It may seem like it’s not very easy to fit cooking into your already busy life. You may have children, work overtime, have planned activities throughout the week, or could be tired after a long day at work. But cooking at home is important for many good reasons.
Let’s explore why cooking at home is important, and hopefully, it’ll make much more sense of how essential home cooking is to your overall health and happiness. Keep reading.
Cooking at Home Can Be Relaxing
For many people, cooking at home is an almost therapeutic activity. Cooking can be a great way to get their minds off of everyday problems.
Some people like to prepare their food in silence. Others may choose to do it while watching a show or listening to a podcast or music. Any of these preferred environments for cooking can lend itself to relaxation and reduce stress.
There are several reasons cooking can help reduce stress. For starters, the prep work you have to do before cooking can be therapeutic.
You can relax your mind while chopping onions, peeling garlic, peeling a potato, or doing other seemingly monotonous kitchen tasks.
These simple, repetitive tasks are a great way to zone out and not worry about such complicated issues many of us deal with daily. It brings us back to the basics and gives us a job that doesnt come with a lot of emotional or physical baggage.
For some people, preparing food is almost like meditation and allows them to get their mind off of things and escape into focusing on feeding themselves and their family.
As pointed out in an article by Harvard University, memories are attached to smells because both memories and smells are processed in the human brains limbic system.
Cooking certain dishes may invoke memories of your childhood or other exceptional times in your life. When you cook something that a favorite relative made for you, the good memories it gives can help you connect with your past or present and experience positive emotions.
Also, nothing is more relaxing than watching a pot of your favorite sauce simmering on the stove for hours, smelling the tomatoes, cooking slowly, turning them from raw ingredients to something truly delicious.
You Can Save Valuable Time by Cooking at Home
It may seem counterintuitive to some people who think they don’t have time to cook, but cooking can actually help them save valuable time.
You see, you need to get to the restaurant in order to eat there. Unless you and whoever you are eating with are all in the same place and it happens to be conveniently located, or on your way to where you are going, you will be spending extra time getting to the restaurant.
And once you arrive at the restaurant, it can take much longer for the entire dining experience to happen. Restaurants get very busy. Even if you have reservations, you may find yourself waiting for a table.
And once you get the table, this is not always a guarantee for fast service. Especially in recent times where restaurants have had trouble staffing, it can take a server quite a while to do all the tasks required for dining service. And chances are, you are not the only table that they are serving.
There are also steps to the service that you would not usually deal with at home. As mentioned earlier, there are splurge items that you will often get talked into buying from the restaurant staff. These may include appetizers, drinks, and dessert. There is also the often time-consuming process of paying the bill, which you obviously would not have to do at home.
Another way cooking at home can save you time is by preparing enough food to have leftovers. You could have the remaining food later in the week or freeze it to have it for a later date. Either option gives you a quick meal for another time that involves minimal work and cleanup.
Preparing enough food for later is one of the best ways to save time when cooking at home. It just requires a little planning.
