Experimenting above your cooking skill level
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to let your creative juices flowing. But if you don’t have the basics down, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment. If you want to impress your family, friends, or a partner with cooking skills, there’re no shortcuts.
First, you have to learn to crack your eggs properly.
Then you can try to flip the pancake.
Keep it simple, learn one meal. If you start from the basics and focus on refining one meal, you’re more likely to produce a tasty or, at least, edible meal. And that good feeling that you made something useful will motivate you to learn and improve.
Eating “healthy” junk foods on a diet
Jokes aside, much worse than trying something new in the kitchen is when you fool yourself into eating “healthy” junk foods. There are many diets out there and a lot of them can work well. But it seems like with every popular one there’s a way to eat junk food while on it. Do these sound familiar?
• Paleo pizza
• Vegetarian sausages
• Low-carb cookies
• Vegan ice-cream
Do diets for the right reasons. The biggest benefit of most diets is the fact that you stop eating processed junk food. When you start looking for loopholes and ways to cheat the system to have your treat, it’s a sign the diet is not right for you. Also, if you can’t live without a chocolate cake for your birthday, go for the real thing! As long as you don’t make that stuff a regular part of your diet you’ll survive; and enjoy yourself much more and without guilt.
On the other hand, if you can make your favourite food using healthier ingredients, then why not do it. This whole month will be all about recipes that can end up being a big fail or a big success. Hopefully you’ll know how to navigate among those by the end of this series.
