Cooking Fresh Food From Scratch
Posted under: Since I moved out on my own 10 years ago, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with cooking. I grew up cooking dinner at home. We rarely ever ate out due to the large size of our family and the huge chunk of change it would have taken to cover the bill! When I moved into my first apartment, my mom gave me a brand new set of Wolfgang Puck’s pots and pans one year for Christmas. I still use them (with the exception of the two non-stick frying pans that began to peel and then had to be trashed), every single day.
Now that I have a family of my own, and am trying to figure out what healthy cooking really is, we’ve dramatically decreased the meals we eat out. We MIGHT eat out one night a week, but here lately it’s once every two weeks and that’s fine with me. The more food I cook at home, the more I realize that I don’t really LIKE to eat out. See, I’m a bit of a food snob. If I go out to eat, I expect the food I get to be something amazing, something I can’t cook for myself at home. There are too many times when I sit in the restaurant with, a plate of food in front of me and I think, I could make this better myself! To me, that’s a huge waste of money. What I would rather do is be eating something so delicious that I’m dissecting it in my brain, trying to figure out how to make it at home because it’s so wonderful that my taste buds are dancing in my mouth. That’s only really ever happened once or twice!
I go through spells where I’m incredibly creative in the kitchen, coming up with new recipes that take me by surprise. Other times, like today, I’m completely uninspired and I need some serious help. There are countless websites out there promising to help you create menus with quick, simple meals that you can whip up in no time. I’ve tried a handful of them and unfortunately, most call for highly processed ingredients. There is one though that really impressed me. I have no affiliation with this company whatsoever. I just want to tell you about them because I think their menu plans are so dang awesome!
The Fresh 20 is a company that puts together menus using only fresh ingredients and dried spices, legumes, things like that. Their memberships cost $15 for 3 months and the meals are absolutely amazing. Each week they publish a new menu (available in classic, gluten free and vegan/vegetarian) complete with a shopping list where they even break down the price for you. Typically, it comes out to about $80. Some weeks it is even less! I’ve found their estimates to be pretty accurate as well. When I use their weekly meal plan with grocery list, I save myself so much time and money in the grocery store! I love it!
I’ve found when I use the Fresh 20′s meal plans and shop from their list, meal planning is a cinch. I wake up in the morning, knowing that I have every ingredient in my house for dinner that night. That is a huge weight off of my shoulders because I’m usually scrambling around at 4pm trying to figure out what we’re going to eat. I love not having that worry!
Their meals are super healthy, affordable and easy, but most of all, they are delicious! I have the world’s pickiest eater for a husband, not to mention a 1 year old and a 4 year old, and I haven’t had any complaints from them. I highly encourage you to check them out! When you go to their site, you can try out a sample meal plan before you buy a membership. When I tried the sample, they had a turkey meatball recipe on there that my husband immediately proclaimed his favorite meatball recipe ever!
Photo from www.thefresh20.com
