Have you changed how you cook through the years?

[JustRightKelly]

I love cooking and am so lucky to have a husband that will eat literally anything, even stuff that I make and end up not liking. For a long time I was very careful about following recipes but over time I've developed a better sense for what goes well with what and what I'm in the mood for. I use to only use basic spices in college but now, even though the bus has a tiny kitchen, I have two big bins of different spices because we like so many different kinds of food (especially Indian) and love tons of spice and flavor.

I'd love to go to culinary school to learn, but would never want to be a chef. C is very supportive of my cooking and cleans up whenever he's around, as long as I keep the fridge full


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[Pollyanna]

Let's see, 10 years ago I would have likely ordered pizza delivery but tonight I made a frozen pizza.

Truly I love cooking but I just no longer have the time. Driving kiddos until 8 or 9 every night eliminates anything fancy. I should be more organized with freezer meals and the like but my family really are not fans of frozen (me included).

I used to have two week meal plans and grocery lists and cook most every night when we were first married and had littles but now I kind of plan of the fly and if I find I have time to cook then I'll do a full meal, otherwise we make what we have or eat out.

[Sheherezade]

Let's see, 10 years ago I would have likely ordered pizza delivery but tonight I made a frozen pizza.

Truly I love cooking but I just no longer have the time. Driving kiddos until 8 or 9 every night eliminates anything fancy. I should be more organized with freezer meals and the like but my family really are not fans of frozen (me included).

I used to have two week meal plans and grocery lists and cook most every night when we were first married and had littles but now I kind of plan of the fly and if I find I have time to cook then I'll do a full meal, otherwise we make what we have or eat out.

Ditto!! I don't know if it's the flexibility of attending level funds or the total lack of schedule control that comes with older children, but I'm so much less meal-organized than I was with littles. I had such decent plans and organized pantries, used the coupon circular effectively too.

Now, that seems ridiculous! Impossible! I can barely get two of us in the house at the same time for dinner, and then one might suddenly have to leave.

Dinners out save our family time. My kids LOVE a restaurant. Lol


Angie

[mommax3]

Ditto to Pollyanna and Sheherezade (and thank you for posting....I feel validated and much less guilty). We are trying to eat at home more, especially since DH has basically become a vegan, but during the school year it is HARD! I do enjoy cooking, and did lots more of it in the past. Hopefully I will return to that when our lives calm down...it will just be cooking for 2 by then, though.


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[MsSassyBaskets]

During and after college I had a more experimental cooking style when I was still learning how to deal with various ingredients and cooking styles. I messed up a lot but usually managed to make something edible. Like I had no idea how to make a stir fry and something usually came out under or overcooked, but I eventually learned cooking order and got better. I'm just the kind of person who has to try something myself rather than just following rules, so I have to make a lot of mistakes! Now I tend to read more about techniques before I try something new. When I met DH he didn't know how to cook much at all, and because he's very particular we started using more recipes. We would spend a fortune getting every single recipe for a dish, no substitutions or modifications, and make something new every Friday or Saturday night, complete with a nice bottle of wine (or two!). As we got better we started repeating our favorite dishes, and I would riff on them without the recipes and DH would get annoyed and tell me to follow the recipe. That's basically still our MO. DH looks up a recipe, I tinker with it and make some changes. If I'm trying something new I'll look up 3-4 recipes and look for the common threads and then do my own thing. I used to cook more Indian style foods, I think because it's so easy to do a variety of single-pot, veggie-heavy, cheap dishes that pair with rice. Chicken korma, chickpea curry, dal, aloo mattar, etc. I'm trying to get back to some of that because we enrolled in a CSA and I need ways to use up lots of veggies. Don't know what to do? Stick them in a curry! Lately we've been eating a bit more meat, grilling more frequently, and doing more crockpot and freezer cooking. Just this week we did slow cooker shredded beef for tacos and froze the extras for later. Same with some slow cooker teriyaki chicken last night. I'm really terrible at meal planning, and I mostly hate recipes, so I need to just always have chicken, ground beef, pasta, potatoes, rice, canned tomatoes, beans, and a huge variety of spices and sauces on hand so that I can throw something together with whatever veggies we have from the CSA this week.