No Excuses Cooking

No excuses cooking! There's nothing like a home cooked meal, but I often hear people make excuses as to why they pick up take-out rather than cook at home. Here I break down some of the reasons for not cooking and give my responses to them.

No Time to Cook

As a health coach, one of the things I often hear from clients is that they don't have enough time to cook. I understand that people have busy lives, and I myself sometimes find myself scrambling to make dinner, but there really is nothing better than a home cooked meal.

Take-out is often full of too much fat and salt, and you never really know what other mystery ingredients could be lurking in the food. When you make a home cooked meal with fresh ingredients, you know exactly what's in the food and you know you're doing something nourishing for yourself. There really is nothing better! Today, I'm sharing my top tips for no-excuses cooking.

No Excuses Cooking

Here are the top 5 excuses I've heard, and my responses answers to them:

My kitchen is too small.

I hear ya. My kitchen is small too. And my last one was even smaller. All you really need is a stove and a small prep area. I think I had about 12 square inches of work space in my last kitchen and I was able to make many delicious meals in it.

I don't have time to chop vegetables.

Most vegan dishes are vegetable heavy, and yes, chopping them can take some time. If you know you won't have too much time to chop veggies in the evening, you can buy pre-cut vegetables at the grocery store. They are a little pricier, but sometimes it's worth it. Another thing you can do is to chop all of your produce as soon as you get home from grocery shopping and store it all in containers in your fridge.

I'm not a good cook.

You don't have to be a gourmet chef to cook a nourshing meal. Find recipes you like and just follow the directions. Don't be afraid - it's pretty hard to "break" a recipe. If the dish doesn't come out the way you'd like it to, you can always add spices and seasons to tweek it.

I don't have the right ingredients.

Recipe swaps are so easy to do. I recently received an eggplant from my co-op and wanted to make my groundnut stew with it, but I didn't have the ingredients my original recipe called for. I used kidney beans instead of chickpeas, canned tomatoes instead of fresh, rice milk instead of coconut milk and  red skinned potatoes instead of sweet potatoes. The dish was delcious and there was no way of knowing I had made it "incorrectly".

I don't have a Vitamix (or food processor, or dehydrator, or ice cream maker...).

I am a full-fledged kitchen gadget junky, but I haven't always had all of these appliances in my kitchen. You don't need to spend a fortune on gizmos and gadgets to make a good meal. Get creative with what you have and don't worry about not having the largest shiniest blender on the market.