From a very young age, I’ve always preferred home cooked meals to eating out. Fortunately my parents are excellent cooks and willingly indulged me. (They are also awesome gardeners and I score quite a harvest on my visits.) But from them, I’ve developed a fairly simple approach to food… avoid fake food. Here’s an easy rule of thumb… if an ingredient is listed by chemical named rather than common name, it’s probably an additive and not inherent to any food in animal or vegetable form.
What this means, practically, is that I avoid processed foods and cook most of what I eat from single component ingredients. I have several simple cooking techniques which can be applied to a variety of ingredients and that gives me huge menu repertoire to draw on. I don’t generally bother with organic ingredients unless they make a difference in flavor (and cost is still an issue). I do prefer organic cooking fats (oils, butter, high fat dairy) because many agricultural chemicals are fat soluble but that’s often determined by budget.
Don’t expect an endless series of recipes because I don’t cook with recipes. I often have a variety of foods on hand and assemble meals depending on my mood. For example: boiled potatoes can easily become potato salad for lunch and hash browns for dinner two days later; crepes can be eaten with raspberry-chocolate sauce or lemon poppy seed sauce for breakfast or late night snack; cooked grain becomes a salad with any vegetable and/or cheese combination I have dressed with olive-oil/lemon juice or sesame-oil/lemon juice mix.
In terms of serving portions, this works for me:
-breakfast: anything goes, quick and small portion (often pastry-ish… homemade scones or basic unfrosted cakes)
-lunch and dinner: 1-2 portions of starch (no more than 1 cup of grain or 2 sandwich sized slices of bread); 2-4 tablespoons of animal protein (cheese, meat, eggs); no limits on whole fruits or vegetables; no limits on vegetable protein (beans, tofu). Fat is not a concern because I control how much I use when I cook. I also don’t like sweet drinks and desserts are for special occasions.
Oh! I forgot… eating mostly whole or minimally processed foods is also better for farmers and farm workers (they get a larger portion of these food dollars).
