I dont enjoy cooking, because I dont know how. That and I cant afford to cook. When it would cost me $10 for the ingredients for a salad, I could pick up a pack of ramen noodles for less than $1. I also have trouble cooking because I'm originally from the USA, but I've moved to the UK and the cultures are so very different. All of the food stuffs I was used to in the USA arent stocked/made here.

If I could find good easy recipes, I'd be keener to cook. Right now the only from scratch recipe I know (aside from baking) is Chicken Parmesan. I cant even get spaghetti to cook right most times!

I took home ec in high school in the USA, but that didnt prepare me for life in the home at all! We were made to work in groups and everyone had tasks to do. IE we made taco salad on a monday, and Mac and cheese on a thursday in a given week. I never got to do any of the "cooking" i just cleaned up after everyone else's mess. Classes like Home ec are on the downfall now, with people opting out of it in most high schools

If there were an easy and cheap way for me to learn to cook, I'd go for it. For now though, I cant stand doing dishes, so the less mess, the better. (no dish washer)

Ann - you are right about people having a limited repertoire. My MIL had a weekly menu that never varied except for special occasions. She grocery shopped without a list. She was on a very limited budget and she knew she could afford to make exactly these things every week and it never varied.

My mom did a little more variety, but we never ate out or did convenience foods and she never experimented. I would guess she fell well into that 20-30 dishes. Hers was more based on what was in season. We had a huge garden so what was ripe was what we ate plus a very simple meat. When my sister moved back in with her 2 kids and money got tight we ate spaghetti with homemade sauce 3 x a week. And EVERY week we had "leftover soup".

Cassandra - truthfully if you learn to cook you can cook cheaper than you can do convenience foods. But it is a learning process that can be tough and somewhat expensive.

Edit: Doh! I hadn't read through Mariposita's post. She says a lot of the same things!

Until recently it hadn't settled in my mind that there's a middle ground. There was microwaveable food and there was company food, time-consuming courses that took a lot of work to prepare.

Now I know there's a middle ground. I know that whole wheat pasta and jarred sauce with a bag of veggie burger crumbles mixed in is a quick, wholesome meal. This is a beginning. It can be further refined with some fresh grated parmesan on top (keeps in the fridge forever), and a bag salad for a side. It can be FURTHER refined by chopping a few vegetables and throwing them in the sauce too, or making your own sauce one Sunday afternoon and freezing it, and pulling out the frozen sauce later.

Good food doesn't have to be incredibly time-consuming. It's the little touches that make a dish sing: fresh quality parmesan on your pasta; pepper from a grinder, simple things like that can add enough depth to compensate for not having simmered something for hours on the stove.

When I was a kid, we had a healthy cooked meal every night for supper. It was some form of meat, vegetables from the freezer (cooking is a snap: about 3 minutes in a half inch or so of simmering water), and potatoes or noodles or rice or garlic bread or whatnot for the bread/starch. This meal was tasty, filling, healthy, and pretty darn quick.

While we remember our grandparents slaving over a hot stove for hours, what may be sticking in our minds is the times they put in that big effort. I bet their daily meals were much the same as I listed above: meat, veg, starch cooked in a quick and efficient manner.

Perhaps it's more about being mindful of what we are doing? The ingredients, fresh or frozen, store bought or from your garden... the preparation of them, chopping, peeling, nuking... thinking about what is going into your body, how it will fuel you, etc is more key?

I can think of plenty of quick healthy recipes that only have 5 ingredients - in fact the most satisfying meals I've had lately have been simple roasted vegetables from the farmers market & some grilled meat from the freezer.

I think if we somehow were able to put the thought, care, love into our cooking while maintaining a realistic time frame and attitude toward it we'd be better off. That's what we are trying to do in my house... a lot of nights it is a frozen veggie lasagna or a thin crust pizza, but we still try to eat mindfully and pay attention to quality ingredients.

As for everything else domestic-I've taken the flylady approach of "you can do anything for 15 minutes" and somehow my house never gets too bad.

Good point Lizziness. As some people don't already feel enough pressure about what they are eating, they also have to feel pressure about how they are making it Some people can spend 10 minutes making a really healthy meal and someone else can spend 1hr making fried chicken and buscuits from scratch.

It's also been proven that forzen and canned veggies retain much of the nutrients compared to their fresh counterparts. If fast and easy will help someone eat better, then I'm all for it

"Fast," doesn't mean unhealthy, and slow and homemade doesnt equate to healthy either. Fat, skinny, and everywhere in between, you will find all sorts of food interests, preferences, and skills.

