Most people have a list of things they are used to eating… A, B, C, D, & E. They also believe these things add up to a pretty decent diet. They stick with them because they like their taste, and because they are familiar and comfortable.
And then someone comes along and tells them “UH OH!! You can’t be eating D or E! They’re NOT GOOD FOR YOU!!”.
Then they’re left with only A, B, & C wondering what to do now. They know they need to eat other things to complete their diet again, but… WHAT?
…as if there weren’t THOUSANDS of other kinds of food and food combinations out there that they could try.
What did the caveman do when the herd of – whatever – got away from him? Did he not eat? Possibly, but he sure looked for other food to survive.
Think about the grocery store.
Thousands of choices.
THOUSANDS!!
All for our convenience.
Isn’t it amazing? Endless healthy options at the grocery store, and people are dying of malnutrition.
Aren’t most major diseases mostly the result of malnutrition? Heart disease, most cancers, obesity, and diabetes ALL can usually be prevented and even reversed through proper diet and exercise.
According to the CDC, 29% of all deaths in the U.S. were due to heart disease.
The Discovery Health website lays out how the American Heart Association recommends we eat to prevent heart disease, as well as other diseases, including obesity.
I’ve talked before about how people with Diabetes can stop taking their medication with proper diet.
We’re not malnourished because we don’t have access to extremely healthy food. We absolutely do.
If you’re reading this, odds are you have a market or store within 5 minutes of you that has a produce department, which can provide almost every nutrient your body needs to thrive.
Most people are malnourished and living as satiated fat slobs or dying of preventable diseases because we’re too stupid to figure out how too cook some vegetables? We’re too stubborn to give up our favorite tasting foods, and ignore the possibility that among the THOUSANDS of other food options that there could be something that tastes even better?
If you don’t know how to cook, how about taking a cooking class?
Don’t want to spend money? I’ve mentioned YouTube before for exercise ideas…
Have you ever used it for cooking tips?
I’ve used it many times for things like the best way to cut an onion, or to cut a mango, or to make pizza dough.
Check out this awesome step-by-step vid to make garlic ginger bok choy:
Add a little tofu or chicken, and even some brown rice, and you’ve got an incredibly nutritious meal. Dark green leafy vegetables are some of the most densely nutritious foods.
And did you see how easy it was? He literally showed practically the entire process and it took less than 5 minutes!!!
Check out this video cooking site, and watch a prep for potato salad with lemon vinaigrette.
How about the Food Channel YouTube channel with over 400 videos.
With the internet… seriously, there are no excuses.
Don’t let your laziness to figure out how to cook something you’ve never cooked get in the way of your health.
Amen!
And if you don’t have a computer, go to your local public library. Those tend to have a ton of cookbooks in the nonfiction section; surprisingly good ones at that!
By the way, thanks for that video. I’m sooo making that tonight since I already have all the ingredients.
You’re right about it being easy to look up receipes or take cooking classes, but unfortunately time constrains always seem to be a problem for me (or at least thats my excuse!). Thanks for sharing the video… it looks delicious and only takes a few minutes to make
Great post!!!! I was starting to get a bit bored of my same old stuff I make and your absolutely right. Time to go on a hunter-gatherer mission at the local supermarket and cook something different.
I never thought of using YouTube for cooking ideas. That’s awesome. Luckily I love to cook and create healthy stuff in the kitchen. I might check some out to get more ideas though. You’re right…there are no excuses. We can all make healthy meals.
Hey once again. A few posts ago you questioned whether your blogging actually worked. Well heres an example how. I was getting quite bored of what I was eating and was starting to dream of eating anything that wasn’t paleo. Not cravings but just boredom. I didn’t do it of course but after reading this post it made me realise I had gotten quite slack at searching for new paleo recipes. Diversity is the spice of life or so they say. So I went to the supermarket and got a whole artichoke heart and had it with lemon and garlic aioli I made myself. I had never had this before and I am feeling completely rejuvenated and a lot more positive. I will post the recipe tonight but I just wanted to thank you and remind you that your posts DO motivate people.
Yes, I concur with Dr. Dan!
I do get sick of hearing the excuses like, “I don’t know how to cook!” We have things that make cooking very easy. Crock pots are a nice aid. What’s easier than making a healthy stew in your crock pot? Chop up some spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, and shred some carrots and red cabbage in there, and you’ve got yourself a salad and a nice soup or stew. A meal! And it doesn’t take a genius. People who are afraid of trying to cook are weenies.
I actually feel sorry for a friend of mine who was absolutely amazed that I was able to take ingredients in his kitchen and make pancakes out of them. He was fretting once while we were hanging out about wanting to make pancakes but not having any mix. He was all in awe to learn that a mix is simply premeasured dry ingredients for lazy people. Who knew, right? So I asked permission to snoop in his pantry, and lo and behold I found all the ingredients needed for semi-decent flapjacks and made them. It blew his mind, O_O “I can’t believe you turned flour into pancakes!” he kept repeating. It was silly.
[...] have been somewhat limited. Consequently, I have been making bland, boring meals. Then I read this post by McBloggenstein and it got me thinking. There is a world of vegetables and fruits along with [...]
I have to disagree, Amy. Maybe some are, but I’d have to say that most people who are afraid to cook aren’t weenies. They, like me, may be afraid of messing up and wasting however much money they spent on the food for that recipe. They may get overwhelmed by the amount of options or be constrained by what they have on hand.
