If you think of the best meal you had recently, it likely wasn’t from the frozen food aisle. It was likely a meal that someone cooked with love and fresh ingredients.
Finding the time to cook whole foods is hard at times. Sometimes you just do your best, you get the frozen pizza on the table with a few cut up carrots and call it a night.
But it’s tough to argue that food made from scratch is fresher, more nutritious and tastes better. When you make things yourself, you get to decide what ingredients to include and which ones to leave out, and you can buy the best available ingredients.
Making food at home supports zero waste living – if not zero, “closer to zero”. When you make food from scratch you end up with less wrappers, plastic containers and general packaging in your recycling bin. We calculated that by making our own yogurt for the last 6 years we have kept more than 3,500 single-use containers out of our local recycling plant. Just imagine how many blue recycling bins that would fill!
Packaged snacks are tempting, oh so tempting. They’re convenient. They appeal to kids. And there are some good, if pricey, options. But many contain a long list of unpronounceable ingredients that both of us are trying to limit for ourselves and our families. So the challenge we’ve set for ourselves? Come up with some tasty, well-balanced, whole-food based portable snacks.
Just in case you need more convincing, how about making food from scratch for fun? Have you ever made gnocchi with friends? Gnocchi was our first Sunday Cooking Collective adventure and we never looked back. We learned a new skill, had lots of time to catch up with each other and had enough gnocchi to take home for a quick dinner another night. A win-win all around.
Check out what we’ve been cooking up here.