There is no doubt that cooking all your meals is the best thing you can do for your health and your budget. Even if you are not an experienced cook and you think that your food is not that good, it’s a life skill that most people need to learn at some point of their adult life. Here are a few tips to help you get in the habit of cooking and ditch that take-away addiction of yours. 

Keep Your Kitchen Well-Stocked

You’ll never cook any decent meals if you don’t have the ingredients on hand. People who are used to cooking all their meals at home usually have a fully stocked pantry, and may even have the habit of freezing meals and portioning out meats, poultry, or fish. If you’re worried about food spoiling in the freezer (due to a power outage), freezer alarms are easy to install and will alert you of any changes in the internal temperature of your freezer. Otherwise food can be safely stored in your freezer for months. As for your pantry, air tight containers are your best friend. Just make sure that your pantry is not humid or too warm. 

Learn A Few Staple Recipes

You don’t need to be a professional chef to cook at home. After all, for most of modern history mothers cooked meals at home with no training whatsoever! By your twenties, you should try to master a few recipes and make them your staples. Meals like mac and cheese, tuna casserole, and other simple dishes are easy enough for most people to make a decent attempt at cooking. Once you have a few staple recipes down, you can start experimenting slightly. The key is not to push yourself beyond your means. Also, keep in mind that learning to cook can only be done by trial and error. You’re going to cook the first few meals wrong, and that’s alright. If you do this in your twenties, then you’re likely cooking for yourself and possibly one other person. Better to make a bad dish for yourself than to make mistakes when cooking for a major gathering! 

Meal Prepping Can Help

Many people feel that they are too busy (or can’t be bothered) to cook every single day. Meal prepping is an easy workaround for this, because you can devote one or two days a week to cooking all your meals. This may be slightly difficult for those who are still learning to cook, because scaling up recipes is sometimes complicated. Nonetheless, give it a try. It’s all the convenience of take-away without the expenses and unhealthy food.

Conclusion

Learning how to cook all your meals is a good habit to develop. Not only is this beneficial to your health (and wallet), but you can slowly learn how to cook meals the way you like them and tweak them to your preference. If you’re the chef, you can leave out the parts of a dish that you don’t like, and keep those that you do!