Full episode transcript.
Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hey everybody and welcome back to the Real Food Stories podcast. So I wanted to start out by some thoughts I’ve been having lately about food, cooking, nutrition, our health. I feel like so much is changing out in the internet and the universe that I just wanted to sort of express what was on my mind today. Now I am more food and cooking focused than I have ever been. in a very long time. And I don’t know about you, but I am here for it because we’re all so caught up in grams of this and milligrams of that, that we and myself included here have sometimes forgotten that 100 grams of protein per day is what’s all screaming on the internet that we women and midlife need. These 100 grams of protein still means that we have to cook dinner. We have to turn this number into something that gets put into our mouths and on top of it tastes good. Now that 100 grams of protein is not going to come, I mean, okay, I take this back. It can come from protein bars and powders and shakes. It can. Okay. You can get your protein that way. And I’m just using protein as an example here. But trust me, if this is how you are going by your nutrition, because making sure you make the numbers, you are going to get yourself into trouble because health does not work that way. Health comes first through food, and food is something we need to do every single day, three times a day. And therefore, it better taste great, right? If we have to do this thing all the time, let’s… make it worth our while. So you better start looking at that plate and say to yourself, I cannot wait to eat this meal because it looks so delicious rather than how am I getting my 100 grams in today? Because food is one of our most important joys in life. We celebrate with food, we go to dinner, we meet friends, we do a lot of things around food. Our cultures depend on different foods. Cooking is the way to achieve that joy. And cooking is a skill that we can learn. It is the hard way, or you can learn it the easy way. And I like the easiest path possible when learning new things. This is why I am starting my Well-Nourished Woman Circle within my Well-Nourished Woman community. This is the paid version of my community. And before you click forward past this part, let me tell you why you might be interested in joining. Because this isn’t another program where I’m going to give you a list of foods to eat, hand you a stack of recipes, and send you on your way. Okay, you can get that on the internet. I get it. There’s billions of recipes. You can get all of that information readily on Instagram. Most of us already have those recipes, right? We already have tons of recipes saved in our Instagram files and somewhere on our computers. More than we could possibly cook. And we certainly aren’t lacking. the nutrition information, right? You can go to any wellness influencer and get tons and tons of different information. But what is often missing is the confidence it takes to take all of that information and turn it into food that we actually want to eat. That is the difference. And this is what I want to help you do inside the Well-Nourished Woman Circle. We are going to cook together I’m going to teach you how to look at a recipe and understand which ingredients matter, which ones can be changed easily, and how to make the recipe work with food you already have. So you don’t have to look at a recipe and say, oh, shoot, I don’t have the brown rice, so therefore I can’t cook the recipe. We can substitute and be flexible with all sorts of ingredients and directions. We’ll talk about how to build flavor. how to tell when something is done and what to do when dinner doesn’t turn out exactly as planned. Because that happens not just to me, but to all of us. And it’s okay. This is something we have to do three times a day for the rest of our lives. Like it’s okay to have a couple days of imperfection. So you won’t just watch me cook. I want you cooking in your own kitchen, asking questions and developing the skills that make the next meal easier for you. So each month, We’ll have a longer live cooking class. I’m having one come up next week, and I’ll tell you about that in a minute, along with a monthly Q&A or shorter demo where we can dig into the everyday questions that come up when you’re trying to feed yourself well. And yes, of course, we will absolutely talk about nutrition because this is a community for women in midlife, and we are in menopause, and we are hormonal, and our nutritional needs matter, right? And they, and they. become different the older we get. We need more protein. We need more fiber. We need plants, calcium, all the other nutrients that support our bones, muscles, hearts, hormones, and brains. And I want to show you what those things look like when they become dinner, not simply numbers on an app. Because you’re not eating 30 grams of protein. You’re eating salmon with roasted vegetables in a lemony tahini sauce. You’re eating a bowl with farro, chickpeas, and roasted squash. You’re eating eggs with sauteed greens and a really good piece of whole grain sourdough toast. The nutrients matter, but the food is how we receive them. So my goal for you is to stop looking at cooking as one more thing you are supposed to get right. I want you to become comfortable enough in the kitchen that you can make adjustments, recover from mistakes, and create a satisfying meal without needing every ingredient or a