Welcome to the Small Steps Podcast. I'm your host, Amy Soon. I'm a nutritional therapy practitioner, blogger at Small Eats, author of Not at My Dastal Lunch, designer, and avid learner. In my nutrition practice, I help you cut through the health and wellness noise to find what works for you.
This podcast is here to educate, inspire, and empower you to grow, try new things, and live a life you truly feel good about one small step at a time. Each episode has small steps that you can try and see how they work for you. You can find all the show notes, small steps, and other episodes at small-eats.com slash podcast. Remember, the materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only.
They are not to be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Hello, hello. It is another episode of the Small Steps Podcast. And I'm your host, Amy.
Thank you so much for tuning in this week. If you are new, welcome. If you are a returning listener, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here.
This is episode 53, figuring out what the fuck to cook. One of the biggest barriers that I see with my clients and with other people when they're trying to eat healthier and make changes is that figuring out what to make can be very overwhelming. Depending on all the ways you know how to cook or don't know how to cook, that can be a big barrier to making those changes because you're like, I don't know what to make. And so people get a little slimmed up.
So I'm going to talk about that all before I get to the show. If you have not left a reading or a view on iTunes, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. It does help boost the show. It does help give some kind of social proof and be like, yeah, this shows a jet.
So if you can, that would be great. Also, if you love the show or this episode or any episodes that have happened at any time, I would love to see you share it on Instagram and you can tag me at small underscore eats and I would love to hear your feedback and what episodes really resonate with you because the more I hear from you about what you like, the more that I can create more shows or find more guests that really speak to you in a bigger, deeper, better, awesome or huggier kind of way. So let me know back to figuring out what the fuck to cook. Also, I want to say that there are lots of options and it depends on what's happening in your life at the moment.
You could be in a busier season where figuring out what to cook may not be the best option because you might just need to figure out what to eat. Depending on your means and your finances, you may be able to afford a service that 100% gives you all the food that you need pre-cooked and ready to go. That could be something that's accessible to you. Or maybe in this particular season in your life, not a lot is going on or the regular stuff is going and you have a lot of time to figure this out and you are able to do more things now because you have more time versus other seasons.
So it's really important for you to check in with what's happening in your life right now because none of this shit happens in a vacuum. And so even if you have the best intentions of like, yeah, I'm going to make all my meals every single day, but at the same time, there's a lot of stuff going on. You have people in town, maybe you have a big work deadline, maybe just you're traveling a lot. Like if it doesn't match with what's actually happening in the rest of your life, it's not going to work because it doesn't match the reality of what you need right now.
And oftentimes we have these great dreams of, yeah, I'm going to do this thing right now. And we may not take a beat and check in with what's actually happening. And then it doesn't work because it doesn't align with what's happening. and then we see that as fuel to be ourselves up and shit on ourselves and not necessary.
So first, please check in with what's happening with your life right now. If you are able to cook more food, I would always recommend that. Why? Because cooking your food connects you with the process and with the food so much more.
When I started cooking many years ago, that really got me much more interested in food. I was never not interested in food, but the more that you can cook and prepare your own food, the more that you have a deeper respect for that process. And you have more fun with it. You're also more involved in more invested in it.
Just like when people say, cook with your kids, so they're more interested in food, like cook with yourself. You'll have more interest in the food that you're eating, especially if you're not someone that calls themselves like a foodie or a super foodie or whatever. Also, like really practical, cooking your own food can be more affordable. It can be.
So I'm usually coming from things from a budget kind of lens because grew up with the clipping of coupons and the double coupon days and the getting the deals and all that stuff. So cooking your food can be much more affordable as well. Another thing to think about and check in is like, how do you feel? How's the comfort level that you feel cooking in the kitchen?
There are some people that don't really know how to cook or they don't know a lot of things or they don't feel as comfortable. So there are different options that are gonna be better for you versus someone who's like, yeah, I know how to cook. I just don't know what to cook. So it's important to know how you feel and pick an entry point that's more approachable and easier for you because we're all about small steps here.
Like, yeah, if you feel super excited to make a big leap, go for it. And if you're like me and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, just take some small steps. So I have a bunch of options for you to think about, figuring out how to figure this out. There might be options that you feel like don't apply to you.