There aren't many healthy fast food options in the US, that is true. At least not compared to much of the rest of the world. But you will find foodies and gourmets who are both thin and fat, and you will find the same range in people who think "I only cook (or even eat) because I have to."

My husband and I love watching the Food Channel. My husband loves Paula Deen, though we laugh at her use of butter and mayo. It's over the TOP.
I prefer Anthony Bordain (sp?) and Andrew Zimmer (Bizarre Food). Seeing what other people in the world eat, is very interesting, especially the fast food (Street food). We don't have much street food in the US anymore, except during fairs and festivals, and even much of that is deep fried.

Watching street vendors dish up grilled critters (from bugs to birds to beasts), stews and curries, fruits and veggies... just about anything that could be made in a home is made and served in the streets - you can see that "fast food," isn't a new concept. "Clone restaurants," really are. Even 30 years ago, the number of chain restaurants was minimal.

There are many reasons that fat is becoming a world-wide epidemic. It can probably be summarized best as "affluenza." Food is available and affordable to anyone in the world who has the money to buy it. In the most affluent societies, even the very poor have the money to buy it. That hasn't always been true.

Our bodies aren't any different than any other critter on the planet. Give an animal an opportunity to eat their meals without working for it, and they will. Laziness and hunger our built into our genes, because conserving energy and eating in times of abundance to carry us through famine is the rule not the exception in the wild. If food is too abundant, overpopulation changes that in a hurry.

We've stepped outside the natural order on so many levels. We don't eat when we're hungry, we eat according to the clock. We don't eat foods that resemble anything that exists in nature. We don't sleep when we're tired, and we don't sleep until we're rested. The work we do, is less and less frequently physical work, and less and less personally rewarding. We don't have a sense of accomplishment over creating something we can immediately see as useful. We rarely if ever have to chase down food, or run from enemies. If we do run or exercise, it often isn't for a reason, and often not even fun.

All of the things that keep wild critters slim, toned, and in top condition don't enter our lives, unless we recreate them in an un-natural setting. I don't think it's rocket science to see why our bodies aren't working as they're intended to.

[QUOTE=kaplods;1813194 Give an animal an opportunity to eat their meals without working for it, and they will. [/QUOTE]

True. And I imagine that most of us would also, if we could, choose to wear clean clothes without having to do laundry, get paychecks without having to go to a job, etc. With most of life it just doesn't work that way. I think that the realm of food is about as close as we (in modernized countries) come to being able to cheat the equation. Unless you figure in the indirect payments in energy and expenses, like gym memberships and treadmills. And whatever medical costs. And believe me I am NO ONE to point any fingers here at all. I have high blood pressure and weird feet with bones that bent in a way they weren't supposed to from having to support excess weight. I am not proud of it. So maybe there really isn't a pardon-the-expression "free lunch."

I think that really is the point, there are consequences to our actions. There always have been, it's just in a modern, industrialized society the consequences aren't always immediate or directly linked to the behavior. At the "natural" level consequences are pretty immediate and clear. Eat when you can or starve to death. Run to get dinner, or run to avoid being something else's dinner. Rest when you're tired, play not only for fun and stress relief, but to teach the youngin's and practice skills used in hunting prey or evading predator.

I'm not advocating a return to the stone age, but now we have to realize that our environment is working against us, rather than for us. We have to use our brains to outsmart our physiology. Our body and primitive brain is still trying to prepare us for a famine that isn't going to come.

Funny - I missed the first 2 pages of this thread the first time I posted.

I like to cook. Thats kind of my problem. I dont like making it if it isnt really good. But I dont often have the time to cook the way I want too. I try at least one weekend night to cook a good meal.

When my mom, sister, MIL come to visit they all want to do me a favor and cook dinner. They cant cook. Finally with my sister I said..."you know what I would really like - YOU take the kids to the park while I cook. I want to cook without 2 little ones screaming for attention. THAT is what would be helpful to me. " They did and it was sheer heaven.

Oh and for me....I love to cook. I hate to menu plan and shop. In my ideal world I would shop for one meal at a time because I would have all day to do nothing but cook dinner. Get up, have coffee, wander off to the farmers market and whole foods to see what looks good TODAY. How do I know what I want to eat tomorrow?

JayEll, the Swiffer IS great ain't it? I talked my mom into one as well. I have the carpet flick and the wetjet, love em both. Magic Eraser is just another of those wonderous inventions as well.