brand new recipe. You don’t have to become someone who wants to spend all Sunday meal prepping. Believe me, we’re busy, right? We are all busy and we want to do this well and we want to do it efficiently. You don’t have to make everything from scratch and you certainly don’t have to love cooking as much as I do. But if you want to eat well, it helps enormously to become a little more cooking curious. That is the reason I created the Well-Nourished Woman Circle. I want it to be a place where nutrition stops being an abstract list of recommendations and becomes delicious food on your plate. Food you know how to make, food you are excited to eat, and food that helps you feel well-nourished in every sense of the word. Now, I have my very first cooking class within the circle coming up next week on September 24th. And you can either do two things. You can sign up just for the class, no membership included. And when you sign up for the class, you will get the live cooking class. You will get the recipes and any handouts that I have for you. But that’s it. It doesn’t go any further than that. And you get a lot out of that. There’s no big commitment to that. However, if you join the circle, you automatically get the monthly cooking class every single month. a monthly Q&A on a variety of health topics like menopausal health, and tons of other resources, plus a community of like-minded women. There is a no judgment zone here, and I want you in it with me. For right now, through the month of September, I am offering a ridiculously low lifetime membership fee for only $37 a month. So if you sign up by September 30th, You will only pay $37 a month for all of that resource. My time, the cooking class, the Q&As, tons of resources, and a community of women. You can try it. And if the membership does not resonate with you, you are always free to cancel. But here’s one thing I can promise to you. I will show up each month ready to teach you something you can actually use in your own kitchen. I will help you understand not only what we are cooking, but why it works, what you can substitute, and how you can make it your own. You will leave each class with more than a recipe. You will leave knowing something you didn’t know before. And little by little, those skills will add up. Instead of opening the refrigerator and thinking, I have nothing to make, you’ll begin to see the makings of a meal. I can walk into my kitchen right now and look in my cabinets and easily put together. five different meals with just what’s in my pantry and my refrigerator. This is a skill to learn though, right? And I will teach you this. You’ll be able to look at the vegetables, leftover grains, cans of beans, pieces of chicken you already have and know how to turn them into something delicious. You won’t need the exact ingredients or a new recipe every time you cook because you’ll understand how to make substitutions, how to build flavor, and how to adjust as you go. Now, I can’t promise that you will suddenly want to cook every night. I mean, I don’t want to cook every single night of my life either, but I can help you become a more confident, flexible cook, someone who can feed herself without making dinner feel like another nutrition test she has to pass. The goal is that cooking becomes less stressful. food tastes better and you start looking forward to what is on your plate. When we have to feed ourselves every single day, that is a transformation worth investing in. Okay, all the details are in the show notes and you can always reach out to me with questions and my email will be there too. So please reach out. I love to answer emails and any questions that you have. Now on this topic of cooking, I wanted to dive a little deeper here because honestly, what I see and hear in the land of the midlife woman is I am done with cooking, which seriously makes almost no sense to me. I mean, I get it. I get parts of it. I do. I know that we’re getting older and we’re like, this is just the thing you’re maybe burnt out on. When you have been cooking as a part-time job for everyone else, yes, you need to leave that thankless job. But being done with cooking is like saying you’re done with… exercising forever or watching Netflix, you’re not done with cooking. You are just done with things like this. I want you to imagine something for a minute. Okay, it’s 5.30 p.m. You’re tired, right? Maybe you’re home from work and your energy is waning. You open the refrigerator and there’s food in it, quite possibly a lot of food. But somehow you look in your refrigerator and there is nothing for dinner. There are vegetables you really need to use. Maybe there’s a container of cooked rice or another grain, a carton of eggs, half of a rotisserie chicken and some greens that are beginning to wilt. Your refrigerator door is crowded with sauces and condiments and your pantry is filled with beans and pasta and grains. And technically there is plenty to eat, but none of it is coming together and announcing itself as dinner. It’s not as if we don’t have enough ideas. We have. thousands of recipes saved on our phones. We have cookbooks. We have meal planning apps. There’s food blogs. There’s an endless stream of cooking videos on Instagram and TikTok. We can have groceries delivered to our door in an hour. We can buy vegetables that are already chopped and look up the nutritional value of virtually anything that we eat. So I wonder if this type of scenario is what we are really sick of. It’s not