They could apply to you later or they could just never apply to you at all. And that's totally fine. But here are a bunch of options like I usually do and you can think about which ones might apply to you and which ones might be helpful to figure out what you wanna eat. So the first option are meal prep kits.
These things are still around. Meal prep kit is where they deliver all of the stuff you need, usually just for dinner. It's not cooked, some of them are cooked, but I'm talking about the ones that are uncooked and you actually cook them yourself. Blue Apron is an example.
I feel like four or five years ago, this was like you couldn't move or breathe or get mail or emails or see anything on the internet and knock it in the face by all of these meal prep services. The bubble has kind of burst a bit and some of these companies have gone out of business and people are really restructuring if everything's out, but they're still around and they're still doing it. So this would be a good option if you don't really know what you want to cook and you want someone to figure it out for you and you may not wanna do the shopping or you may not have time to do the shopping. So what these meal kit services do is that it all depends on the service.
Usually you might get to choose what you eat or you might get to choose what you don't wanna eat, but you'll get meals for anywhere from three to five days. It will come delivered in a box. You will get that box, you'll put everything in your fridge, it comes with recipes and then at the time that you cook it for however many people you cook it for, it has all the ingredients that you need to put together this meal. Most of the time, if you try this, you're not usually someone who's gonna prep everything at once.
You're just like, I'm gonna cook this meal this night, this meal that night, all that stuff. If you don't know too much about cooking, you might need some hand-holding or you're like, I don't wanna make a decision about it, this might be a helpful option for you. There are also boxes out there if you have any food allergies or intolerances, like HelloFresh, Green Chef and some basket. Or if you have a certain variety of ways of eating, like if you don't eat meat or you do eat meat or things like that, those three services are ones that have several different options, and they also have options if you have families as well.
Whether this option is good for you depends on your budget because these can be a little bit more expensive, also most of them are only for dinner, so you're still gonna have to figure out your other meals, how much time that you have and how many people you cook for. There's also been an ongoing criticism. If this matters to you, if not, that's totally fine, that these boxes can have a lot of waste because everything is individually packed often, and there are smaller quantities of literally everything, so you're gonna get exactly two tablespoons of paprika. So if you have paprika at home, you might be like, well, I don't really need this, or if you have some basic seasonings at home, if you're someone that's more concerned about the amount of plastic waste or waste that you're throwing away, this may not be the best option for you, if that's something that is a higher priority than I just need to figure out what the fuck to eat.
Also at the same time, I wanna say that as someone who has values and wants to hold on to them sometimes a little bit too tightly, always go back to what's deeply the most important thing to you right now. It is the most important thing, finding a low waste option, or it is the most important thing, figuring out what the fuck to eat so that you can continue on with the rest of your life. That's something that's up to you. The thing to consider is that they have certain specific delivery days.
Those might not always be the most quote convenient for you, usually they are during the day. I have had meal kits in the past sent to my work or made sure that someone was home because they do have dry ice in them so that they can sit for the day, but also depending on your work situation and your living situation, you might be constantly worried, like I have been in the past, that someone's gonna steal your box off your front porch. So another thing to think about and consider that you may not control when it arrives and that may not align with planning other things for the week as far as food, or if you go out a few times, you've got extra meals, which could be helpful, or it could be like, no, no, I don't really need this right now. Important to see how that works and plays out in your life.
Also, it's an important thing to know is that depending on how many people you're cooking for and who you're cooking for, these meal kits may not actually be enough food, which is something that I have experienced before. So my partner goes to the gym a lot, works out a lot, usually just naturally eats more than I do. And when we tried meal kits in the past, in the very, very past, you would always still be hungry because there wouldn't quite be enough food. So I know for us, we usually cook for four to five people because we have leftovers afterwards and because depending on how much he's training at the time, he may need more food than I do because we're very different in size and all the things that we need.
It might be something to consider if you lead a more active lifestyle or if you live with people that lead more active lifestyles, you may require more food than what they provide. So something to think about and consider if you're looking into meal kits. So again, if you have any food allergies or intolerances or ways of eating, I definitely think it's worth looking into HelloFresh, Green Chef and some asking it. I'm not affiliated with them at all, so I don't get any like bonus or no one's paying me to say that.
