I readily admit that I am by no means an amazing cook. I do however thoroughly enjoy cooking, my husband and son enjoy eating the food that I make and I manage to get an entire meal made from scratch on the table almost every night of the week. Sometimes it’s even a healthy meal!

I only really became interested in cooking about a year ago when I received a cookbook for Mothers Day. Before that, my husband and I were mostly living off of microwave meals.  We were unhealthy, sluggish and put on a lot of weight in that first year. I didn’t think that I could cook and I certainly didn’t have the confidence to try.

But now, when people tell me that they don’t cook, I can’t help but wonder to myself “How do they eat?”

You can tell me that you don’t cook, that you can’t cook. You can even yell and stamp your feet and tell me that you don’t even like cooking. I will tell you that you are already cooking.

If you are putting together some kind of food for your family to eat, then you are cooking. So what if you’re just mixing spaghetti with store-bought sauce? The first time I ever cooked spaghetti it ended up black and stuck to the pan, completely inedible. So you’re already one step ahead.

So we have established that you can in fact cook, now where do you go from here? Some of the first things I really tried to cook were things that I remembered my mom making when I lived at home. I think it is a good place to start, after all I already knew what the meals should taste like.

Next, I moved onto cookbooks and magazines. I chose recipes that I recognized, perhaps I had eaten something similar at a restaurant. Recipes with few or inexpensive ingredients so that in the event of a culinary disaster I wouldn’t have to feel too bad about it. I did have a number of disasters, I ruined pans and set fire to ingredients I hadn’t thought were flammable. But every now and then I would manage to throw together something that was absolutely divine. Well, perhaps it wasn’t all that good, but I had made it entirely myself from scratch and that really was something divine.

Nowadays I find myself branching out into things that I’ve never tasted before, I’m learning about seasonal vegetables and healthy eating. I’m not slaving away in the kitchen for hours every evening to produce a gourmet dinner, after all like most parents I am too tired and too busy to dedicate that amount of time an attention to much else, let alone what I am cooking.

I still have the odd disaster, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. I have now learned to be confident that I can feed and take care of my family, and perhaps that’s more important than the meal itself.

photo courtesy of this flickr stream