so much cooking. It’s the having to figure it out. Why doesn’t feeding ourselves feel easier if we have all these resources? I’ve noticed more women saying, besides that I’m done with cooking, that they have retired from cooking. I keep hearing this buzzword around this retirement from cooking. And honestly, I understand where some of that is coming from. I mean, we’ve spent decades being responsible for feeding everyone else. And that responsibility was never limited to standing at the stove. It included planning the meals, shopping for the food, remembering who liked what, who had an allergy to this, who didn’t like that, accommodating everyone’s preferences, and then cleaning it up all afterwards. And then doing it again the next day and the next day and the next day and on and on forever. So the actual cooking may have even been the easiest part. And after years of being the person expected to answer the question, what’s for dinner? Qu- course some women are tired of it. I don’t want to dismiss that or turn this into a conversation about why women should just cheerfully return to the kitchen and keep taking care of everyone else. That is so far from what I am talking about. I’m not saying that you’ve got to like love this every single night and do it selflessly, but I do think that there is something else going on here. Even when we are only trying to feed ourselves, cooking can feel more difficult than it should. With all the information, all the recipes and conveniences available to us, have we somehow made cooking itself much more complicated than it needs to be? So that’s what I wanted to talk about today. Now, I think one reason cooking has started to feel so difficult is that dinner is no longer just dinner. Somewhere along the way, it became a daily health assignment. We’re trying to get enough protein and fiber and eat more plants and stabilize our blood sugar. and protect our bones and maintain muscle. We’re supposed to take care of our gut, get our omega-3s, watch our saturated fat, avoid too many ultra-processed foods. And then, especially for women in midlife, there’s a whole other layer of advice about what we should or shouldn’t be eating during menopause. And none of this is necessarily Bye. Bye. bad advice. I mean, there is a lot of crazy advice out there, but not all of it is bad. I mean, I talk about protein, fiber, plants, and bone health too. I talk about it all the time. We absolutely need these things. But when you try to account for all of them, every time you make a meal, dinner can begin to feel like something you’re going to get wrong. So instead of asking, what would taste good tonight? Or what can I make with what I have? We start running through a mental checklist. Does this have enough protein? Am I eating too many carbs? Will this spike my blood sugar? Should I be eating dairy? Is this anti-inflammatory or is it inflammatory? Is it too processed? Is this even what I’m supposed to be eating at my age? It’s a lot to ask of one measly plate of food. So I see this all the time with protein right now. For example, I started talking about protein earlier. We hear that. we should get a certain number of grams every single day. So the goal becomes hitting the number. And before long, we’re adding protein powder to everything, eating bars we don’t particularly enjoy or drinking a shake because it seems like the easiest way to get there. But 100 grams of protein still has to become food at some point. It has to become eggs or yogurt or beans or fish or chicken or tofu. It has to become breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And ideally, it becomes… food that tastes good and that you actually look forward to eating. The numbers can be useful, but they can’t cook dinner for us. And then we have the other side of this, which is the enormous amount of food content we see online. I love looking at beautiful food, don’t get me wrong. And there are plenty of wonderful recipes out there. But a lot of what we see is created to catch our attention. It has to look impressive enough for us to stop scrolling, save it, and think, I should make that. Then you open the recipe and there are 19 ingredients, three separate components, a homemade dressing, an unusual garnish, and some specialty ingredient you’ll use one teaspoon of and never touch again. Three pans are dirty, the food processor, the blender, but somehow it’s described as an easy 30-minute dinner. And apparently chopping and cleaning up doesn’t count towards those 30 minutes. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making a more involved recipe when you have the time and want to do it. I enjoy that kind of cooking, but not every single night, not on a random Tuesday. That’s not what most of us need on an ordinary weekday night. If those are the meals we’re constantly comparing our own cooking to, a simple dinner can start to look really inadequate. So we’re caught between two different kinds of pressure. Nutrition culture tells us that dinner has to meet all the numbers, and cooking culture tells us that it should also be beautiful, interesting, and worthy of being f***ed. photographed and put on our own Instagram pages. So no wonder a plate of scrambled eggs and sauteed vegetables can start to feel as though it doesn’t count, even if it’s exactly what you want and need that night. The problem isn’t that we have too much nutrition information or too many recipes. The problem is that information alone doesn’t teach us how to