But those are ones that have been out there for a few years. So they're worth looking into. They're not pretty, they're not like 100% new. There are also still so many of the OGs around too.
So it's worth doing a little bit of internet research to see what's right for you and all the situations that are in your life. Another thing to consider, another option to consider is a meal prep website. So this would be more for if you don't necessarily need all the things to learn for you, you want the one else to figure out the recipes or have more options in front of you rather than figuring them out from your brain. So what these websites do is that you pay as subscription, you pay a monthly subscription and they pull all the recipes together for you.
They usually have big banks of recipes that you can either customize or they'll send you a fixed plan and then they give you a shopping list. And then some of these services also tell you how to prep them so that you can prep it the most efficiently. So this is definitely going to be an option for, I'm gonna prep stuff, I'm gonna have a big batch of stuff ahead so I can just pull out things during the week which can be really helpful if you're in a busy or season, you just got a lot going on. Or if you know that you have a really mentally taxing job or mentally taxing day and the last thing that you need is to come home and figure out what the fuck to cook each night.
Some of these can definitely have set menus or set options depending on the recipes that they have on their site. And some of them you do get to customize a lot more options of like, I don't want this in my food or I eat this certain way or we need it for X amount of people or we need a bunch of meals, not just for dinner. So it depends on what it is. Also, again, I wanna put in the whole, like you may have to adjust portions for depending on how much people eat.
Sometimes they have like portion adjustments that you can adjust so you can like double the recipe, reduce the recipe. It's important to have a guest in it and figure that out as you go because what a serving size is to you and what a serving size is to any other website or any other recipe or any other cookbook is very subjective is what you think is serving, they think is serving not the same. So important to think about that as well. So two sites that are worth checking out, there are a lot out there, but the ones that I know of and pop into my mind is the Fresh 20, that's more thinly centered and there are many different styles of eating in there and they send you a list each week and you go figure it out.
The most robust one that I found out there, I haven't used any of these services, but just from looking on their websites and from hearing from other people, the most robust one out there is called Real Plans. It was started by a blogger and I know a lot of people who have been bloggers who have contributed recipes to their websites, so if you like Steph Gaudreau, Nom Nom Nom Paleo, Audio Mule Wellness, if these names mean anything to you, they also have their recipes in Real Plans. So if you follow particular food bloggers and you like their stuff, you can find that there. Also, they have even more ways of eating that you can figure out recipes for.
So if you're doing the AIP protocol, for instance, or if you wanna try Keto, or if you know that the Paleo eating style works the best for you, they have the most different kinds of diets and therapeutic diets and ways of eating that you can try and customize. They're the most customizable. You can also do all the meals that you want, not just dinner, because there are some that just do dinner and do you eat more than just dinner. Again, I'm not affiliated with any recommendations that I talk about, these are things I've seen in real life.
So Real Plans is the one that I've seen that has the most helpful reviews and is the most super flexible and customizable. The other option that I've tried that is the, I think more of like the OG way, which I started a long time ago, is finding recipes through cookbooks, blogs, and Pinterest. So before all this shit was popular in everywhere, that's how I found things. Finding recipe bloggers that I really resonated with that had ways of eating that I liked, and recipes that I liked, or cookbooks.
And then you can, if you're doing this online, you can save it to Pinterest, so you can always have a way to pull it out easily and remind, you're like, oh yeah, I hate this. Or what I have done in the past, I still have this, but I haven't added to it in a long time, is you could print them out, print them out. Does anyone still have a printer? I still have a printer, or print them out at work, and then put them in a binder.
So this is what I used to do way back in the day when I was still figuring out like, what do we like to cook, what do we like to eat, how do I make things? I printed out recipes that I found on blogs, and I put them in a binder. And each week when I would cook food, I wanted to cook food the same food that I liked again, I would pull out that binder, and I would learn through that binder. I still have it in a shelf somewhere.
