Back to a Bowl of Cereal
I wrapped my fingers around the door handle and pulled. The seal on the door gave way. As I perused the shelves in the fridge my eyes came to rest on the soy milk, a carton of eggs, carrots, a container of wilting arugula, and a bag of broccoli. They all had potential. Though, everything required some prep to make into a proper meal.
I just didn’t have the inspiration or motivation to cook.
Well, back to the fallback meal, I thought. The one that probably most of you use as well, cereal.
In a world of cheap ready-made meals that are hyper palatable, it is extremely tough to choose the homemade meal.
Growing up I rarely ate store bought meals, all thanks to my mother. Eventually when I moved out I vowed to cook my own meals, and I did, for a while. Unfortunately it took me years to master the art of cooking for one. I would go stints where I would cook and then another stint of eating out or eating prepackaged meals.
Heck, I even tried eating T.V. dinners for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week. I don’t recommend this. As with anything in life, progress comes in steps.
The biggest challenge to cooking healthy meals at home seems to be two-fold. These are time and knowledge. First off, if you don’t have time or struggle to prioritize cooking it just won’t happen. Okay, so let’s say you carved out some time. Now you need to at the very least know what ingredients and amounts are going to taste good and be a healthy choice.
I struggle with the latter. How to take simple ingredients and infuse bold flavors into them. This all came to a head for me in 2021 when I embraced a pescatarian diet. This is a diet that is vegetarian with the ability to eat fish. I think of it as a vegetarian light diet.
I remember opening a can of garbanzo beans and thinking, how am I going to make this taste like a home cooked meal. Most likely to no one’s surprise it didn’t on the first or second attempts. We ate many dinners that were devoid of palatable flavors, but eventually cooking with this vegetarian light diet became easier.
Then in 2023, we discovered the Yuka app. At this point my wife and I had become adept at throwing quick healthy recipes together. We did rely on store-bought sauces or frozen veggie patties here and there, but overall we were doing pretty good. The Yuka app was just the next step of knowledge.
Yuka allowed me to scan any food in the store that had a barcode and see how it ranked on being healthy. The best part was that I could read why it was considered unhealthy and what risk I would be possibly taking by consuming an ultra-processed food. With one scan I could figure out in less than a minute if the food was good for me or not.
So, I went from one end of the spectrum of home cooked meals to the other of eating T.V. dinners for an entire week. Eventually I settled back down towards home cooked meals with the occasional ordering or eating out. I just have to remember that I almost always have a choice to eat healthy food.
-Abe
