Cooking from Scratch

Making real food doesn't have to be too time consuming, but it is worth the time you spend.

You can reduce your exposures and improve your health by eating as much unprocessed food as possible, and eating as much organic as possible. For example, plenty of research, from the US and beyond, shows that conventionally grown potatoes are consistently among the top ten most pesticide-contaminated vegetables, so buying organic potatoes will reduce your exposure to pesticides, and organic potatoes have 22% more vitamin C, 21% more iron, and 5% more magnesium than their conventional counterparts (find more information here for one paper that summarizes research on the topic).

People often say, 'I can't afford that' or 'I don't have time to do any cooking from scratch.' Yet buying organic potatoes (or growing your own) is a lot cheaper than French fries, or potato chips. As for time, the kind of cooking I do doesn't burden my time too badly. Like everyone else, I am busy: I head to my desk in the morning, and work pretty much all day, usually not abandoning the computer until around 6:00 or 6:30. Then I head to the kitchen and start dinner. Cooking and cleanup for dinner takes between a half hour and an hour, depending on how elaborate my preparations.

Keeping the time manageable requires some planning, but with a little thought about the sequence, you can keep things going smoothly and quickly. If I have something that takes a lot of prep, like homemade soup, stew, spaghetti sauce, or such, I try to work on it for the next day’s meal at the same time as I am preparing tonight’s. So around 5:00 I jumped up for a few minutes and stuck the potatoes (skins on) in a pot on the stove to boil, with more than enough to have mashed potatoes tonight and potato-vegetable-cheese soup tomorrow (this is really a kitchen-sink type of soup).

I started actual dinner preparations at about 6:10, throwing on a couple burgers to cook, and while they simmered in one of my two always-in-use cast iron skillets, I cleaned and peeled a few carrots and some greens from a window box garden that supplies about 60% of our winter lettuce and greens. The potatoes that had been simmering for over an hour were to the mash-able stage, so I pulled out enough to make excess mashed potatoes and mashed them with an old-fashioned hand masher, butter, goat’s milk, and salt and pepper. I poured all but a cup or so of the water from the remaining potatoes, added milk to cover them, a couple tablespoons of butter, salt, pepper, dill, and returned the pot to the stove. We ate our burgers and mashed potatoes and the small salad made right on our plates. I got done, and set our plates aside. I brought the soup pot back to the counter and grated a couple carrots into it, added some fresh chopped onion and garlic, grated some ginger in, crushed some sesame seeds with a mortar and pestle to add, dumped in a can of corn (drained), chopped up a few jalapenos slices, diced some green onions, stirred in some more herbs (fresh chopped parsley, basil and rosemary from window pots, dried tarragon and dill dried from my summer garden), and finally added about a half cup of grated cheese. All the chopping and dicing and grating took about 10 minutes. The pot went back on the stove. I washed everything, and I began writing this at 7:05!

I will take the pot off the stove in a few minutes, let it cool and stick it in the fridge right before bed. Tomorrow my dinner prep won’t even take this long. All I have to do is put the pot back on the stove when we head out for chores tomorrow night. Dinner will be ready to eat as soon as leave my desk tomorrow evening. Nothing easier...

The great thing about this recipe is that you can put in any combo of vegetables depending on what you have in the cupboard and the fridge. Peas, beans, peppers, mushrooms, carrots, broccoli... all work. And the same with spices: experiment with odd combinations.