So if that's something that's appealing to you, also I think this would be great if you had probably more time, or if you enjoy cooking and you wanna figure this stuff out, a tangible, tactile person, finding cookbooks that you resonate with. I usually like to go to the bookstore to actually look at all the recipes, because you can see, if you go on Amazon, you can see the inside, you can see the table contents, so you can sometimes see the recipes, or if you look at the index page, that's the index way in the back, you can kind of see. But what I usually like to do is find the title that I like, go to the bookstore, and then look at the book there, and see, oh, do I like these recipes, do I like these methods? Is this too complicated?
Is this just the right level of skill for me? If you are a beginner and you wanna try this, or if you're like somewhere in the quote beginner-ish stage, there are so many cookbooks that are geared for that, because everyone is very busy, there are so many cookbooks that are geared for, simple meals, five pot meals, five ingredient meals, one pot meals, all the things that make things a lot easier to cook things quickly, it's just more of like figuring out if those books are to the taste that you like, because if you don't like getting the food inside, it doesn't matter how helpful them are, if you don't actually like it at all. If you do have any intolerances or allergies, I do use the quote diet shortcuts, so I call them diet shortcuts. So even if you don't 100% eat paleo, or if you don't 100% eat vegan, or if you don't 100% need to eat the AIP on your protocol, you can still use those terms as shortcuts to figure out what books or what recipes or what recipe sites are going to have food that you can actually eat.
Now you won't have to constantly be like, oh no, I have to check every single recipe to make sure, like if I don't eat gluten, that this is gonna be gluten free, or if I don't eat dairy right now, I have to make sure. So usually when I search for recipes or recipe books, I look for if you're not eating gluten, or if you maybe can't handle legumes right now, beans of any kind, or if you need to be dairy free for a while, I usually find paleo recipes, because those, especially if they're more quote stricter, paleo, they won't have gluten, most of the time, they won't have dairy, some of them do, a lot of them won't have legumes. So if you need to not eat those things for a while, or if you haven't challenged or allergy, whatever, look for paleo recipes. If you want something that is dairy or egg free, I would look at vegan recipes.
I wanna say as someone who is not eating gluten or dairy right now, vegan isn't always the answer for everything because they still could definitely have gluten in it, so check it out if you have both of those things. But if you can't tolerate eggs or dairy, or if you're taking a break on those, vegan is a great shortcut to find recipes that will work for you. If you can't eat nightshades or garlic or onions right now, nightshades are potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants. Look into recipes that follow the autoimmune protocol or AIP, those are gonna have things that you will more likely be able to eat unless you have additional things.
So that's kind of what I do to quickly find recipes that will work for you if you have food allergies or intolerances. If you don't, you can still, if you wanna try them, go for it, but you might not necessarily need to. Also a thing that is really a potential thing to look at, thinking about things, because when I did most of this like figuring out, I wasn't not eating things for health and therapeutic healing reasons, and I wasn't really super aware of diet culture at the time. So know, especially with blogs and cookbooks and Pinterest, because Pinterest can oftentimes be a straight garbage fire.
Know that diet culture can be extremely poppin' in all of these places. So you'll see a lot of things that are sometimes legit just for clicks and for SEO, like these people aren't terrible people at any start to the means, but they will say things in the recipes and in the descriptions that are diet culture, and they may not realize it. Like all the recipes that are quote, guilt free or skinny or healthy, like they have all these terms to describe the recipe, but it's like, it's just a recipe of food. You don't have to attach all these additional diet culture-y kind of labels.
You may encounter that as you're looking for recipes, or you may see that the portions may be a little bit small, or calorie counting may be really important, or there could be recipes that have ingredients that you don't like or that you don't use, or that don't align with you, like finding, for me, finding things with oils that aren't like, personally questionable to me, something that I look at. I just wanna give that as a caveat. If you are feeling a little bit like, ooh, about diet culture, know that going in, that you could find things that reinforce diet culture, and you can still enjoy the recipe without attaching or subscribing to the diet culture things that are intentionally or unintentionally put up there. So, wanted to put that out there for you.
You can have a recipe and make a really good meal, and not subscribe to that. You can do both at the same time. So, again, if you wanna pursue this option, you're most likely gonna be someone that likes cooking, you might have a little bit more time to figure out recipes, and you might really deeply like researching. If you don't really enjoy that, this might not be the super best option for you, and that's totally fine.
