Cooking from scratch

Whether it is meal delivery boxes, fresh organic vegetable deliveries or home-cooked frozen meals sold through dedicated shops and farm shops you can’t fail to have noticed that there is a definite move away from the processed ready meal and towards the meal that is freshly cooked from scratch.

Whilst our lives have not necessarily got any less busy we have decided, perhaps, that in order to keep up with the pace of life we may need to think about how we fuel our bodies better. Eating meals that are as recognisable as the ingredients which created them has become more important than ever in our recent history. The frozen crispy pancake is thankfully a thing of the past.

Since we don’t have any more time than we did, we still have the same dilemma. We want real cooked meals but with minimal effort and without time-consuming instructions and methodologies. Thankfully that’s where one pot or one pan cooking really hits the mark. This style of cooking is designed for modern lifestyles. All you have to do is chop up a few ingredients and place them in a tray, pan or pot and cook for the specified amount of time. Ok, there may be an ideal order for adding these ingredients to the pot or pan but that really is as complicated as it gets.

I am the author of two recipe books that meet this description perfectly. This is not a sales pitch! It is merely to show that there are lots of recipes that make the job of creating real food meals from scratch a straight-forward one. These are designed to be healthy, easy to digest meals that take very little cooking know-how to create.

These simple ways of cooking go a long way to helping people who live very busy lifestyles or even those who, quite frankly, prioritise sport, exercise, hobbies or family time over cooking complex meals from scratch. The idea behind sheet pan cooking is something many people do in part already, they just don’t tend to put the whole meal on the sheet pan or roasting tin or baking tray currently. That’s all this method requires. It simply requires the whole meal to be placed on the tray.

As far as the Instant Pot or Multi-cooker cooking is concerned that’s even simpler. Of course, it requires you to own a piece of kitchen gadgetry. Those that have objections to this based on lack of space, I honestly recommend you rethink these objections because the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. The speed with which these machines produce all in one meals with minimal effort still astonishes me. All this gadgetry requires is a modicum of common sense and once again following a suitable order for adding the ingredients to the pot.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, then do look at these methods of cooking fresh meals. What could be more pleasing than producing a freshly cooked meal from scratch, one that was cooking away whilst you were getting on with something far more important.

Jenny has published two recipe books this year:

• Sheet Pan Cooking – 101 recipes for simple and nutritious meals straight from the oven
• The Modern Multi-cooker Cookbook: 101 Recipes for your Instant Pot®