Cooking for a crowd can seem like a daunting task, unless you practice bringing your culinary A-game on a regular basis, which makes cooking for yourself as if you were royalty an excellent way to learn.
Getting Caught Up In Routine
Realistically, we clearly can’t cook all-star meals everyday, especially with work, school, kids, activities, there are many challenges to managing a busy schedule even without the added stress of cooking a fancy meal.
Finding gaps in that busy schedule however is precisely what led me to start developing recipes, experimenting with ingredients and finding new and exciting ways to feed myself and my loved ones on a regular basis. Just an hour or two on Sunday mornings eventually became an afternoon here and there, a night or two during the week, all sorts of little pockets of time that, tied together with a common culinary goal, became a new reality for me, and I’m so thankful for that change.
Set One Meal Aside That Will Be Special
Now I’m not saying that cooking fancy stuff all the time should be a goal, quite the contrary, I firmly believe that we all need to start small and work our way to bigger goals. Cooking one recipe each week that tests our limits and pushes us out of our culinary safe zone is a great way to start. No need to even buy a cookbook since we all know that free recipes abound online and it’s just a matter of picking one that grabs our creative attention.
Many recipes that seem out of reach at first usually involve some long-term prep like marinating over night or doing lots of chopping and such. These are precisely the best kinds of recipes to try since they can be taken on in smaller shifts of effort, leading up to a great result, or not, but our failures are as important as our successes, so plan on making mistakes; best way to learn hands down.
Invite A Guest Tester
Another obstacle that sometimes keeps would-be home-chefs from making anything extravagant is simply that they don’t feel comfortable doing it for themselves. Best advice I can think of is, invite a friend to dinner. Especially if cost of ingredients is an issue. If you invited someone to help pitch in for some more costly ingredients with the understanding that you’re going to do all the work and prepare some lovely dish to compensate for their investment, watch how fast your friends will accept, you may even have to limit seating at some point when word gets out.
Never deny yourself the sheer joy of putting together strange ingredients and using new culinary techniques, the new found confidence gained as a result will catapult your culinary satisfaction to wonderfully tasty new heights.
About me: My name is Paul Thibault, an impulsive home chef developing delicious gluten free recipes for family and friends regardless of their allergen restrictions or dietary limitations, visit the About Page to learn more.