The option that I use the most right now, and have used for several years, because this is how my brain works, is something that I call recipe formulas. I cook off of recipes actually, like, really terribly. If I know that I need to achieve a certain flavor profile, or baking because that's fucking science, I follow that a little bit more closely, but I'm actually really terrible at 100% following recipe directions, because recipes are actually pretty inflexible, besides baking because that's fucking science, because no recipe ever can account for your taste, how many people you're cooking for, what you actually have in your pantry, what you're willing to do, the amount, like, it can't account for that. Like, and that's no fault of it.
That's just the recipe is just a recipe, right? So, it's not as flexible for all the things that you need, or all the things that you want. So, I usually riff on recipes or adapt recipes on the fly, or what honestly happened, say I was looking up one recipe on how to cook a chicken or something. I would just look for the method, like how to cook it, and the general, like, this is one you should add this, and this is when you should add that, and I didn't really pay attention to, like, the actual spices or the other, the flavorings or all that stuff.
I was just like, I want to know how to cook it, like, what are the times, what are the temperatures, what are the general, if, unless it was a very specific, because I mean, what are the general flavors here, what combinations would work well together, and then I, like, would come up with a structure, or a formula that would work well for me. That's how my brain works, I see systems, what has come out of that, if your brain doesn't work like that, which is totally fine, I don't actually know how many people's brains do work like that, but what has come out of it is a formula system and something that's really helpful for figuring out what to eat in all sorts of situations. Basically, a recipe formula is some plug and play stuff. It's like bringing to Pol Lea whatever, build a bowl, restaurant is by your house, into your own house.
The two that I usually go to all the time is building your own bowl and building your own plate. I'm gonna tell you the kinds of things, and then you get to add in whatever you want based on lots of important things, like what's accessible to you via finances or what's in your area. Also, like, what's in season right now, again, always gonna go for what's in season, because it's more delicious, it's more nutrient-hand, and it's more affordable. So you're gonna go for that, what you like, like what your tastes are, what your partner's tastes are, and then it doesn't matter what quantity, because I'm not telling you, you have to use two cups of rice, you can do whatever you want, and this can be a bit more flexible for you, with some guiding things.
Because sometimes you need to still need some structure, because when you have no limits, you can get paralyzed and be like, there are too many choices, I can't figure this out. So we're gonna narrow it down a little bit. So build a bowl is one base, one protein, and two to three produce-based toppings. So the base, this can be whatever you want.
This could be salad greens, this could be rice, this could be a grain, this could be noodles, this could be especially as you move into fall, this could be any mashed starchy vegetable that you like. If you want to be over a bed of mashed potatoes, fucking rad, go for it. Sweet potatoes, butternut squash. If you like those spiralized veggies, that can be your base too.
Or if you wanna be like super fun, and mix it up, you can have, within your base, you can have a combination, you can have mixed greens, and you can have rice in there, or mixed greens and quinoa, or kelp noodles and greens. Like you can combine that however fancy you wanna get, that's totally fine, but you have that as your base, and then on top of that, you have one protein. That can be whatever you like, whether that's a meat-based protein or not. You can do that, put that in there.
Make sure that you have enough for you, so that you feel full, and that's something that you will need to experiment on. And then the two three toppings can be, I like to go for produce-based stuff first, or have more of that, and then you can add on other stuff too. So two or three toppings that can be any rose vegetable that you want, you can have a raw vegetable, you can have it fermented vegetable. If you wanna put nuts on it, if you wanna put avocado on it, if you wanna throw in some fruit in there, like figuring out what you like and what your tastes are.
Also, the toppings can include dress salad dressings, pesto, whatever you like, and there you go. Like, there are so many things you can make within there. The build-a-play is pretty simple as well. It's one protein, two veg, or one protein, one veg, one grain.
If you're super hungry, you can have literally all of those things as well. You can have one protein, two veg, and one grain. Depends on what you would like. Depends on what you like to eat.
The one protein can be anything that you like. Again, meat, not meat. Two vegetables, I usually do rose vegetables because that's pretty easy and hands-off to do, but if you wanted to, you could do one rose vegetable and a side salad if you wanted to. Grains, any grains that you wanna eat, and you can figure out what you wanna do.
