More Than the Frozen Lasagna
This is my first blog post! I am so excited to finally be doing this, for a long time now I have entertained the idea of combining two things I love: writing and cooking, into a blog. The kitchen has always felt like a home to me, I like experimenting with recipes and have been known to be an emotional baker.
Neither of my parents are big cooks, so I don’t think I inherited the passion from them. My dad’s favorite thing to make is breakfast for dinner, and while my mom is a good cook, she doesn’t really enjoy being in the kitchen. My Grandma Judy is probably the likely culprit for starting my cooking obsession. When I was about ten or eleven she gave me a cookbook for a birthday gift. Inscribed in the front cover was a note “May you grow to love cooking as much as I do.” And lucky for her, I did.
In college, especially once I moved off campus and got a meal plan, cooking became more of a necessary evil. Sure I enjoyed finding new recipes on Pinterest, and weekly grocery shopping felt like an escape from studying, but all of the time it took to make those plans and cook was exhausting. Not to mention often the portion sizes were off. I’d cook a meal for one (my roommate and I didn’t really share food) and end up with a family style dinner. This meant either leftovers all week, or lots of waste. Nothing gets more boring than a full week of taco bake or chicken casserole.
In fact, I have a great example of this exact phenomenon. I had a dear friend who had limited cooking experience when she arrived at college. This girl was (and still is) super smart, incredibly driven, and (at that time) a little lost in the kitchen. Well the summer between our freshman and sophomore years she landed a dream internship out of the state. So she packed her bags, found an apartment, and learned how to make one of her mother’s recipes….lasagna.
As the internship began it became evident that there would not be much time for home cooking. So this friend, did the most practical thing possible and baked several big pans of lasagna, divided those into individual portions, froze them, and proceeded to heat them up for dinner. Every. Single. Night.
Yup, for a whole summer my sweet friend had lasagna every evening for dinner.
Friends, we all deserve more than the frozen lasagna.
The truth is even after college our quarter century lives don’t slow down. We graduate, find a job, then put in the hours to get our dream position. We meet new people, maybe start a relationship, maybe even get married. We move out of our parents’ home, or maybe we stay but claim some independence in providing for ourselves while we are there. Whatever your twenty something years look like the truth is we deserve to eat well, to discover our skills in making something that both tastes good and that we can be proud of. We deserve dishes that can feed one or two people and not break the bank or take all night to prepare. You don’t need a meal delivery service, you’v got this.
My sincere hope for this blog is that I might be able to show you the skills you already have. Help you to learn to meal plan ,grocery shop, pick a cut of meat, poach a chicken and then use it three ways in one week. I want to help you find how easy, exciting, and empowering it can be to cook well.
You deserve more than than the frozen lasagna. You can cook, with a little bit of guidance we all can. Let’s make it happen.
