Eating In: 5 Ideas for Making Cooking at Home More Fun

One of the most ordinary ways to keep healthy is to cook your own food. In the Philippines, this is not difficult; we have a culture of going home to eat, we can buy local produce at affordable prices (especially when vegetables and fruits are in season), and we have plenty of simple dishes that can be cooked in a jiffy.

According to Michelle Davenport, PHD, RD, a nutritional scientist and dietician who studies aging, cooking your own food is part of an “ordinary person’s guide to longevity.” “Homecooking,” she says in her article, “is a consistent predictor of healthier weight and better glycemic control.”

When you cook your own food, you know what you put in it: wholesome vegetables, healthy fats, and healthy proteins, made delicious by any of the various cooking methods you like to employ (Dr. Davenport prefers boiling, steaming, and braising) and the spices and seasonings on your pantry shelf. Of course, not everyone cooks, but every home has a designated cook or two—or a reliable source of healthy, homecooked food—so enjoying homecooking really can be for everyone. It’s just a matter of making choices.

Make homecooking enjoyable

I understand that, for some people, cooking is a chore or perhaps even something scary to do. Or it could be simply that eating out is more attractive. At times, especially when it is late and our family is out and still undecided as to what to eat, the mere suggestion of going home to cook something sounds like a mild threat to the children, who instead quickly agree on a favorite restaurant or takeout place.

While I think the occasional eat-out is okay (and of course, enjoyable), I also think that homecooking can be made more fun and interesting to make it easier to fall back to. Here is a list of possible resolutions to make cooking your own food more appealing for both the cooks and the diners in your household:

1. Explore different ingredients. See what you can find in the marketplace. Is there something unfamiliar? Search out recipes that use them and try them out. Once you’ve tasted that something new, you can find a way to incorporate it into your cooking repertoire. For example, once we found this bokchoy-like leafy green. It was called “tatsoy” and it’s like bokchoy but with smaller leaves and a mild bitter flavor. We tried it out, liked it, and now we buy every now and then to add something new to the menu. It can be added to soup, steamed, and stir-fried (added to stir-fried veggies or stir-fried noodles).

2. Explore different cuisines. Besides Filipino cuisine, we try out the cooking styles of other cuisines like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Mediterranean, Southeast Asian, Indian, and even Mexican. (Sometimes we make a table spread of mixed cuisines: a souvlaki chicken and steamed rice, paired with a mung bean sprout and leek salad with a Korean-inspired dressing: soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, chili pepper flakes, sesame seeds.) There is no wrong way to plan a meal because it is your homecooking—you can do what you like! You can even just pick out cooking techniques or flavor combinations and create your own recipes, which brings me to the next item…

3. Combine favorites. If you like spice combinations in certain cuisines, why not use them to create your own recipes? After studying what goes into a chili recipe, I create my own chili using what is available at home (because we don’t always have the same lineup in the larder—see next item). Sometimes it can have kidney beans and ground beef, sometimes chickpeas. Sometimes we don’t even have bell peppers. We can add squash to it, or sweet potatoes. Greens. Of course, tomatoes! But the spices are the same, sans the cayenne pepper (it still must be kid-friendly). The children don’t like black pepper so we only really use it whole (so they can pick them out) or it is served at table so that we can add to our own bowls as we like. Being creative in the kitchen gets easier when you follow what has been done before.

4. Restock the larder with different things every week. Don’t buy the same meat cuts every market day: perhaps if you buy chicken fillets and pork chops this week, you can buy ground beef and fish next week. The same goes for vegetables. Change the green leafy options, the salad options, the gourds, and the starches. Have grain options as well: bulgur is a favorite alternative (to rice) in our home, but we also have quinoa and barley sometimes. The children love eating bread and pasta so we have those as alternative carbs as well. Fruits are great for switching up too: buy mangoes, lychees, and strawberries only when they’re in season so that the children really enjoy them; buy the staples—apples, pears, bananas, grapes, papaya—every other week or so; and buy other rarer (or more expensive) fruits occasionally to add a pop of novelty and encourage little ones to be adventurous with food.

5. Have foresight. Because of the family schedule, we end up needing to eat out every now and then. But we can avoid this problem more often if we plan. That’s because, as a family, we know our schedule at least a week or two before. Nothing really comes as a surprise, if you think about it! So, plan. What can we cook at home? Is it going to need early prep? Will it need a long time to cook, or just 30 minutes? Weeknight meals can be quick-cooking recipes or leave-in-the-pot-braising recipes, and rice is easy to set to cook by a certain time. Add different salad (or stir-fried or steamed) veggie combinations to the repertoire and you have veggie dishes to go all the time. Or have ready-to-eat veggies like natto, sauerkraut, pickles, or kimchi. Eggs are great for making frittata or tortang talong (eggplant omelet), or as a protein pairing to takikomi gohan.

Overall, there are many ways to make homecooking doable, and more importantly, enjoyable. It’s an ordinary way to be healthier—really, you don’t need to do anything fancy or change the way you do things too much. Because eating is part of every day, so is cooking! I hope this post inspires you to tackle kitchen duties with more resolve and gusto!

"At times, especially when it is late and our family is out and still undecided as to what to eat, the mere suggestion of going home to cook something sounds like a mild threat to the children, who instead quickly agree on a favorite restaurant or takeout place."