I have exactly 2; the one that came with our grill and Muscle Chow

What’s the point of this? Well there isn’t one really except that I suspect my wife, like many women buys cook books and then never actually reads them. You see I’ve read the grill book, I’ve made stuff out of it a couple of times, and I’m reading the Muscle Chow book right now because I just got it last week, it’s even in the bathroom (it’s not like I’m going to rub my food on it and then cook okay) but when I’m done or even before I plan to make lots of stuff out of it.

When it comes time to cook something and my wife doesn’t know what to cook but doesn’t want to make one of the 3 meals we usually eat (Toast, Cereal and Pasta) she doesn’t go to one of those cook books she instead goes to the computer and searches the Internet and in exasperation we end up with toast, cereal or pasta because we don’t have the ingredients to make whatever she finds.

I suspect this is a pretty big problem for a lot of families and it stems from something very simple.

A cook book isn’t a guide on how to cook a meal, it’s a guide on how to prepare a meal, that means more than just throwing a list of items from the pantry into a pot and pressing a couple buttons.

It means choosing what you want to eat before it comes time to make it. Even the simplest of recipes are no good without the right ingredients. You can’t make scrambled eggs without eggs, it just doesn’t work. And you can’t make lemon pepper chicken without chicken… but that’s too often the case.

Men and women alike crack their cook books some time after they get them (usually as a gift) and then try and make something only to find out they can’t make this good food because they don’t have the right ingredients. They then decide that the cook book doesn’t fit into their lives and give up, onto the shelf it goes and they wait for the next one.

This actually drives the cook book industry, there are thousands of new cook books published every year, but it’s not like we didn’t know how to make lemon pepper chicken in 1988. Of course food trends change, people are fat conscious etc but the basics of cooking and recipes really don’t change all that much.

Millions of people buy these cook books and then let them slowly decompose somewhere in their house.

So basically we’ve all got these cook books doing nothing, they just sit around, and although you might eat more than three things you’re probably not thrilled with the variety of your diet.

The cure for this is obvious, read the cook book’s table of contents pick some things to look at further and then go buy the ingredients and make them.

There in lies the problem, we’re both lazy and short sighted, even if you do read the cook book you’re probably not going to make a list and go buy the food, and then if you do you’ll get it home and use it to make something else, or like us you’ll let the food go bad while you eat toast for dinner.

It’s a pretty complex process when compared to making toast for dinner because we always buy bread when we go grocery shopping see the “healthy eating from a cook book plan” bellow

1. Decide what to eat
2. Make a list of needed ingredients
3. Go to the store and buy them
4. Store them
5. Prepare the meal
6. Eat the meal
7. GOTO 1

Wow tough vs

1. Prepare the meal
2. Eat the meal

Yikes that’s a big difference isn’t it?

So how do we solve this problem?

Sucker! That’s for another post!