As a personal trainer and fitness bootcamp coach in Singapore, I teach nutrition, as diet is the biggest thing that impacts people's fat loss, weight loss, fitness and muscle gain goals. A huge part of getting nutrition right involves cooking at home, where you have complete control over the quality of ingredients as well as preparation techniques and quantity.
When I talk about meal preparation, I often hear, "But I don't know how to cook!", or get asked, "How do I learn how to cook better? I'm tired of my own cooking!"
It's not difficult! Let me share with you a little of my culinary journey and you'll see that it is not difficult, especially if you know the secret to improving your cooking!
Ok, when I first started cooking, I was bad. The first served I served a friend, no kidding you, consisted of frozen peas defrosted with the dorm kitchen faucet, chicken pink and bloody in the middle, and half-cooked, hard brown rice. He valiantly and very politely ate the whole mess. Some people have bellies of iron, I guess.
Well, my friend lived, but I was ashamed. I had to change!
It took a while and quite a few disasters along the way (like when I poured water and rice into the rice cooker when the rice receptacle was NOT inside the rice cooker...) but I succeeded. I'm proud to say that I'm now capable to single-handedly preparing a Christmas feast for the entire family, make pizza, perfect empanadas, kangaroo stew etc.
How did that happen?
Well, the secret to improving one's cooking is really simple - all I did was to I SET SPECIFIC COOKING GOALS and work hard at them.
After all, goals are pretty important. Particularly if you have hard cash wagered on the match. I'm kidding - I meant the other kind of goal - the "goal" where a kid drops all his coins into his Batman-shaped piggybank so he can get another Batman-shaped piggybank. Or when a scrawny man disciplines himself to lift weights and eat a fearful amount of healthful foods so he starts to pack on muscle. Or when a girl attends a fitness bootcamp four days a week instead of going shopping, for maximal fat loss.
As you can see, goals provide direction and purpose. They keep you from just flopping and drifting through life.
Goal setting is essential to cooking. By setting goals, you map out clearly the kitchen skills you want to pick up, and create for yourself a structured plan to gain those skills. Your cooking WILL improve.
Here's an example of a basic kitchen goal:
DREAM: A perfect roast chicken DEFINATION: A perfect roast chicken is one cooked through but juicy throughout, even in the breast, with crisp, crackly skin. TIMEFRAME: by January 1st . RESOURCES: allrecipes.com's tip page + grandma's careful instruction
As you can see the goal is defined with clarity under "dream" and "definition", a precise deadline is specified, together with the resources that will make achieving that dream possible. You can create excel spreadsheets to write up your goals and track your improvements, use a simple notebook or just a Post-It on your fridge door.
Remember, SET THE GOAL HIGH (e.g being able to put together a healthful lunch in less than 30 minutes total time, perfect Peking duck etc) . Culinary goals have to be inspirational and challenging. Otherwise, it's not going to put passion and drive into your kitchen sojourn.
In fact, we should all aim to cook so well that your own kids/nieces/nephews/grandkids etc would turn their noses up at MacDonalds. (Yeah, I guess it'll be hard to compete with the allure of those plastic Happy Meal toys though.)
My current "big" kitchen goal is developing the perfect ginseng-goji-cinnamon-maitake double boiled free-range chicken stew by Christmas.
I should share this recipe with my fitness and fat loss bootcamp participants when it is ready. It's a perfect muscle-gaining recipe too!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment