Making meals from scratch doesn’t have to mean spending hours of planning and preparation
If making meals from scratch sounds daunting or extremely time consuming to you think again, you can make lots of nutritious healthy meals in less than 30 mins without having to grab a jar of ready-made sauces etc, which tend to be loaded with salt and sugar. There are however a few need to knows which are useful before you launch in to making every meal from scratch. This type of cooking approach allows you to be far more creative in the kitchen, which increase the variety in your diet, and hopefully will help you get away from that food boredom so many of us suffer from!
Having a well stocked spice rack is essential to making meals from scratch, herbs and spices add soo much depth of flavour and will allow you to create a variety of dishes. Plus dried herbs and spices tend to be very inexpensive and will last you for quite a long time. Many recipes online, in magazines and cookbooks generally will have a few spices/herbs included to encourage making meals from scratch. Having those herbs and spices to hand makes it easier to make the meals without having to write a big long list of ingredients you need to buy in the supermarket every time you prepare a new dish. I find it useful
every so often to make a note of those spices/herbs that are running low and just pop them on your list to replace and that way you never run out.
In general, having a well stocked store cupboard goes a long way in helping to make meals from scratch, and make sure you always have those items to hand. This means you will focus your attention on buying more basic food items for your dishes such a chopped tomatoes, lots of tinned pulses and lentils, good quality oils, and vinegars.
There are many benefits to cooking from scratch, which is why it is becoming so popular as consumers become much more health conscious particularly around hidden salt and sugar contained within processed foods. Also if you have a food intolerance or are trying to cut out certain foods from your diet you will become much more aware of reading labels and the more you read the labels and find out what your food contains the more you won’t want to buy certain prepacked foods! Generally with processed goods half the ingredients on the list you can’t even pronounce with so additives and preservatives being added…… so do you really want to be eating them??!!
Cooking from scratch will also save you money in the long run, sure it might have the initial upfront costs of building a good spice and store cupboard, but once you are up and running the core ingredients are generally cheaper and the number of meals you can make are endless. You will naturally end up eating healthier as you are able to control the amount of salt and sugar you are adding to meals and you will know exactly what is going into the meal! You will inevitably be including much more fresh vegetables into the meal you are cooking and as a result it will be a much more nutritious and well balanced meal.
To master cooking from scratch does take a some time investment, in terms of having to create a meal plan for the week and shopping list each week, but these are the best tools that will help you achieve the goal of making all your meals from scratch. You will reap the benefits as the more experience and confidence you gain in the kitchen the more you will be able to cook freestyle and become less reliant on following recipes religiously. You will learn the art of substituting and tweaking recipes so you don’t have run to the supermarket and spend more money.
If you do feel that this style of cooking is something that you aspire to but don’t know where to start, signing up for a weekly meal plan will help alleviate the stress of building out a full week of meals that make the best use of your shopping list from scratch leaving you only to follow the instructions and prepare the meals. We think the benefits you will see in terms of health, variety and freshness of food by cooking from scratch will be well worth it!