I have been trying to watch what I eat a bit more carefully after I found out that I have high blood pressure. These are simply things that come with age. I am relatively active, I don't really drink excessively (all that often) and I almost never have any sort of processed sugars. I am slightly overweight but figured that I could get this under control if I just started to eat out less.
I used to think that it was just an American or Western problem about how it is so much more expensive to cook for yourself than it is to just hit a fast-food restaurant but that is also the case over here. I can for a few dollars, order burgers, pizza, even tacos for every meal and never have to clean anything up or be involved in the cooking process at any point. I also never have to do any washing of dishes and that is a big plus in my book even though (and I am not trying to sound posh here) I do have cleaners that come by my condo up to 2 times a week. I suppose that is beside the point because I would never beckon them to my place just to wash my dishes anyway.
src
not my house but you get the point
I was at a butcher the other day and figured I would just try my hand at it and see what happens. I do this not because I know I can make something amazing, quite the opposite actually - I have very little skills when it comes to cooking anything and the only exception to this rule seems to be chili con carne, which I can do oh so wonderfully. But this time I was just trying to get a lot of vegetables cooked up and add about 200 grams (sorry Americans, I've been converted) of some sort of protein.
This is what I started with and it probably looks pretty terrible.
Looks pretty fancy doesn't it? haha, I know that it doesn't. I just chopped up some peppers and threw some mushrooms in a pan and pushed them around for a bit. I don't even know when they are done but I do know from some level of experience that meat (at least the way that I like to eat it) doesn't take hardly any time at all to cook. So I let it sit there for a while and of course I had an observer watching my every move.
I also had the assistance of a spice packet that cost about 10 cents to add to it all. I have no idea what it is but there was a picture of some sort of meat on it and we'll just run with that. In the end I suppose it added some flavor to my meal.
In the end all I can really say about my exploration into cooking for myself was that it didn't make me throw up and it made me full. That is really all I can say about it. I would never order this in a restaurant but I suppose if any meal in my day was to be considered irrelevant it would be lunch. I don't really care what I eat I just need something in my belly to get me through to dinner.
In the end, this meal cost about 30% more than it would cost me to order some fast-food and that is just a damn shame. On the flip side of things though, I know exactly what went into the cooking process and hopefully that is doing something good for my health. I will eventually have to figure out how to cook better using local ingredients because I'm not just going to eat tasteless crap for every single lunch.
I think my next experiment will be to dig further into these seasoning packets that are available for next to nothing. Maybe one of them will be the magic bullet that I am seeking to make my food palatable.