make practical decisions in the kitchen. You can know a tremendous amount. about nutrition, have hundreds of recipes saved on your phone, and still not know how to turn the food you have into a meal. And that, I think, is the crucial piece we need to talk about next. This is where being both a nutritionist and a cook has really shaped the way I think about feeding ourselves. I have spent nearly 30 years, 30 years, it’s a long time, talking with women about food. And very often the problem isn’t that they don’t know what is healthy. They know plenty, right? We all know what. The difficulty comes when they have to translate that knowledge into something they can put on a plate. Now, it’s easy for me to tell someone to just eat more vegetables, but which vegetables do you actually enjoy? How do you cook them so they aren’t soggy and bland? What can you add to make them satisfying enough to feel like part of dinner and not something you’re eating because you’re supposed to. And the same thing happens when we talk about eating more beans, for example. A can of chickpeas may be convenient and really nutritious, but opening the can is not the same thing as making a meal. What do you put with them? Do you roast them? Do you add them to pasta? Do you toss them with vegetables in a dressing? How do you make them taste like something you chose for dinner rather than something you were forcing yourself to eat because chickpeas have more fiber and you saw that on the internet? This is where nutrition advice often stops too soon. We tell people what to eat, but not necessarily how to turn it into food that you can enjoy. Now, even meal prep can fall into this trap. You can spend all day Sunday cooking your brown rice and chopping vegetables and grilling chicken. But if you haven’t thought about how these things will come together or how you will make them taste good, you may have a refrigerator full of prepared ingredients and still not want any of them by Wednesday because you are so sick and tired of them. Of course, this is usually when we go looking for a recipe, right? And recipes are useful. I’ll write recipes. I teach recipes. I use them myself all the time. But a recipe is designed to show you how to make one particular dish. It can’t always account for the food you already have or the size of your vegetables, the pan you’re using, or the fact that you forgot to buy cilantro. So what happens when you don’t have one of the ingredients? Do you just leave it out? Do you substitute something else? Was it there for flavor, texture, or structure? And what happens when the recipe says the vegetable should be browned after 20 minutes, but yours are still pale and watery? Or when you make the sauce exactly as written and it tastes flat? A recipe can give you directions, but it can’t stand next to you and explain what the food needs. That is why someone can be very good at following recipes and still feel lost without one. You may know how to reproduce a dish, but not yet know how to make decisions when something changes. And something almost always changes. You’re missing an ingredient. Your oven cooks differently than what the recipe is saying. Someone doesn’t like onions. The spinach needs to be used before the kale. You have chicken left from the night before, but the recipe calls for salmon. So can you use the chicken? The real shift happens when you understand enough about cooking to work with those changes instead of being stopped by them. You begin to see your recipe as a starting point rather than a set of rules you have to follow perfectly. That is what I mean by kitchen fluency. And it’s the piece that can make cooking feel so… much easier. So what does kitchen fluency actually look like? Kitchen fluency is really just the ability to make useful decisions while you cook. It doesn’t mean having professional knife skills or knowing every classical technique or making everything from scratch. It doesn’t mean you have to produce elaborate meals and it definitely doesn’t mean you’re going to feel like cooking every day. It means you understand enough to keep going when dinner I’m sorry. doesn’t unfold exactly as planned. One part of that is learning what you can stand in for something else. So for example, if a recipe calls for farro and you have brown rice, barley, or quinoa, you can probably use what you have. The texture and cooking time may be different, but those grains can play a similar role in the meal. If the recipe calls for white beans and you only have chickpeas, that may be perfectly fine too, depending on what you’re making. Spinach can take the place of arugula, walnuts, or pumpkin seeds can give you the crunch you were supposed to get from pine nuts. The substitution doesn’t have to be identical. It just has to make sense. And you have to know and learn what starts to make sense. So I think that’s where people sometimes get really stuck. They assume that there’s one correct ingredient and everything else that has to be wrong. But I’m usually thinking about what that ingredient is doing in the first place in the dish. Is it there to add substance? Is it there to add creaminess, acidity, freshness, crunch? Once you know its job, you can think of other ingredients that might do the same job. If a dish needs acidity, lemon juice or vinegar might work. If it needs something creamy, perhaps you add in a little yogurt or tahini. If it needs freshness, maybe you have parsley instead of basil. You’re not trying to create an