Cooking for yourself

Welcome to la mia cucina, that’s Italian for my kitchen.

It’s not been lost on me that as we get older, we lose our enthusiasm for cooking. Note that I said cooking, not cooking from scratch, as some folks simply don’t have any interest in cooking for themselves; it’s much easier to pop into a local café, pick up fast food, or, heaven forbid, a frozen meal from the grocery store.

Since I retired, my enthusiasm has grown exponentially over the past four years. I’ve always loved the art of cooking and baking; there’s so much to learn, and, best of all, it’s a wonderful way to eat healthily.

I know many struggle with finding recipes with smaller portion sizes. Some websites have recipes where you can dial in the serving sizes, making it for six, sixteen, or just two or one. I always make recipes for two, even when my husband is away on business trips, so I can have leftovers or perhaps bring dinner to a neighbor.

Your freezer is your best friend.

Since I’ve invested in a food vacuum sealer machine and souper cubes silicone freezer trays, it’s even easier to stock my freezer with homemade food. I’m always making big pots of various soups from scratch, and it’s even easier to freeze individual portions using the souper cubes. Yes, it’s a bit of an investment, but it’s one that pays off. You want to make a pork tenderloin or perhaps a beef roast with some veggies, or perhaps a roast chicken dinner with rice and gravy, but you also don’t want to eat it for days on end. This is where the souper cubes come into play: portion out your meal, put it in the cubes, and freeze them. You can do this with glass containers too, as long as they’re verified freezer-safe (check the lids for being airtight).

Some people have never enjoyed cooking; both my own mother and mother-in-law have told me of their dislike of cooking, even my own sister detests cooking. It was funny how two people living on opposite coasts and my sister living in the Midwest told me the exact same thing: “If it wasn’t for having to feed my children, I wouldn’t cook at all.” Funny but sad, too.

FYI: Cooking isn’t an occupation or a task to be done only by women; it’s for everyone.

I had made breads and pasta from scratch sporadically while my children were growing up. But as our lives grew busy with sports and other extracurricular activities, I gave in to the convenience of buying boxed pastas and grocery store bread.

Then Covid-19 came along, and we all got into baking bread.

Since I got back into bread and pasta making, I’m always looking for ways to share how easy it is. I think I’ve found the least complicated bread-making cookbook ever (it was recently published). While I adore crusty bread loaves, I’m not willing to buy them simply because of two factors: additives and price. The additives are for shelf life at the grocery store, and there’s also the wood pulp fiber, better known as cellulose, which companies started adding in the 1970s. Nowadays we’re worried about the sodium and sugar content.

I was raised by granola types, so I know why we had everything made from scratch. There are bread types at the grocery stores that call themselves Brioche but don’t contain eggs; they’ll gladly charge you $8.00 or more for a loaf. Or sourdough that is made with a flavor additive to achieve the taste of real sourdough. Your bread and pasta ingredients should be simple, ones a kindergartener could read.

In a time where TV dinners were all the rage and box mixes for everything were starting to line the grocery store shelves, my parents became even more invested in making wholesome scratch-made food. They had invested in a mini grist mill and ground various grains to make their own flours. I don’t remember having store-bought breads or pasta until college. My parents made everything together, from various types of jams to big pots of beef stew or canned tomatoes, green beans, beets, corn, carrots, or whatever they grew in the garden. My own garden area is small and I grow flowers and herbs as I shop local farmers markets for fresh locally grown produce.

Today, I’ve got recipes from Giada de Laurentiis and Lidia Bastianich, ones that I know will turn out really well. With a crisper drawer full of fresh vegetables and some chicken cutlets, I’m about to embark upon making a fabulous meal for two, and if we’re lucky, there will be leftovers for lunch tomorrow.