Not a chef but getting better

I’ve always enjoyed cooking but never considered myself a “great” cook. I mean, I can make good food, follow a recipe, use good ingredients, etc. But I shy away from using a lot of butter and salt like most restaurants do. My wife lovingly calls me the “Butter Police” as adding extra fat and calories for the sake of taste isn’t what my goal is. I also have to watch my sodium intake so I tend to under season my food. I also cut out fat where I can mostly to avoid heartburn later in the day…and really I don’t NEED that much butter in my diet.

I’ve learned how to cook mostly through family recipes and watching others cook. I also use Youtube heavily to learn about techniques and how those with more trained experience tend to do things. In South Louisiana most dishes all start the same using the Trinity (onion, bell pepper, celery) and the Pope (garlic). Using that as a base, you can generally make most “one-pot” southern dishes such as gumbo, jambalaya, smothered anything, etc. It’s good, and definitely a taste of home, but I’ve always ventured out of cajun dishes when it came to meal prep meals.

I really enjoy other flavors like Italian, Asian, and Mexican when prepping for the week. Most of these dishes are quicker to cook and generally revolve around simple and fresh ingredients. That’s not to say that Cajun dishes can’t achieve this, but I don’t always want to smother down onions for 30 minutes either before getting my meal started. I also don’t cook with a lot of seafood oddly enough so I always tend to try new flavors when deciding what to cook.

Cooking > Takeout

The goal of my cooking is to find a cost efficient, flavorful, and more healthy alternative to what’s available near my office. My town has no lack of food but prices have continued to go up while quality seems to suffer. My closest options are:

• Subway
• McDonald’s
• Taco Bell
• Burger king
• Sonic

Not the best lineup for someone trying to eat decent food and lower their blood pressure. The next set of restaurants include:

• Rouses supermarket
• Arby’s
• Chicken Salad Chick
• Dairy Queen
• Salad Station
• Panda Express
• Chic-fil-A

So some “better” choices, especially Chicken Salad Chick and Salad Station when compared to the others. But while the quality goes up, so does the price and time/headache it takes to get there, get food, and get back to the office in a reasonable amount of time.

My meals are normally cooked on Sunday and I cook enough for 4 days. This normally leaves Friday for me to venture out and get a meal elsewhere, or bring something left over from the house. It’s a good break after eating the same meal 4 days in a row. If I worked on a frozen meal instead of something in the fridge, I could probably also cover Friday. I’ll try that one day.

This week’s menu

I have some steak and plan to do a steak and rice power burrito. This one I’ll loosely follow from https://jalalsamfit.com/. I’m not sponsored in any way, but I’ve always enjoyed their simple meal ideas. I generally go for a carb, a protein, and veggie for each meal and their idea is very similar to this. For Christmas my wife gifted me his cookbook set so I’ve been using that to get different ideas and try different seasoning combinations. Some of their meals are high in macros and probably good for those who are also training regularly, but for me I usually cut back a bit on portion size as I’m not as active as I should be.

Actually, this is pretty similar to what I’m doing but I’m using steak instead of chicken. I’ll also probably skip the avocado: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7i4xSZnXMuQ. The Youtube videos are pretty quick so the cookbook helped me see all of the ingredients so I can get everything prepped first and then do the cooking in a much more controlled manner.

Photo Credit

Unsplash - @fotoinshadows