exact replica. You’re just trying to create a meal that works for you and that tastes good. So kitchen fluency also helps you build a meal from separate parts. You begin to recognize that the container of rice, the roasted vegetables, and that piece of leftover chicken are not just three random items in your refrigerator. They are most of a dinner. Maybe they need a sauce or a handful of greens or something crunchy on top. But the structure is already there, right? I’m not suggesting that every meal has to be assembled according to a formula. but it helps to notice what might be missing. Is there something substantial enough to make the meal satisfying? Is there a protein? Are there vegetables? Does it need something acidic or flavorful to pull it together? Would a crunchy or creamy element make it more appealing? Those are much more useful questions than what recipe can I find that uses exactly these six ingredients? And then there is the tasting of food. This sounds so obvious. But many people are really uncomfortable making adjustments unless a recipe tells them exactly what to add. If something tastes bland, the instinct may be to start adding more and more ingredients. But bland food often needs something much simpler. It may need salt. It may need a squeeze of lemon juice or a splash of vinegar to brighten it. Maybe the vegetables need more time in the oven so they actually brown and that brownness It caramelizes the vegetables and makes them taste a little sweeter. Maybe a handful of fresh herbs would wake everything up, or toasted seeds would give a soft dish some contrast. Adding more ingredients does not automatically create more flavor. Sometimes one small adjustment changes the entire dish. This is also why you have to pay attention to what is happening in front of you. If the vegetables are crowded together and steaming, another 10 minutes at the same temperature may not even solve the problem. you may need to spread them onto a second pan. If a sauce is too thick, you can add a little water. If something tastes heavy, you may need acidity. If greens are starting to wilt, that doesn’t mean they belong in the trash. It may mean tonight is the night to saute them. I think people imagine that good cooks never have these problems. Of course we do. Food behaves differently from one day to the next. One squash contains more water than another. One pan holds heat differently. Your oven may run hotter than mine. Onions cut into thick wedges are going to cook differently from onions that are sliced very thinly. The difference is not that an experienced cook gets perfect results every time. The difference is that she notices what is happening and has some idea of what to try next. That is the kind of confidence I want women to have in the kitchen. Not the confidence of believing that nothing will ever go wrong, but the confidence of knowing that an imperfect dinner is usually still very workable. You can taste, adjust, and keep going. And these aren’t skills you either have or you don’t. They develop every time you cook and pay attention. You begin to remember that lemon helped the last time the soup tasted flat. You notice that roasted vegetables brown better when you give them more room. You learn which substitutions you like and which ones you don’t. And eventually you stop feeling as though every cooking decision has to come from somewhere outside of you. You start trusting what you see, what you taste, and what you already know. That is kitchen fluency. And I didn’t learn it from collecting recipes. I guarantee you that. I learned it from cooking, making mistakes, paying attention, and doing it again. I know culinary school definitely changed the way I think. thought about cooking, but not because I left with a giant collection of impressive recipes. I left with a giant collection of base recipes that could be manipulated into hundreds of different ways. Of course, I learned techniques, but the more important lesson was learning how to pay attention to the food. You taste as you go. You notice how something changes when it browns. You learn what salt actually does to flavor and what happens when you add an acid like lemon juice to a dish that tastes flat. You stop assuming that a recipe can tell you exactly how many minutes something will need because the food in front of you may be telling you something different. That was a significant shift for me. A recipe gives you a plan, but cooking is what happens once you begin following that plan. You still have to observe, taste, and make decisions. In culinary school, making an adjustment wasn’t treated as evidence that you had done something wrong. It was simply part of the cooking. I’ll never forget. I think it was probably the first or second day I started cooking school and we were making soup. We were making a soup and I can’t remember what soup it was exactly. And the instructor came over to me. She tasted the soup and said, you know what? That needs a splash of vinegar. It needs brightening. It needs lifting. That was the best lesson I had ever learned from cooking school. And just something I still tell all of my students today, something tastes flat, you brighten it. It was indispensable for me and it’s made such a huge difference. But these are the things that I had to learn in school and that you have to practice. So if a soup needs more seasoning, for example, you season it. If a sauce is too thick, then you adjust the consistency. If something isn’t browning, you