Part 6: Four Steps to Stick with Your Cooking Goals

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This post is part of a series to help you cook more in the new year. You can click the green button to follow along with weekly emails:

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It’s the final week of our series and March has already begun. So now I have a question for you:

Are you cooking more?

When you started this journey with me, you wanted to do more cooking in the new year. Are you?

If you’ve found it hard to stay the course, you’re definitely not alone. Cooking more seems like a simple enough goal, but in reality it’s a super complex routine that requires a lot of new choices and habits to support it. And there are sooo many everyday obligations (kids! work! spouse! errands! life!) endlessly conspiring to take us off course.

So it’s not easy.

Four steps to get back (and stay) on track with cooking more

Doing a lot of cooking in the midst of your actual life is a lot. But if you want to regroup and get things heading back in that direction, here are some suggestions:

Step 1: Wait, why do you want this again..?

Waaaay back in Week 1, when we were all fresh and optimistic at the beginning of the new year, I suggested you should write down the reason you wanted to do more cooking. Maybe your goal was eating better, or losing weight, or spending less on takeout, or producing less waste, or spending more time with your kids or family. Whatever your goal, ask yourself: why was that important to me?

Then, keep asking why at least 3 times. For example, if your goal is to eat healthier, that might be important to you because you want to be healthier. (Duh.) But wait - why do you want to be healthier? Maybe it’s because you want to live a long life, or set a good example for your kids. Now ask yourself again - why is that important?

Once you get down to the real reason you decided this was important to you, ask another question: is it still true? Is that still important to me? Be honest. Sometimes life changes, and priorities shift. No shame! If things have changed for you, this is the time to own it.

But if that underlying reason still resonates with you, then it’s time to ask the next question…

Step 2: Is cooking more still your best move?

Now that you’ve got a bit more experience under your belt, let’s re-assess:

Is cooking more actually still the best goal for you right now?

It might be surprising for me, the creator of this very pro-cooking website, to be asking this question. But remember, I started life as a complete non-cook, so I get it. Cooking more involves so much beyond just the act of cooking. It requires shifts in countless other everyday routines, and that can be a lot to tackle.

And the truth is, there are non-cooking ways of accomplishing lots of personal goals. For example, to make progress toward a healthier lifestyle, you could start with more exercise, or grab veggie trays from the grocery store each week and eat those instead of chips. If your goal is spending more time with your kids around the table, you could literally accomplish that while ordering pizza every night.

If you’re reading this and breathing a sigh of relief at the thought of an exit ramp, then cooking more might not be the right goal for you right now. Maybe this just isn’t the year for you to tackle this. Life is a marathon, and maybe your best move right now is something else. If so, you have my blessing to shift onto a different path.

But if you’re recoiling in horror at the thought of subsisting on veggie trays and pizza deliveries, that’s a pretty good sign that cooking more actually is the right path for you. And… hello! I’m here on this path with you! We are fellow travelers, my friend. You’ve got me, and this website, at your side.

So let’s take the next step…

Step 3: What exactly do we mean by cooking more?

When you started down this path, you might have had visions of making every single meal from scratch. Or growing all your own organic ingredients in your backyard garden. Or shopping only at the farmers market. I’ve had all those visions for myself at various stages of my cooking journey, and some years I’ve come pretty close. But other years, in the midst of running a business and raising kids, definitely not.

So let’s take a minute to redefine what exactly we mean by cooking more. Now that you’ve got a couple of months of experience under your belt, take another look at what works - and doesn’t work - in the real world in your home. For example, did you originally hope to cook dinner every night? If so, do you want to double-down on that, or loosen it up a bit? Maybe 3-4 nights a week is enough? Or just Tuesdays and Thursdays? Or maybe dinners aren’t working, but you could put a good breakfast on the table most days, so you want to focus on that.

Now’s the time to revisit and update your goal. Use your experience so far to hone your expectations. If you want to stick with your original goal, you now have a lot more insight into what it will take to do it. Decide on a plan that’s workable in your actual life this year.

Then…

Step 4: Write it down and make it happen

Write down your freshly revised goal and take another look at Steps 3 and 4 from Week 1: Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want. Let your family or housemates know if you’ve changed your goal, or if you’re recommitting after getting off-track. Then, be your own accountability partner by tracking your actual cooking against your plan, and setting a regular date with yourself to review how things are going and make adjustments.

Schedule time each week to plan your cooking for the week ahead. Go back to Week 2: How and Why to Plan Your Meals for suggestions to do enough planning to keep you on track (but not enough to be annoying, wherever you personally might draw that line!).

Then, consider adding a batch-cooking session to your weekly routine. You can make batches of things like cookie dough, chicken stock, beans, pancake mix or oatmeal, and keep them in your fridge or freezer to help you out when time is tight on another day. Take another look at Week 3: Batch Cooking and Other Strategies for more ideas.

If you’re struggling to please unreceptive eaters, you might find ideas to liberate yourself in Week 4: Dealing with Picky (Selective!) Eaters. And if you’re drowning in dishes, check out Week 5: How to Deal with All the Dishes for ideas to get your head above dishwater.

Here’s to You, My Cooking Friend!

Cooking is no small task. You could have set your sights on smelling flowers or petting kittens. But no. You chose cooking. There are flames and sharp objects involved. Multi-step processes. A lot of moving parts. Precise timing. The potential for large messes.

But cooking is important. An army marches on it’s stomach.* And you are feeding the troops. You’re nourishing your loved ones. You’re fueling yourself! You’re bringing people together. You’re setting examples. You’re making space. You’re sharing something joyful.

So you, my cooking friend, are pretty amazing! And what you’re doing matters. Whether it’s a box of macaroni and cheese on a busy weeknight, or a birthday cake, or that homemade chicken soup, you are the one who is making it happen. You’re the linchpin of the whole operation. You are important!

So go on with your bad cooking self! You’ve got this. Let’s do it!

Winter Veggie Recipes

It’s winter! And you’re trying to cook more veggies! It’s a tall order, right? Week after week, squashes and salads, with a few greens thrown in there for good measure. Here are some more ideas to spice up your winter veggie game while you’re wait for spring to arrive:

More recipe inspo for Cooking More

More Stuff to Help you Stick with your Cooking Goals:

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This post is part of a series with a month’s worth of content to help you cook more. I’ll be sharing new posts each week with recipes, ideas and tips to help you cook more in the new year. If you want to get emails with new content each week, you can click this button to follow along!

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*This quote is commonly attributed to Napolean, but he may have never said it. And worse for his poor troops, who tended to die of thirst, starvation, and the illnesses that come from them, he definitely didn’t live up to it! So don’t be like Napolean. (I told you cooking was an important job!)