I like to cook, but I hate cooking dinner every night. Some days, I am simply too brain dead to think up a delicious and nutritious meal that the whole family will love, to pull from every woman’s magazine ever. Learning to cook is a frugal investment, and everyone should do it.
And we need to stop undermining new cooks with endless nitpicks about nutrition and family life.
Learning to cook is an investment, which means that it takes time and money up front. Cooking is not cheap for the new cook. When I started cooking for myself, I was armed with The New Laurel’s Kitchen
After a few months, the kitchen was reasonably well stocked, and so the costs of cooking from scratch fell dramatically.
Another reason that cooking is an investment is that some of the early attempts will fail. You will make mistakes. For example, I keep a lot of baking items in jars on the counter. Once, I made fruit turnovers and used salt instead of sugar. They had to be trashed. Learn to cook when you can afford to make mistakes, and then the skill will pay off over a lifetime.
But those of us who advocate for home cooking need to understand that it is neither cheap nor easy at first.
Then there’s a second issue with home cooking: our families need to understand that it will not be tasty and consistent every day. One of the reasons that home cooking can save money is that, with experience, a cook can adapt recipes to whatever is on hand. That means the results will vary, Restaurants and packaged-food companies emphasize consistency as much as taste. Years ago, when I worked for a mutual fund company, I attended the McDonald’s investor analyst meeting. One of the events was a visit to the test kitchen, where we tasted French fry samples from around the world. A McDonald’s fry should taste the same in Chicago or Chengdu.
But my cooking? Hah!
One of my current go-to recipes is a no-boil macaroni and cheese. I can pull it together quickly and set it to bake while I do other things. I often adapt the recipe for whatever is on hand: miscellaneous pasta shapes; assorted bits of cheese; additions of vegetables that happen to be on hand. I have used a cup of salsa to replace a cup of the milk; the next experiment will probably involve tomato soup as a partial milk replacement. (I like to have tomato soup for lunch, so there’s often a cup or two in a plastic container in the fridge.) The result is often delicious but can never be replicated.
Some people are probably looking at that recipe and assuming that I am killing my family with fat and gluten. Nutritional quality is important, but it is easy to undermine people’s cooking efforts with an all-or-nothing approach to ingredients.
Because I mostly work at home, I can make recipes that take a long time to cook (but not a long time to prepare), and that often improves the results. Baked potatoes that are allowed to sit in the oven for three hours taste way better than those cooked in the microwave. A lot of Amish recipes are frugal and simple; they emphasize improvisation and long bake times. That’s not helpful to someone who walks in the door at 6:00 and faces hungry kids. Home cooking can be a form of love, but so can delivery from your friendly neighborhood pizza joint.
Learning to cook is a good thing. Cooking from scratch saves a lot of money, and it is often better nutritionally than prepared and restaurant food. However, those who promote it would do well to acknowledge that there is an investment of time and money in learning to cook, that family members will complain some days, and that we don’t always have the time or energy to do it right or to meet someone else’s standards.
Things that are worth doing are worth doing, even if they are not always done well.
