Food For Thought

I love to cook. It's an art form I learned from my mom at a young age when it was weird for a boy to be interested in such things. Turns out, cooking is a great skill for a grown ass man to possess. In addition to being a far more impressive (and fun) date than going to a restaurant, cooking is essential for a healthy lifestyle.

Most food is terrible for you. All of the expedient options for feeding yourself will slowly kill you, while making you feel a little worse every day. Restaurants do not have your health or longevity in mind, and fast food is literally poison. Frozen or "instant" meals are nutrient poor and filled with artificial ingredients. Which means that the only way to eat well, is to buy, prepare, and cook your own food.

In a way I am both lucky and unlucky. I am unlucky in the sense that my body is not subtle when it comes to voicing its displeasure with bad food. This can be intensely frustrating at times, but it forces a level of discipline that I may not otherwise have when it comes to eating well. I can eat junk food occasionally and be alright, but if I do this with any regularity, I begin a slow decline that starts with feeling sluggish and bloated and ends with my body going into open revolt until I satisfy its demand for vegetables.

Fortunately and thanks to my mom, I know how to make (reasonably) healthy food taste great. I don't seek to purge all fats, sugars and salts from my diet. These things are all OK in moderation. This is what most commercial "diet" foods get horribly wrong. Low fat foods compensate by loading up on the sugars. Sugar free usually means there is some arguably worse artificial sweetener in there. Rather than using a moderate amount of the "unhealthy" ingredients (again, only unhealthy in excess) these foods pick one to demonize then overcompensate with the others.

With that in mind, I strive for a balanced approach to cooking. I use real ingredients and a healthy dose of fruits and vegetables. You can use those ingredients which make food taste good and still create a healthy meal simply by using a reasonable amount. In fact, this actually tastes better than using the excessive quantities of flavor enhancers (fat, salt, sugar) found in high-volume, low-quality commercial foods. Case in point: If I were to eat fettuccine alfredo at a restaurant, or use a jarred sauce, I would be miserable for about a day thereafter. But the way I make it tastes better and doesn't leave me in a food coma because I don't use excessive amounts of cream or salt. All of the flavor without the lead weight in your stomach (recipe to follow!) Though to be real, I couldn't eat this every day, nor would I want to.

I want to eat well and feel well. It's possible to do both; I've had to figure it out through trial and error. In the process, I have improvised some delectable yet balanced recipes, which I've refined over the years. It occurred to me that I should probably write these down and what better place to do that than here?