Sharing words, recipes and breaking bread with your loved ones is certainly not a new idea. At some point in our modern society cooking at home developed a negative stigma. Maybe it started with women who felt chained to the kitchen and housekeeping. As a wife, Mother, Mimi and business owner, I understand how challenging feeding a family becomes on a daily basis.

You’ve Come A Long Way Baby!

With the daily struggles of taking care of our family, innovations and appliances have assisted in making our life easier. I recall the horror I felt when my Grannie described washing clothes the old fashioned way.

Clearly, times have changed and technology has brought us many inventions. Now we have devices to reduce time spent on menial tasks, eliminate repetitive steps, automate our lives and provide much needed convenience.

Addiction to convenience

Yet, with our addiction to convenience I believe that we have been led astray when it comes to cooking. Big business wants us to believe that frozen or prepared foods are just as healthy as cooking from fresh fruits and vegetables. It just isn’t true. More importantly, vegetables and fruit lose up to half their nutritional value within a week of harvesting.

So when did they harvest the produce in the grocery store? Who knows but it is ideal to have your own garden or grow vegetables in container pots. Also, buy veggies from your local farmers, farmers market or CSA. Supporting local farmers is good for you, local community and our environment.

Fresh produce picked locally will provide the best nutrition. Preparing meals at home will allow you to control the amount of calories, salt, fat and sugar. Also, the amount of chemicals and preservatives that you introduce and feed your family will be greatly reduced. Paying attention to these things help improve our health.

Start making small changes

It is impossible to follow these guidelines all of the time. Time and circumstances dictate that we eat out, grab fast food or cook frozen dinners. What I am suggesting is that you start making small changes to improve your cooking and overall nutrition. Occasionally we all need instruction in the art of eating.

When I cook at home it is a labor of love. Thankfully my mentors introduced me early to the joys of cooking. If you struggle with this, please let me help you, First Stop- Mimi’s New Food Column. We can start small and work our way up. Before you know it you will want to show off your cooking skills.

Love from Mimi’s Kitchen

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Cook, please! Your body will love you for it.

Our body’s health operates by the nutrition that we give it. Heather Mangieri from The Academy of Nutrition and Diabetics is a registered dietician nutritionist. On a recent study Heather commented that “The findings support the evidence-based position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that the best nutrition-based strategy for promoting optimal health and reducing the risk of chronic disease is to wisely choose a wide variety of foods.”

Choosing fresh foods and preparing is the best way to know what ingredients actually go into your food. When was the last time that you cooked a meal and included a list of chemical preservatives in your recipe? We should not have to resort to research to find out what an item is when you see on food labels.

Cook, please so you know what your eating

However, understanding food labels is a job in itself. In my research I located this article  from Dr Mercola that provides a scary list of information. If your interested in Dr Mercola’s background and education it may be viewed on his site. Visit the about page for details on his medical expertise and background.

Cooking is something that I love to do. I know that this is not the case for everyone. Learning to cook is something that we should do for our health even if we do not enjoy the process.  It truly is the way to help our bodies work as well as they may.  There are some things that we don’t have control over but our food intake is not one of them. Cook, please.

As a result the more I research and learn about food processing the more I want to limit. I try to be selective about the processed foods that we eat and balance it out with fresh food. I confess to being a potato chip addict. If I bring it home, I am going to eat them because I adore the crunch of just about any kind. Sadly, I’m not even snobby about it, any chip will do.

In conclusion, I too struggle with using processed foods. They are a huge convenience and may taste good. Food manufacturers actually insert items in the food to make us crave their products. Learning this fact makes me want to limit all of their products from my diet. If it doesn’t grow in nature, we probably should not eat it.  Easy to say but harder to do, cook please.

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