You know my mother tried teaching me to cook, she learned from grandma. And most people in my family LOVE to cook. I just...well, I don't. Never have. Wasn't able to even learn. I've been shown the family secret for their wonderful buttermilk biscuit recipe many many times. Hubby and I have contemplated using them either as weapons or hockey pucks when I make them though. But they're rather dangerous to get hit by one. Ouch.

Mom even sent me some premade biscuit mix that a local place sells here...good old fashioned homeade WV biscuits. They were harder than the ones I tried from scratch. ::sigh:: I finally decided, biscuit making was not for me and I stay extremely far away from it.

Now I don't know if fast food actually has anything to do with it though. As I said, most of my family loves cooking...greasy fried potatoes, fried pork chops, candied yams, candied beets, biscuits, cornbread...see a theme? They eat a variety. But just about EVERYTHING they make, they feel like they have to add fat too. They grew up on lard and butter. I watched mom take a can of peas and add a half a stick of butter to them! ICK! And to think...I actually used to eat and love her cooking. Nowadays, they taste overdone. I'm so used to nuking the Steamfresh frozen veggies from Birdseye. The peas taste more fresh, not overcooked, like those from a can. And I add nothing to them. Sometimes I may put about 3 squirts of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" on them. So mom's, swimming in butter, overcooked, squishy canned peas just taste awful to me now. Right after the peas, I watched her pour half a bag of brown sugar and add the other half stick of butter to a can of candied yams. They weren't candied enough for her taste. Double ICK! No wonder I got fat.

I TOTALLY agree.

I have the time, and I'm not 'lazy', nor do I 'not care'...I simply don't like cooking, or anything having to do with food prep and clean up.

But the opposite of that doesn't mean 'junk food'. An apple is 'quick and easy'. So is a salad. That said, my preference is just that someone ELSE who is better at cooking (and how likes to cook) DO the cooking.

I didn't develop a weight problem because I like things 'quick and easy'. I developed a weight problem because I ate more calories than I burned, and wasn't mindful of that. Bottom line.

true - not all fast foods are unhealthy and not all time consuming cooking results in healthy cuisine.
when i first posted I was motivated by a web site describing pierogi preparation and the grief involved in making them and I thought Whoa! That is not anywhere close to grief. I know it was an exaggeration of the term but of got me thinking how easy we tend to expect food to be -

great thread.. With me I just simply didn't know how to cook. I knew the basics of following a recipe and measuring and that's it. I've basically had to teach myself since my mom never taught me to cook. But up until I was a teenager what we ate was pretty much all fried and very southern cooking so it's not like I would have learned healthy cooking. Also my problem was I really wish that my high school had offered a nutrition class/cooking class of some sort to educate me on how bad fast food is and what are the healthy foods and portion size and how to cook healthy food since when I first started trying to eat healthy I had no idea there were ways you could cook veggies or grill them, etc. I knew fast food was not that great but I didn't realize how BAD until I started doing research of my own. The only thing that I knew to do was to not eat fried foods on such a daily basis and grill them or bake them. So my big problem was just plain ignorance. My taste buds have completely changed though.

I think sometimes this is another case were perception trumps reality, even for people who love to cook.

There are a lot of foods that we are so used to seeing in prepackaged form, that we assume that homemade takes tons more time. Prepackaged carrots and lettuce, make it seem like peeling and slicing a couple of carrots and tearing lettuce is so incredibly "time consuming." Is 20 seconds as opposed to 2 minutes really such an incredible savings in time that it is worth twice the cost?

I made homemade gnocci a couple months ago. It was the first time I ever made them, and I just cut the dough into nuggets without making any fancy designs in them, with a fork like my grandmother did. I boiled them and made a quick tomato sauce for them from diced canned tomatoes. I was really shocked that it only took a few minutes longer than making homemade mashed potatoes. Who knew? (Probably my grandmother!)




I also occasionally make homemade flatbreads (tortillas or roti).

Well to me, yeah, it is. Not because of the time, but because...well, I simply don't like cooking. I do make some exceptions. I eat lots of fruit, which means washing, pealing, etc. I'll get melons on sale and cut them up and bag and refridgerate them to keep when I get home from the store. But I really would prefer doing something else with my time. Maybe it's cause I don't like lettuce and carrots AS MUCH as I like cantaloupe? LOL But nah. I'd actually buy the cantaloupe precut IF it weren't so danged expensive and IF they didn't add some crap to preserve it. It changes the taste, and yuck! But just so I don't have to fool with food prep, which I really really don't care to do, I do buy the prebagged lettuce and carrots.