This is the third installment of a four-part series on how I transformed myself from frozen food queen to healthy weeknight chef. Yes, it is possible to go from almost never cooking anything from scratch to cooking virtually everything from scratch. Even if you work full-time like I do. It may take awhile (I took a full year), but you can do it.

If you missed the other installments, you can read about phase I (Fits & Starts) here and phase II (Mastering the Basics) here.

Experimenting with New and Fun

This third phase of the year of my transformation was all about branching out from the basics and experimenting a bit.

As we headed into the summer months, our local farmers market opened and shopping suddenly became really fun for the whole family. We got in the habit of walking to it every Sunday and discovering new things to try, from leeks to kale, mustard greens, pasture raised chickens, and tomatillos…

Typically I’d create the week’s menu by outlining the building blocks for our meals, namely the proteins and the grains. But then I’d leave the vegetables and sauces up for grabs. The overflowing bins of vegetables at the market never failed to steer me in interesting directions.

One evening, a tomatillo salsa verde made a wonderful accompaniment to talapia.

The kids loved it, and my husband begged me to make the salsa again just to have on hand. It was that good.
{image & recipe via: Pinch My Salt}

Another night, I whipped together a leek tart. This is a wonderfully fast and relatively easy dinner to make. Perfect for those nights when you look in the fridge and don’t have too much left in there. I had tried my hand at an apple pie or two, so making my own crust wasn’t entirely a new thing. The good thing about a homemade crust is that it is generally delicious – even if it doesn’t come out perfectly flaky. Don’t be intimidated.

While at the beach with family, on my night to cook, I tried my hand at homemade pizza.

While not something I recommend for large parties (we were 28 people – oven space fell a little short), it is a great and really easy dinner for a single family. I have fallen in love with Tyler Florence’s pizza sauce recipe and use the pizza dough recipe from the back of a package of Fleischman’s pizza yeast. It has become our new go-to Friday night recipe.

Quinoa burgers made it in to the menu set.

I’ve tried these with and without eggs (without when my vegan relatives were visiting at Christmas). When making them without the eggs, just use something like cornstarch or a little extra flour to make them stick together. The tzatziki sauce that goes with this recipe is insanely good, but I’ve found you only need 1/2 to 1/4 of what’s called for, so I usually half the recipe. In general, Eating Well Living Thin is a wonderful resource for delicious and healthy recipes. I highly recommend perusing her blog.

Fish tacos were another hit of the summer.

And super, super easy. The tangy sauce is delish, but like the tzatziki sauce for the quinoa burgers, a little goes a long way. Definitely 1/2 the recipe for it.
{image and recipe by Daisy Cooks Sometimes}

And how could I forget this beautiful recipe for Thyme Scented Salmon with Tuscan White Bean Salad that I found in a Cooking Light Magazine from May 2003? I had stashed it away with my cookbooks and forgotten about it until I was hunting for some new and different dishes. It took a little longer to make as there are quite a few fresh ingredients to chop. But aside from all the chopping, there is nothing complicated about it. I think the elbow grease is worth it as it is both melt-in-your-mouth delicious and wonderfully nutritious.

The bottom line is, once you’ve mastered some basics, branching out an adding new and exciting dishes to the menu set is critical in helping maintain momentum. For me, I found that experimenting kept interested and excited about cooking in this stage. It kept me from stagnating.

Of course, not every dish I tried came out beautifully. But as I gained confidence, my fear of failure melted away. Nothing was ever so bad it was inedible.

My rule of thumb is that I have to prepare a dish three or four times before I really “get” how to both cook and flavor it to my (and my boys’) taste.

Confection Heaven

Dinners weren’t the only thing that I experimented with in this phase. I also threw my hat into the baking and confections arena. Because I love me some sugar.

It all started with my oldest son’s birthday. We decided to throw him a monster truck themed birthday party in our back yard, and I felt compelled to bake him a proper monster truck cake.

Miraculously, my gamble paid off. You can read the step-by-step monster truck cake tutorial here.

Bolstered by my monster truck cake coup, I leaned on my aunt to teach me how to make bread from scratch and she kindly obliged.

Now, once a month, I turn to this step-by-step bread-making tutorial and make four loaves for the month. I keep one loaf out and freeze the others, pulling them out as needed.

Once you start making your own bread, it’s pretty impossible to go back to the store bought kind. I’ve only had to buy bread twice since last summer. Once when we were just back from vacation and had nothing in the pantry, the other when I was battling the flu.