That can have endless amounts of options and flexibility because I do know as someone that can kind of fall into ruts, like eating the same thing over and over again, is really fucking boring, and it doesn't provide as much variety and nutrient density that your body needs. I do recipe formulas. It does require you to kind of know how to cook some basic stuff. So if you don't know how to roast vegetables, you'll need to figure out the times for that.
All you really need to do is figure out the timing for that, and then figure out how to cook the proteins and how to cook the grains, which again is pretty easy or easy-er. Like I'm not asking you to learn any like fancy cooking methods. It's just how can you cook these things and then putting it together. I see this more as you've already figured out what kind of food that you like.
You have a somewhat comfortable grasp on cooking some things and you just want something that gives you a bit more variety and flexibility without being too flexible and too never ending. So I also wanted to throw in some pro tips for figuring out how to cook because that can be really helpful. A lot of times when I talk with clients or when I talk with people about cooking, people have bad experiences with food, usually not because they don't like the food. Sometimes yeah, it is, they don't like the food.
Other times it's when they ate it, whoever cooked it, it wasn't cooked to the right time or the right kind of done this, and or it wasn't seasoned properly. What the hell is seasoned properly? Historically, a lot of people under seasoned are don't seasoned at all. Something that I have learned from all of my years of watching all the food shows and all of this stuff is seasoned while you cook and taste while you cook, adding in salt, adding in seasonings, tasting it.
What do you like? Also realizing that if you're afraid of salt unless you have very specific recommendations from your doctor, the fear around adding salt, a little bit too high culturey based on fear, a lot of times when you're like, oh, this is gonna lead to my hypertension or whatever, like sometimes no, a lot of times I can go back to stress. So add salt, add seasonings. If you don't feel like you're an expert on seasonings, the easiest thing to do is get spice blends.
So those are already blended for you. They're pretty straightforward and very descriptive in their flavors, especially for roasting vegetables or cooking animal proteins. That's super easy because you're just gonna like, sprinkle it over and be like, boom, there we go. So season and taste and add salt.
Timing can be another thing that's pretty big. Yeah, for me, that's pretty obvious. Like if you've ever had an overcooked anything with animal protein, it's usually pretty tough and you're like, I don't like this. Or you can over-order under-cooked vegetables and have a very different experience.
I feel like most people when they were young had overcooked vegetables of brussel sprouts or cauliflower and they don't like it. But if you get it to the right temperature and the right time, it's gonna taste great. There are many, many resources out there. If you Google times for roasting vegetables or times for cooking meat, you're gonna find a lot of things out there.
So I would highly recommend that you Google that, especially depending on what vegetables and proteins you make all the time. Also, it can be helpful to buy a meat thermometer or your meat, if you're not sure exactly if it's done yet. If you don't have the magical touch, like my partner has some like magical, intuitive knowing of like when meat is ready, he just knows. Not all of us have that.
So a meat thermometer can be really helpful. So you're like, is this none? I don't know, let's check the meat thermometer. If you want to achieve this level of doneness, it will be the temperature.
So it kind of takes the mystery out of it. It takes the magical intuitive knowing that not all of us have. So a meat thermometer could be very, very helpful. If you need some variety in the kind of food that you're eating, definitely head to a farmers market.
Again, if that's in your area and accessible to you, or you can try a CSA box. So a CSA box is CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You can find that at your farmers market or you can go to localharvest.org to find individual places that might just drop off at a farmers market. And there are a lot of places on the internet that have that in your area, whether that's nationally or just in your state, go check it out because what they do is that they give you what's on their farm.
So you're automatically gonna get what's what is in season, you're gonna support a local farm and you are going to have a lot of different varieties of things to choose from. It is for the season. So yes, summertime, you could get like all the fucking zucchini for weeks and weeks and weeks. And then you get to figure out all these fun things to do, zucchini and or you can give those zucchini to people in your life that you're like, yeah, you need a bill.
Zucchini in your life slash I'm tired of being zucchini. That's also an option. So you can try that. Or you can Google a list of in-season produce in your area because it's slightly different depending on what parts of the United States you live in, what parts of other countries that you live in.
Also what time of period is because our seasons are not the same as other people's seasons in different countries and different parts of the world. So Google that, print out a list if you want to, and then check off those things on the list. All right, like we're gonna have these three things from this list this week, or we're gonna have these three things this week. Or what is that?
