Our new healthy recipe columnist gets serious about home cooking

Cooking has always come naturally to Sarah Pound. Growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne, she would leaf through her mother’s extensive cookbook library for her inspiration.

“I used to love sitting there and reading everything and tabbing,” says the recipe writer and new cookbook author.

But Pound, one of five children, believed that not everyone was drawn to the kitchen like she was. Some of her siblings share her love of cooking, while others find her cooking tedious.

Now, with two children of her own and a third on the way, she also understands how different individual tastes and food preferences can be. Her parents, in particular, can struggle with the challenge of putting dinner on the table every night.

“It’s completely normal to dread dinner time or dread cooking,” she says. “This isn’t it. [skill] We are all born with a love of doing things, and you too love doing things. I think people think they have to feel it because it’s something they have to do every day. However, it is normal to not enjoy it or feel stressed. ”

That’s why Pound started posting recipes online two years ago. Melbourne’s lockdown brought her catering business to a standstill and, in a pinch, she bought a professional camera and started taking videos and photos of her cooking for the website she was running at the time. . Her purpose was to share easy and affordable recipes that anyone can cook and help others feel confident in the kitchen.

“I was really surprised by the response. People were actually making the meals, and I thought, ‘I’m surprised that people actually find value in this.’ ”

The positive response gave them a proper “crack” on social media and sparked bigger ambitions to start posting new recipes Monday to Friday.

Her Instagram account currently has nearly 700,000 followers, mostly women, and her audience is also growing on TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Pound is ready to publish his first cookbook Healthy, by Sarah A collection of simple family meals including soups, salads, stir-fries, and one-pot dishes, many of which use everyday ingredients like minced meat and canned tuna.

She attributes part of her success to this non-intimidating approach, which she says resonates with a generation of home cooks who lack basic skills. She says her recipes have given her confidence in her own abilities and expanded her repertoire of meals, although her parents, especially her mothers, are still responsible for the majority of home cooking in Australia. I feel it.

“[They] We didn’t learn in the kitchen next to our moms and grandmas like we used to,” she says. “So they weren’t really confident in the kitchen and were a little bit scared of trying things and using different ingredients.”

It’s not just confidence that’s missing, Pound says.

Time is also severely lacking. “Our mothers usually had time to spend half a day preparing meals,” she says. “Many had home gardens or knew local farmers. And that influenced our diet.”

Pound said the challenge for today’s busy parents is that many still feel held to the same standards. Feeding children a completely balanced diet, considered central to the concept of “good parenting,” creates unnecessary tension and increased stress around food, especially for mothers.

“It would be great to just take the pressure off a little bit,” says Pound, who is also a certified nutritionist. Instead, she recommends that parents involve their children in cooking and shopping, expose their children to a variety of foods, and actively talk about healthy ingredients rather than “good” and “bad” foods. We suggest focusing on easier and more effective ways to instill healthy eating, such as:

Simple, easy meals also help lighten the load and should not be considered inferior to complex dinner spreads. Even if you’re as passionate about cooking as Pound, sometimes cooking eggs on toast is all you need to spend your time and energy on.

“You don’t have to have such elaborate meals every night,” she says. “You can make something with less than 10 ingredients. You can even use canned lentils, canned tuna, or packets of pasta. It’s a great meal that’s perfect to serve to your family.”

“Time of Power” approach

Pound’s cookbook reflects this philosophy, focusing on unpretentious, healthy dinners that are not too prescriptive. She offers adaptable formulas to create salads, bowls, and stir-fries to suit different palates, using a variety of vegetables, proteins, sauces, and textures.

“Every child is different, so I can’t give you an exact recipe that will work for your child,” she says.

It’s a flexible approach to meal planning using ingredients most people already have in their fridge or pantry.

But if you want to make cooking less stressful, Pound says some preparation is necessary. One easy way to get started, he says, is to spend “an hour of power” chopping up the next week’s worth of produce, making salad dressings, or roasting a tray of vegetables. Letting children choose the recipe also helps give them some autonomy over what they eat.

“If you’ve never planned your meals in your life, don’t start by trying to do it five to seven nights a week, because that’s just too much work. I say start with one,” she says.

Eventually, with practice, most people will become calmer, more confident cooks. Pound doesn’t promise that everyone will love being in the kitchen, but most of the time he can reduce stress by feeding himself and others.

“Some people out there will never reach that level of joy in the kitchen, and that’s no surprise,” she says. “But obviously, we still have to eat and we still have to eat dinner every night. So I think if you have the desire to be a good home cook, you absolutely can be. At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of practicing and trying new things.

“I just do the best I can. Some nights I spend an hour eating a delicious, balanced meal.

“Another night I’ll be eating a can of tuna on toast. Both are perfectly fine. We all lead really busy lives, so I think we all need to give ourselves a break from time to time.” It’s just one meal. You need three meals a day for the rest of your life. Not every meal has to be fancy.

Follow Sarah Pound’s Good Food column. Each month she explores a different theme, such as gut health or fiber, and posts three recipes.