Simple cooking is the best cooking. There, I said it for the 1000th time! No matter where I travel, no matter to whom I speak, those people and cultures that know good food say the same thing. In Paris, the spice store shared his incredibly simple secret to eating healthy, “Simple things are good things”.
In a fish market on Hawaii, the local fish monger advised me to cook my tuna very rare and very simply. “Only scare the fish with a fry pan, it will be Ono”, he said. Ono is “delicious” in Hawaiian.
From the pierogi at the Polish Festival in Riverhead, Long Island, to the grass-fed beef rancher in Nebraska, they have all told me that the best ingredients, cooked simply yield the best results.
Yet, food TV shows will have you believe that elaborate meals are the only way to truly be considered a good cook. Few people have need of complicated dinners, most are just trying to provide interesting, flavorful meals for their families every night. Why would cookbooks and food TV want to make you feel as if your cooking were inadequate? So you’ll buy more cookbooks and watch more food TV!
When you discover just a few basic cooking methods, then you can break this cycle. Imagine the benefits you would enjoy if you stopped searching for recipes and avoided the influence of celebrity chefs who make you feel unworthy of a kitchen.
What if you were empowered with this concept of simple cooking? What if you could just choose items already in your pantry and improvise a delicious, nutritious, quick and easy meal every night of the week?
You would then begin to improve your lifestyle through food. You needn’t be on TV, nor need to write a cookbook to know what type of food YOU like. No celebrity chef or recipe author can tell you what you should be eating or how you should be cooking it. Only you can decide that.
Cook simply and you’ll enjoy the following benefits:
1) Freedom – You’ll gain freedom from written recipes and vague instructions that make it impossible to cook consistently. You’ll have the freedom to eat what you want, how you want it.
2) Confidence – Once you gain your freedom from others telling you how to cook, you’ll have the confidence to create your own recipes, using the ingredients you desire. Or, you can change any existing recipe to come out just like you want it to.
3) Health – With confidence comes a desire to cook new ingredients, more wholesome, fresh, farmer’s market ingredients. Once you discover simple cooking, you’ll want to try it out on items you were afraid to purchase before because you couldn’t find a recipe for the item.
4) Family - You’ll reunite your family over the dinner table. When they actually look forward to your cooking, when you enjoy preparing healthy meals with confidence, you’ll spend more time together. Also, cooking is a social skill. You’ll find yourself entertaining more, making friends and meeting new people.
5) Money - When cooking in your home moves from the living room as entertainment and back into the kitchen as art, you’ll save money. You’ll order less take-out food. You’ll purchase less convenience items and make better decisions at the grocery store. You’ll stop buying cookbooks. Simple cooking will save you money.
Something else I’ve said 1000 times is that cooking is an art. There is no other art form that comes with a strict set of instructions to follow. Your cooking should come from your heart, using basic cooking methods with the ingredients you and your family desire. Otherwise, you’re giving the responsibility of something as important as your health and nutrition to a guy on TV.
See Chef Todd’s live Simple Cooking video demonstration.
Chef Todd Mohr has a passion for helping people improve their cooking with simple cooking techniques that work! His cooking DVDs transform home cooks into confident home chefs. “Burn Your Recipes” and your cooking will be transformed.