A Practical Approach to Real Food and Home Cooking.
Thanks for taking the time to learn more about our Functional Home Cooking philosophy! We’re so happy you’re here and hope you’ll join us on this journey to discover the goodness in real food through home cooking, find comfort in the kitchen, and enjoy a healthy dose of long-term consistency along the way.
Before diving into any one of our recipes, check out our top 5 functional home cooking principles below helping us navigate the kitchen.
Top 5 Functional Home Cooking Principles
1) REAL FOOD
Focus meals around Real Foods** found on the outer edges of the grocery store, especially those without labels. If they do have a label, be sure all ingredients are recognizable.
No diet dogma here. Regardless of what one’s preferences are, I think we all can agree that the less processed food we eat, the better.
**What is “real food,” you ask? Meat from animals & fish, fruit, vegetables, eggs & dairy, etc.
2) MINIMAL INGREDIENTS
Recipes DO NOT need to be complicated to taste delicious! Minimize use of ingredients in a given recipe, or better yet, full meal and learn cooking techniques to improve flavor. Cook from scratch when and where possible. The fewer ingredients we aim for, the more likely we are to rely on real food.
3) MEAL PLANNING
Plan out all dinners every week and build a grocery list that supports them. This should help avoid freestyle shopping that often leads to regrettable purchases and last minute meals where brainpower may be running thin. Not to say that one can’t deviate or splurge, but if we go into the week with a plan, that’s seven fewer decisions we’ll need to make on the fly and more success we’ll experience. #winning
4) SETUP YOUR ENVIRONMENT FOR SUCCESS
Human willpower should be a synonym for “flaming hot dumpster pile.” Aside from those freaks of nature, we’ve all gotten-got by this fickle beast many-a-time in our lives.
The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits
A simple solution:
Make eating junk food as difficult as possible. Remove all unwanted food and beverage items from the home or keep them in a designated area that’s out of sight. That is, the more difficult you make it to go hog wild on a whole package of mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups than to maintain course, the better your chances of succumbing to temptation and a lack of willpower.
Slightly more complex solution, but worthwhile effort:
Take the time to understand and solve for undesirable food habits (e.g. late night sweet tooth or constant snacking). This is a twist on Tim Ferriss’ Fear Setting ritual.
Spend 1-2 weeks tracking when cravings come on, their triggers, and what we gravitate towards to sooth them. Some habits can be addressed by resolving whatever it was that caused the trigger. In other cases, simply embracing the habit and finding a healthier alternatives yields more benefit. Just make sure to rid the home of the less desirable junk food and stock up on those healthier alternatives (e.g. when the sweet tooth kicks in, go for dried dates instead of that box of cookies).
5) LEFTOVERS, LEFTOVERS, LEFTOVERS
Leftovers are King!
Increase cooking volume at dinner to leave enough leftovers to eat in the following day(s) for breakfast and lunch. In other words, if the goal is to put food on the table for 4 humans, try cooking as though there were 6 instead and that will yield dinner for 4 + 2 easy leftover meals for the next few days.
This sounds like more cost upfront, but trust me, it is cheaper in the long run from both a time and money savings perspective. Better yet, having readily available leftovers in the refrigerator will encourage more real food consumption throughout the week. Again, we’re reducing the number of decisions to make around food to improve long-term consistency, and besides, leftovers are just plain delicious.
Want to learn more about functional home cooking?