I have an absolute love/hate relationship with the question, “What’s for dinner?” It doesn’t matter if it’s a week night or a weekend, when you have a family, you have to answer this question daily. I have actually really come to love cooking and baking over the past few years. There is such satisfaction in creating a delicious meal and watching others enjoy it. Talk about instant gratification. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the time, energy, budget, or patience to create these gratifying meals daily. And that’s the rub of it all – finding a balance that doesn’t have me scrambling to come up with a meal idea every day and also allows for those days when there simply isn’t the time and/or energy to prep a meal for an hour.
A typical week at our house is filled with a grab bag of meals, some entirely homemade, others using some prepackaged ingredients, and some (usually on the weekends) from the freezer (pizza), restaurant, or “lazy meal” bin (quesadillas, french dip, grilled cheese and tomato soup). I’ve made it my goal over the past three years or so to try and tip this balance in favor of more wholesome, fresh, and complex dishes. I’ve been partially motivated by health, but also by budget and boredom. More than anything, I needed variety in cooking to keep me interested in making dinner and my palette was sick of the same old dishes. I also found that “quick meals” often meant higher cost meals.
I started this culinary adventure because I made a new friend in my cousin’s wife and she inspired me. Dayna has lived throughout the world and eating a meal at her house is always a treat. She introduced me to the Everyday Food magazine and this proved a good start. This magazine helped me understand what spices and basics to have in my pantry and to find new dishes to try. The recipes have been hit and miss with my family and it took me awhile to learn that I needed to create a meal plan that used similar ingredients and leftovers throughout the week – otherwise my grocery budget was monstrous and wasteful!
This will probably sound like a cheesy paid endorsement, but I promise it isn’t. My feelings about dinner and my enthusiasm for trying new things truly took a turn when I decided to try a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. This inspired magazine from America’s Test Kitchen is an incredible wealth of knowledge – from kitchen tips, to foolproof recipes, to ingredients comparisons, to kitchen gadget reviews. They don’t accept advertising, so their opinions are not influenced by paid endorsements. They are also famous for trying a recipe a myriad of times – sometimes over 100 – and running it by taste testers to ensure that it really works.
My husband is now famous in our home for asking “Did this recipe come out of Cook’s Illustrated?” If it is, he is always excited to try it and confident that it will be good. Using their recipes has helped me build so much confidence in my own cooking, instincts, and understanding of terminology and ingredients. It might seem like overload, but we have the magazine subscription, recently subscribed to the website, and have started ordering their cookbooks – including those from The America’s Test Kitchen PBS tv show. I’ve also used their recommendations to ask for gifts over the past year or so of a cast iron skillet, food processor, and dutch oven and I’ve loved the results I’ve seen in my cooking!
Although I still dread the question, “What’s for dinner?” some nights, I can honestly say that many more nights I look forward to answering it now. My culinary adventures have truly taught me that if my pantry and fridge (and sometimes my freezer) are stocked with some basic adventures, I can answer this question in a pinch. I don’t need to depend on prepackaged mixes, canned soups, or even sauces either. While these can definitely be convenient, it can be so much more cost-effective and even convenient to simply make things from scratch using common ingredients.
I love the satisfaction of knowing go-to dishes, planning complex meals, and knowing I can figure out something to make in a pinch. Plus, I don’t think I’ll ever get over the thrill of watching someone truly enjoy a meal I’ve made!
My new favorite go-to cookbook that I think is an absolute must-have? America’s Test Kitchen: The Complete TV Show Cookbook.
We love Cook’s Illustrated too! They are like the Consumer Reports of food. Every year we get their Cook’s Country magazines bounded all together. It is an annual subscription and is a great way to look at all the magazines from that year. I really like Cook’s Country. I find them to be a bit more “family friendly” for our tastes. I also get the Cook’s Illustrated magazines from our local library.
Glad to hear you like them!
Angie
We LOVE America’s Test Kitchen and Cooks Country TV shows! I use tons of their recipes and love them all! I will DEF have to look into that cook book.
So funny you’d post this, because I have one of their recipes I cooked and blogged about, ready to post to the blog tomorrow! LOL!
I get bored easily with cooking because I really don’t like it, I will have to check this out!
I love trying one new meal a week to mix it up and if it doesn’t work out then it’s only one meal that didn’t go well and we have extra things to make quesadillas as backup.