And lack of experience doesn’t help either. Your crockpot stew? Ignoring the fact that I, like lots of people, I’m guessing, don’t own a crockpot and probably won’t for the foreseeable future, the fact is that I’m bad at just throwing things together without a recipe. I don’t instinctively know what would taste good together, and how much of each to add. And spices–what should I add? How much? How long should I cook it? I’ll search for a recipe, but most of the time it seems like I don’t have half of the ingredients on hand, and I hesitate at buying some of them because I know I won’t use them up.
Same goes with the flapjacks. I do know that you can make pancakes without a mix, but without a good recipe I wouldn’t know what proportions to use, and would probably just end up with pancake soup. Being able to just “throw things together” takes time and practice, things a beginning cook doesn’t have.
Hey Brit!
Please don’t take this the wrong way…
When I saw that you had commented, for a split second I thought to myself that your comment will probably be negative. And I was right.
Your prospective is easily understandable, as most of us have been there, but the point is that being in such a state of mind is easily remedied.
Did you get any inspiration from the video above or the sites that I linked?
I know the feeling of not wanting to get ingredients if you don’t know that you’ll be able to use all of them, or that the portions you do use end up not tasting good, but how will you learn if you don’t try?
As far as the pancakes, it is pretty easy to keep some flour, eggs, and milk on hand, as they don’t go bad very quickly. All it takes is finding one easy recipe on the internet and writing it down or printing it out, and now you’re a person that knows how to make pancakes from scratch. I’m just saying you’re making it harder than it really is.
As for the crockpot, wouldn’t you say it’s worth-it to you to find a used one at a garage sale for $10 so that you can save time and money in the long run by making large quantities of dishes so that you always have meal options in the freezer? I’ve only used one a couple of times, but I would be fairly confident if I just cut up a bunch of my favorite veggies and poured in some vegetable stock, that I would have a decent meal a few hours later. But luckily there are recipe sites, like ones I have shown you before, that make sure you make something tasty.
Remember this tip when you make recipes. You don’t need to get the measurements of ingredients exactly right, only the spices. For example, I sometimes make a vegetable curry that has squash, zucchini, red peppers, broccoli, baby corn, snow peas, bamboo shoots. If I were to follow the recipe, I would use only a portion of each of those vegetables. Instead, I just use the whole squash, zucchini, etc. Now, I end up with a CRAP LOAD of food, but that’s a good thing for me, because now I have lunch for a week!
The good thing about doing that is that since the veggies will go bad if you don’t use them, you can just throw them all into whatever you’re making. The measurements that you do need to stick to are the spices, but luckily they take years to go bad, so if you stock up on those, you’re good to go for a long time.
One more point: When you go to the grocery store, do they sell their produce by weight or by bunch? If it’s by weight, you can get just one carrot if you want, you don’t have to get the bunch of 20. Just tear open the bunch! Don’t feel bad for it. They can’t make you buy them all.
McB–
Sorry for being so negative. That seems to be a bad habit of mine.
I haven’t looked at the sites you linked yet, because grad school is kind of kicking my ass right now, but I promise I will check them out.
That is the Catch-22 with me: I don’t want to try things because I don’t know if they’ll taste good, but I won’t know how they taste if I don’t try! Let’s hope I break the cycle somehow.
I actually DO make large batches of stuff already, without a crockpot, so that I have meals in the freezer. Just tonight, to get rid of some stuff before I go home for Thanksgiving break, I made a batch of mushroom stroganoff, and the ONE thing I’ve ever made without any kind of recipe–a tomato sauce-y thing with onions, zucchini, bell peppers, and toasted chickpeas that I can throw over rice or whatever. Tonight, it got thrown over roasted potatoes.
I think part of my problem is, like I mentioned in my post today, that I’m too much of an engineer. I need an exact plan and steps to follow if I’m making something–it’s hard for me to just wing it.
I also think that what sets me on edge sometimes, and gets me to post negatively, is when people are all, “But it’s so EASY! Anyone who doesn’t do this is stupid,” about anything. Yes, it’s easy if it’s something you’ve done for a long time and are good at. But when you’re new to stuff and just starting out, it’s not always that simple.
Feel free to knock me upside the head the next time I get too negative. ;-P
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you’re “stupid” for not having a sense for cooking. I guess I’m just smug in my inborn sense of being able to make a meal out of almost nothing. Because I’m awesome. What I meant by the “weenies” comment is that it all comes out of fear, and living by fear is not good. My opinion only. A word of advice: never take anything a person on the internet says personally. It’s just not a good idea.
Peace and Love, brothers and sisters! Let’s all sing Kumbuya now!
Hmmm how do you cook? Step one, pick up a book of recipes and follow them. Step two, follow step one.
I do most of the cooking at home and its so effing easy that everytime I hear someone whine it makes me sick. There are great websites that have healthy food ideas and they are FREE!
Discovery health has a site that have lots of them and most of them have prep times of less than 15-20minutes. Cheaper and faster than driving out to some fast food joint. If you can cut a carrot you can cook these.
Source
http://www.tv.com/a-lyon-in-the-kitchen/show/71826/episode.html
I had taken culinary arts classes at high school, and that opened me up to new foods even more! Now that I’ve consumed more fruits and veggies as a result, my palette is more adventurous than ever!
It’s a good site, if you don’t know what to cook…
http://www.iwillcooktonight.com
for sunday dinner:
SALSA VERDE CHICKEN SALAD