of course, services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh can ease that pressure a bit. But, as Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott notes , it still keeps you on the “treadmill one by one.” This time-consuming process disconnects many would-be chefs by sending them straight to the take-out menu.
Instead of trying to go through cookbook after cookbook, develop a system that allows you to cook a few of your favorite dishes with minimal effort. If you can find a way to make different meals for the week using the same four or five ingredients, you are on the right track. By doing this, you not only save time and money, but also make it a habit and improve it through repetition. After all, if you only do something once, you don’t really learn it.
Then, once you have a good culinary system, you can start branching out and experimenting. When you find something that you really like, you find a way to incorporate it into your system, instead of letting a new dish disrupt it. Taking a systematic approach to preparing homemade meals can save you some hardy meals you haven’t added yet.