Let's go try it. So that can be another fun way to figure out how to get some more variety in the kind of food that you're eating. It's easiest to do that with vegetables because that changes all the time. Also want to put out there if you are busy overall, meal prepping can be super helpful and can save you some decision fatigue at the end of the day.
And meal prepping can look like many, many things. I'm pretty sure there's an episode of meal prepping. I've talked about it a lot, but at the bare minimum, you can just roast a bunch of stuff. Pressure cooker, which are very, very helpful.
That's a way to make meals and proteins and pretty hands off. And then from there, you can do the recipe, structure the recipe of formulas and plug and play and you know all things that you want. Another thing that can be helpful if you're figuring out how to do all this is figure out some kind of consistency. If you're not doing the meal prep service where you really don't have control of when that shows up at your door, really?
Like you don't get to decide that most of the time. If you're planning all this yourself, it can be really helpful to have a system. Like this day, I know that I'm going to plan what we're gonna eat. This day, I'm gonna shop.
This day, I'm going to prep. Those can be in the same day or at the same few days. It's totally fine, but the more that you set the, this is the day of the week. I'm going to do this and the more it becomes like, not a thing you have to figure out in your schedule, the easier that can be.
Again, I know if you are in a busy or season, it might need to be a little bit more flexible, but having that structure of this is the process that we do, takes more decisions and thoughts out of your way and can really get you to focus on what you need to do, which is figuring out what to eat, cooking that, and then eating it and enjoying it. So small stuff for the show, look at what's going on in this season of your life. Get really honest and see if this is the time that you need to do this or want to do this. And what's actually going on?
It's always nice to know the temperature of things before you do it so that you can set yourself up for helpful success and not shit on yourself. Decide which of these approaches, if any of them appeal to you, are the best ones for you to try right now. Try that one for a week or two or maybe a little bit longer and see how you like it, set that time and check in with yourself. Adjust it as needed.
Maybe you find that one approach isn't quite cutting it and that you want to try blending the two or you want to like make a hybrid and figure that out or maybe none of them apply to you right now. Figure out what works for you and adjust as needed. Also check in with yourself as the weeks go on to see how you like what you're doing. If you don't like it, adjust.
If you do like it, just keep going with it and see how it is. And as always, required small step for every show that we do is have a lot of kindness and compassion for yourself as you're figuring this out. You may not nail it the first week. That's totally fine.
There's no need for it to be perfect ever. Especially when you're just trying something new. So you have yourself a lot of kindness and compassion as you're figuring stuff out, as you're learning things. And also, I would say how can you make this more fun?
If it's you're cooking with kids or you're cooking with your partner or you're cooking with yourself, like how can you make this experience more fun? Because really, this can't be really fun. Like you're cooking, you're creating food. Like you are doing something great for yourself and also like creating this awesome time to make meals that are gonna be tasty, discover new things, try new flavors.
It can be really fun. It doesn't have to be something. You're like, oh, I can't figure it. No, it's gonna be a time to bond with people.
It's gonna be a time to try new things, to figure out new things about yourself that you didn't actually know. So it's important to remember that this is really like not super fucking serious for most of us. If you have a luxury of being able to be like, what would I like to do? It's gonna be okay.
It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be some deep breaths of kindness and compassion. You're gonna figure it out, I promise. So wrapping up the small steps again, because when I'm on a slight tangent, look at what's going on in the season of your life.
Decide what the best approach is for you right now. Try it for a week or two. See how you like it. Adjust if you need to, maybe blend a few of the approaches together, keep checking in to see how you like it.
Find ways to make this fun and have a lot of kindness and compassion for yourself as you figure this out. And that is all for this week's show of figuring out how to fuck do you figure out what to let's eat and what to let's eat. So I would love to know if any of these tips were helpful or if there's another way that I've forgotten and have it mentioned that you're like, oh wait, what about this method? Let me know.
Hit me up on Instagram at small understore. And let me know what you think, what methods work for you, methods didn't work for you. Also, if you love the show, remember, please share it and rate it and leave a review in iTunes. And as always, you can do this once most of the time.