Cooking for Real Life

• How often do you have the time or energy at the end of the day to pull a meal together from scratch? Every night? A few times a week? Once or twice a month? Never?

In our fast-paced lifestyle, eating a traditional meal of "real food" seems to have been left behind. We're simply too busy, too tired, too overwhelmed, too overextended to get it done. We are shown ads constantly (just watch for it the next time you're watching live TV- you'll be amazed) about how wonderful it is to be eating out instead of cooking at home. There are ads for junk food, diet food, weight loss programs that include the food, and fast food. The themes continue in sitcoms and books. Cooking at home is a dying art.

Our recent Canada Food Guide, unveiled in January, places a high importance on eating with others, enjoying whole foods, limiting processed foods, and so on. But there's not a lot of awareness put into the "how" of home cooking. In fact, it's laughable, and it's exactly the kind of information I found when I was a new mom and trying to sort out meal planning for my life with a squalling infant, no sleep, no energy, and healing a post-partum body. It didn't translate then, and it doesn't translate now.

How do you implement it when you are literally away from home more hours than you sleep? When you've got a household to run and a million things on your "to do" list?

The thing is, it's complicated and different for everyone. No two people share the exact same meal planning complications. But here are a few ideas to start you thinking, and I'm just a phone call away if you want to get serious about cooking at home.

• Begin with your "why". Why do you want to meal plan? Why do you want to eat at home? Why do you want to cook more or eat out less? If you don't really care, you won't do it.
• Decide "when". Make it specific. Once a week? Twice? Five times?
• Pick and plan meals appropriate to the time you have. You can't serve a 5 course meal when you have very little time to do it in. Can you plan a more intense meal when you've got some vacation lined up? Or some half days at the office?
• Make a list of what you need to buy for those meals- check your pantry, fridge, and freezer first
• Just buy those things, and use them. (Even if you don't cook what you planned initially, use it for something!)
• Consider freezer meals, "meal starters", and meal planning strategies such as leapfrogging and piggybacking.

For more information on meal planning that suits your life, let's talk.

​All the best, friends! Stay warm!
Stacy