More and more families are trying to tackle the dual goals of living healthier lifestyles while saving money. One thing that can help with this is to cook your meals at home. However, home cooking for your family might be easier said than done. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you to become more comfortable in your kitchen.
Grocery Shopping
The first hurdle to overcome when it comes to cooking at home is shopping for ingredients. While shopping isn’t an inherently difficult task, there are some common mistakes that people make. Food, like everything else in life, costs money.
Thankfully, there are some good ways to save money on grocery shopping. The first step starts at home. You should do an inventory of your food and ingredients and see what you need, ideally making a list. This way, you don’t end up buying things you don’t need which wastes food and money.
Make sure that you shop at the right time for you. Keep an eye out for deals and coupons, but don’t buy something that you won’t eat just because it’s on offer. Make a plan and a list. If you have some meals in mind that you buy ingredients for, then it simplifies the shopping and cooking process.
Make Ingredients at Home
One thing that can save you money and make your food taste great is to prepare some more complicated ingredients at home. You can use fresh simple ingredients to create spice pastes from scratch. This doesn’t take long, but the end result has so much more flavor than the store-bought alternative, and sometimes even costs less money.
Some homemade ingredients can last for a long time in the fridge or freezer. For example, quick pickled red onions take minutes to make and can be kept refrigerated for at least a couple of weeks. If you can find cheap veggies on offer in the grocery store, then pickling them is an amazing way to preserve them for longer.
You can then add your preserved vegetables to a meal, a salad, or even to a sandwich for a rapid injection of flavor. The aforementioned pickled red onions go well with almost anything.
Preserving in vinegar is the easiest way to achieve this, but you can go a step further and ferment your vegetables. Sauerkraut is a simple and delicious way to do this. All you need is salt, cabbage, and time to create a zingy and delicious addition to your sandwich or meal. Even better, fermented vegetables have extra health benefits and are great for your gut health.
Quick, Simple Meals
Once you get more comfortable in the kitchen, then you can start experimenting with different ingredients and creating some tasty meals. But before then, it’s a good idea to become familiar with a few different recipes. Ideally, pick some quick and simple recipes to start with, so that you can feed your family no matter what.
For example, you can make your own creamy pesto sauce in just a few minutes using a high-powered blender. All you need to do to make a quick and delicious meal is to boil some pasta, add the sauce, and enjoy with a few fresh cherry tomatoes and cranks of black pepper. It’s sure to impress and takes less than fifteen minutes to put together.
When choosing which recipes to cook, focus on things that you like and that you can easily find the ingredients for. If you try to tackle something too difficult or fiddly, then things are more likely to go wrong and you’re more likely to get discouraged. However, quick and easy is the key to gaining confidence in the kitchen.
When you’re confident with a recipe, then you can start experimenting with it and adjusting it to suit your tastes. If you use the aforementioned pasta and pesto recipe as a basis, then you can make it slightly more complicated or different.
Perhaps you could swap out the pasta for pan-fried gnocchi for a bit of crunch. You could serve it with some rocket leaves as well as cherry tomatoes, and use the pesto sauce as a dressing. You could even add some meat or fish into the equation to make a more substantial meal.
The best way to improve your skills in the kitchen is to practice. Set attainable goals, like mastering a simple recipe, then build on them. The rest will come naturally from there.
