Eventhough I had some successful adventures with cooking from scratch I was still in the mindset that it should be an every once-in-a-while thing. I was shopping at the commissary on base (and we all know that they have the worst produce of any grocer on the planet) and an avid coupon clipper which meant that I was still buying frozen pizzas and frozen stir-fry and pasta meals because it was quick and cheap. It was my opinion at the time that money should be spent on eating out not on food for the home. Not to mention I did not have a dishwasher and the worst part about cooking for me is cleaning up - especially when you have a 10" x 10" sink to do it in!
It wasn't until my husband and I moved to a rural house in Maryland, while we were trying to sell my DC apartment, did I really start cooking all the time. The new house had a huge kitchen with lots of counter space and normal house sized appliances and most importantly a dishwasher - what a concept! The other push to make me start cooking was that we were miles from any restaurant besides a drive-thru. The commissary on base was no longer a convenient place to shop and there were a few specialty food stores in the area. Even luckier for us we had a roommate that loved to hunt and we had a freezer full of venison!
We started grilling steaks almost every other night. I cooked stews in the crock-pot and my husband made for me boiled artichoke hearts with lemon mayonnaise for dipping! I was now cooking things that my husband was fairly impressed with but I was still falling back into midwestern habits. Fried onion rings were a common side dish and lots of lipton pasta packets! It was a small step in the right direction but I still had a ways to go.
Fast-food wasn't completely out of our diet yet either. We both had about a 3 hour roundtrip commute every day and somedays that McDonald's drive-thru was just too tempting. My husband who rode to base with our roommate would sometimes pick up fast-food on their way home. I had moved away from my soccer team in the city and was sitting on my butt for 12 hours a day in a car and at my desk at work. We were eating more at home than we were before but it was a diet with lots of meat, little vegetables and what vegetables there were were fried. It's obvious what this was doing to my waistline and my fitness level, fortunately for James he was in the Army and was forced to stay in shape. I learned to have greater sympathy for all the people in the rural areas of the country - this was how they had lived their entire life! No wonder we are having a national health crisis! But I sooned learned its much easier than we think and actually cheaper to cook healthy and even more delicious food than we are used to.
No comments:
Post a Comment