investigate why. That way of thinking has probably been more useful to me than any individual dish I learned how to make, hands down. And when you’re cooking and you are the one cooking, most of the time, if you need to make substitutes, if you need to substitute arugula for spinach or pine nuts for walnuts,Most of the time, no one eating it knows that anything has even changed. And you might be changing the recipe for the better. They’re not sitting at the table thinking this would have been much better with arugula. They’re simply eating dinner. So I think we forget that part. We treat recipes, we treat the recipe that we’re cooking as though the person who wrote it somehow is in the kitchen with us grading us. But no one’s keeping track of whether we used the correct green or the prescribed nut. The only question is whether the substitution still makes sense and whether the food tastes good. Now, there are ingredients that you cannot just casually swap, especially in something like baking, where the chemistry matters. That’s a real science. So I’m not going to tell you that every flour behaves the same way. They absolutely do not. Or that you can leave eggs out of a cake without changing anything else. But everyday cooking gives us much more flexibility than we often realize. And that flexibility has changed the way I cook. I don’t need to wait until I have every ideal ingredient before I begin. And I don’t have to turn a missing ingredient into another errand. I can look at what I have, understand what the dish needs, and make a reasonable decision and feel totally fine about it. Sometimes the new version of what I’m making tastes actually even better. And I’m happy that I was able to make the substitutions. And sometimes I make a choice that I would never make again. That’s useful information too. You learn it, remember it, and you cook differently the next time. And that is how confidence in your cooking develops. Not because someone hands you the perfect set of instructions, but because you make these small decisions over and over again. And the dinner I was actually making today is a perfect example of how that looks in real life. So I… Today, I was testing some recipes for my upcoming cooking class that’s going to be on the 24th of September. It’s a farro bowl with roasted squash and red onions and chickpeas and arugula and a tahini sauce with pumpkin seeds. Now, that’s not the title of the recipe yet. This is just what’s in it. I don’t have the title yet. I’m working on that. But I wanted to test it because I need to make sure that the timing, we time out and And everything kind of works in sync. For a cooking class, you really have to make sure that things are timing. So something’s not sitting on the stove for 30 minutes while you’re just sitting around with nothing else to do. So I also wanted to test the recipes with chicken because that is one of the options I’ll be giving people in the class. So rather than just using chickpeas and having it as like a vegan option, you can also use chicken if you wanted to. Now, what I like about this dinner is that every part of it contributes something different. The farro is chewy and substantial. It’s also the whole grain in the recipe. The squash and red onion become sweet and caramelized in the oven. And those are the vegetables that we want that have a lot of fiber and tons of nutrients. The chickpeas give the meal more substance. That’s the protein, which also has really great amount of fiber. And the arugula keeps the bowl from feeling too heavy, right? We’re only in September. We’re not in January right now. So this is what’s keeping it nice and light. And then I’m creating a tahini sauce, which is creamy and tangy and gives the lift that this bowl needs, right? The interest, that thing that makes it taste, that really like drives it home and makes it taste great. And then the pumpkin seeds, I thought to add for a little crunch for the texture. And yes, those are… all nutritious foods, but that’s not what I’m thinking about when I sit down to eat it. I’m thinking about the fact that the bowl has different flavors and textures and that they work well together. It looks beautiful and it tastes delicious and that is what makes me want to eat it. Now the chicken was an optional addition and my original plan was to roast it with everything else. That would have been very convenient. One pan, fewer dishes, everything cooking at the same time. But once I put the squash, red onions, and chickpeas on the sheet pan, I could see that there wasn’t enough room for the chicken. So technically, I could have squeezed it all in there, right, onto one pan. It would have fit, but it would have been very crowded having everything on one pan. And my oven was small enough that I didn’t want to get out another pan. Now, when food is crowded on one pan, it releases a lot of moisture and it begins to steam, right? So now we’re not roasting anymore. Now we are steaming. are food. So the vegetables may soften, but they’re not going to develop into that nice brown, roasty look, you know, that’s nice and caramelized and really flavorful. And the chicken also adds a lot of moisture to the pan. So I knew I probably wasn’t going to get the result I wanted if I forced everything onto that one tray. So I paused and I changed the plan. I roasted the vegetables and the chickpeas on the sheet pan and I sauteed the chicken separately, which only took about 10 minutes. It was chicken breast cut up into cubes and it takes almost no time to cook it. Now, this wasn’t a dramatic cooking decision. It took an extra pan. but otherwise it wasn’t a big deal. Yet it’s exactly the kind of decision that makes the difference between following instructions and actually cooking. Now I could see what was happening in front of me. The pan was too crowded. I understood what that would do to the food. And so I made the adjustment. That is the part of cooking that is difficult to capture in a recipe. A recipe can tell you to spread the vegetables on the pan. But sheet pans come in different sizes. Squash also comes in different sizes. My squash might be gigantic compared to your squash that you have. Maybe I cut more vegetables than the recipe even told me to use. Or maybe your pan is smaller than mine. The recipe cannot account for every possible variation. So at some point, the person standing in the kitchen has to decide what makes sense. And separating the chicken actually gave me more control over the whole thing. I could season it properly, watch it cook, and take it off the heat when it was done. Meanwhile, the vegetables had enough space to roast the way I wanted them to, and everything came out perfectly and really delicious. And I can’t wait to teach this now in the class. Once everything was ready, I had all these different elements that could be combined according to what each person wanted. The farro, the vegetables, the chickpeas, the tahini sauce already made a complete and satisfying meal. Chickpeas aren’t sometimes enough protein for a lot of people. My husband, for example, Mark, I’ll definitely add in the chickpeas, but he wanted more protein. So the chicken was there for someone who wants to add it. But the bowl does not depend on it. And you could be totally fine doing it just as is without the chicken. That is an important distinction because I don’t want to teach this as a one fixed meal that everyone has to assemble in exactly the same way. I want people to understand why it works. And once you understand that, you can make choices based on your appetite, your preferences, and the food you have available. Now, I made the bowl earlier because I needed to test it. I just needed to test the timing. I’ve made versions of this bowl 5 billion times in my life, but it’s always good for me to just do a test run. and to re-familiarize myself with the recipes or the techniques. But now I have dinner ready for tonight, and I’m genuinely looking forward to eating it again for dinner, tomorrow’s lunch. And not because it fits a certain nutritional formula, although it certainly is a nourishing meal. And I’m looking forward to it because it tastes good. And what I also didn’t do is I didn’t spend all day Sunday preparing 15 containers of identical food for the week, as you see so many people doing on Instagram. I simply cooked something earlier in the day when I had a good pocket of time and I had some really good energy. Also, that will make dinner easier for tonight. Now that counts too. We sometimes make meal preparation sound like it has to be an organized system and all day on Sunday kind of a thing. But it can be as simple as cooking enough to carry you through another meal, a meal and then the next day’s lunch. The point isn’t that everyone listening should go make this exact bowl. The point is to begin noticing why a dinner works and what is happening while you make it. That is where cooking becomes more flexible and much more enjoyable. And this brings me to an idea I keep coming back to. On top of being kitchen fluent, I want to nudge my listeners to become a little more cooking curious. I’m not asking you to suddenly identify as a cook. You don’t have to love spending hours in the kitchen or bake your own. sourdough bread or make your own homemade stock. There’s no requirement that cooking has to become your favorite hobby, but cooking curious is much more approachable than that. It means being able to ask a question instead of immediately deciding that you can’t do something. What would happen if I roasted this vegetable instead of steaming it? Could I turn these leftovers into lunch tomorrow? Do I really need to buy that ingredient or is there something in my kitchen that I could views that would do the same job. What is the simplest version of this dinner that I could make tonight? You don’t need to know the answer before you even ask the question. Curiosity gives you permission to find out. Maybe you roast something you’ve always boiled and discovered that you love the browned edges. Maybe you add lemon to a dish that tastes dull and suddenly understand what it was missing. Maybe you cook extra farro and use it warm with dinner one night and cold in a salad the next day. And sometimes the experiment is not going to be a huge success. Could be a big fail. That’s okay. You may decide that you don’t like roasted radishes or that a particular substitution didn’t work or that next time you would use less garlic. That doesn’t mean you failed. Now you know something you didn’t know before. I think this matters so much because so many women approach the kitchen feeling as though they are being evaluated. There is a correct meal, a correct method, a correct way to eat. and everyone else seems to know what that is. Curiosity removes some of that added pressure. The kitchen becomes a place where you can try something, pay attention, and decide what you think. You’re no longer waiting for someone else to tell you whether you did it right. We sometimes make mistakes in the kitchen, and it’s totally fine. And over time, that changes much more than one dinner. You start to realize you waste less food because you’re more willing to find a use for what you have. or you become better at carrying one meal into the next. You might discover which flavors and methods you genuinely enjoy. And when your schedule, appetite, or nutritional needs change, you have more ways to respond to it. That kind of flexibility is especially valuable in midlife because our needs may be changing, but we don’t need another rigid eating plan every time they do. It’s far more useful to know how to make food work for the life we are actually living. So you’d… don’t have to love cooking. You just need to be curious about it. And that is really what I mean by back to the kitchen, which is the theme of this month in the circle, getting back to the kitchen. And I don’t mean getting back on track. I’ve never liked that phrase because it suggests that there is one correct track and that every time life interrupts our plans, we have somehow fallen off of Ed. So this isn’t a September reset or a detox or a fresh set of rules to follow. I’m not suggesting that you reorganize your pantry or create a complicated meal plan and promise yourself that from now on everything will be homemade. Back to the kitchen is much simpler than that. It’s really about rebuilding a useful relationship with the place where you feed yourself. Maybe you begin by learning how to roast vegetables so they come out like you like them. Maybe you make one sauce that can turn a few simple ingredients into a dinner you’re excited to eat. Maybe you keep several foods on hand because you know they can work together in different ways. These are small things, but they make the kitchen feel more available to you. You’re no longer walking into it believing you need a complete plan before you can begin. You have a few skills, a few reliable ideas, and enough trust in yourself to figure out the rest. Because life is going to interrupt the plan. Always, right? When has the plan ever been like smooth and easy? You’re going to get home later than you expected one night, or someone will eat the leftovers you were counting on having for dinner. That’s happened to me many times with my husband. The vegetables will need to be used sooner than you thought. You will occasionally forget to buy something. I just did that the other day. I forgot to buy some key ingredient that I needed and I pivoted. It didn’t ruin the meal. The goal is not to prevent any of that. The goal is to be able to feed yourself anyway. So you don’t need to start over every single Monday. You don’t need a new system or another promise to do everything perfectly this time. You just need to be able to walk into your kitchen, look at what’s there and begin. Now, If this is the kind of confidence you want to build, I would love to have you join me on September 24th for my cooking class, Back to the Kitchen, One Dinner, Endless Possibilities. We’re going to be making that farro bowl I talked about today, but the class is not really about mastering one farro bowl, right? I’m going to give you some recipes, of course, to follow along with, but it’s not about just taking those recipes and me telling you to copy this every single time, the same exact technique. I’ll show you how all the parts of the meal work together, where you can make changes, and how to adapt it to your own preferences. We’ll also talk about adding chicken or another protein if you want, and how you can take the same basic ideas and create a completely different dinner with other ingredients. I want you to leave knowing how to make the recipe we cook together, but more importantly, I want you to understand it well enough to make your own version the next time. Now, the class, like I said earlier, is included in the Well-Nourished Woman Circle. That’s the paid part of my Well-Nourished Woman community. This is where we’ll cook together each month and focus on the practical skills that make it easier to nourish ourselves well through midlife. Founding membership pricing is available through September 30th. And you can find all of that information about joining in my show notes. And if you’re not ready to join the circle yet, you can just register for the class just on its own. And I’ll have that link in the show notes too. So cooking may have become complicated, but dinner does not have to carry the weight of every nutrition rule. every beautiful recipe and every expectation we’ve picked up along the way. Sometimes dinner begins with farro vegetables and a pan that’s a little too crowded. That’s okay. Then you notice what’s happening and you make a different decision and you keep cooking. That is the way back into the kitchen, not through perfection, but through curiosity, attention, and a willingness to begin with what you have. Okay, I hope that you join me on September 24th. and I see you in the cooking class. I would love to cook with you. If you don’t want to cook, you can just sit and watch as well. You’ll still get the recipes, the recording, all of it. So thank you so much for listening today. And I hope I see you in the kitchen on September 24th. Bye for now. And as always, if you loved this podcast, Please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating, our real bodies, and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.
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