As the summer fruit season kicked into high gear, we also enjoyed

Strawberry shortcakes

{image and recipe via Fine Cooking}

Julia Child’s apple tarts

I followed the recipe from Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking, but this recipe from the Little Blue Hen looks about the same.
{image and recipe via: Little Blue Hen}

Paula Deen’s peach cobbler

Now, this one isn’t for every day as it is not the healthiest concoction. But can I just say, we all went weak at the knees on this one. With fresh picked peaches, it is simply divine.
{image and recipe via: Food Network}

A doggie birthday cake for my youngest

And my personal favorite, raspberry jam.

Since raspberry jam was the very last thing my mom ever made, making it held special significance for me. Surprisingly, it only took 35 minutes from start to finish. And wow, so good. Next summer, I will be making lots, lots, lots more as we plowed through ours before winter really ever set it.

Looking back, the key to maintaining my momentum in this arena was clearly just being willing to experiment – and fail. My first apple tart looked pretty sad. But it tasted great. Each time I make it, it gets prettier and prettier. My first batch of raspberry jam was a disaster. I had to toss the lot because I overcooked it. But I tried again and it turned out beautifully.

Indeed, the overarching theme to this entire journey has been: if at first you don’t succeed…try, try again.

What would you cook if you weren’t afraid to fail?

As I promised yesterday, here is the story of the first part of my journey from someone who relied heavily on packaged goods, frozen dinners, and take out to someone who cooked healthy dinners from scratch at least 6 nights a week.

Phase I: Fits & Starts

Of course I started strong out of the gates.

On January 1st, I think I pored over the 10 cookbooks in my stash for about two hours while I made a detailed menu and shopping list. I carefully printed or copied recipes for the week and organized them in a plastic sleeve that I boldly labeled “Recipes” and kept on the countertop. I dragged the family shopping at Whole Foods, embracing my new Mother Earth image with aplomb. Dinner the first night took me a full 3 hours to get on the table, half of it hands-on prep. I made an absolutely delicious vegetarian lasagna from the delightful cookbook The Healthy Kitchen by Andrew Weil & Rosie Daley.

My husband, a meat lover, thought it was delicious. My oldest shouted, “THANKS FOR MAKING SUCH A BAWICIOUS BRAZAGNA MOMMAY!” My youngest slurped it up too, occasionally grinning at me from across the table between fistfuls of spinach and noodles.

Lights twinkled and the angels sang. My chest swelled with pride.

I can DO this!

And then the weekday hit. I got something resembling the dinner from scratch I had planned on the table the second night. But by the third, my usual chaos was back. Conference calls, immovable deadlines, and revisions, revisions, revisions kept me in a frenzy until 5:55pm. Oops. Thank heavens I still had some frozen Bertolli dinners in the freezer. Three more days like that and my pride-filled chest was nothing more than a deflated sac.

Who am I kidding?!

The image of my mom was a powerful motivator though. The next Sunday morning I got right back in the saddle, poring over the cookbooks, making my menu and shopping lists, although this time I shopped at my local Stop & Shop. The second week went much like the first: three real meals, four quazi-ones.

And around and around I went in fits and starts through most of January and February. I can DO this! Who am I kidding?! I can DO this! Who am I kidding?!

Fortunately, I had done two things right when I framed my resolution. 1) I had given myself plenty of runway to figure this out – 12 whole months. Even though I was technically “failing” in this stage, December still felt far enough in the future that I believed I could crack it if I stuck with it. And (2) I had tied one hell of an emotional motivator to my resolution. How could I not want to carry my mom’s legacy forward for my boys?

I cannot understate the importance of having a massively important emotional reason to keep you going when you want to give up.

Suggested Reading

As my interest in healthy foods/cooking grew, so did my appetite for books on the topic. There were two books I read during this period that made a lasting impression – and strengthened my resolve to make this resolution stick.

The first, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer, the acclaimed novelist and author of Everything Is Illuminated.

The author was motivated to explore the topic by the arrival of his own son. As an on-again, off-again vegetarian his whole life, he felt he needed to come to terms with the issue as he would be making dietary choices on behalf of his child – a responsibility he took very seriously. Just that notion alone reminded me that I hadn’t been making the best dietary choices for my boys (because I was “too busy”). It made me want to redouble my efforts.

Mr. Foer is a wonderful storyteller, so even though this is very much a non-fiction book, it reads more like a fast-paced novel. For me, by far the most compelling portions of his book involved his dive into the horrifying world of factory farming. I honestly had never really thought much about how the animals that I ate and fed my family were raised, slaughtered, and brought to market. But his chilling accounts of the mass cruelty as well as the biological and ecological ramifications stopped me in my tracks. His findings have been reinforced by other books and articles I have read since, so I don’t think anything is fabricated or exaggerated. The book provided a wake up call that has profoundly affected how we think about and consume meat and dairy products. We’re still omnivores, but we only consume meat and dairy products that have been pasture-raised and we made the shift right away. Yes, it’s more expensive, but you offset that by eating less of it, which is healthier anyway.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who is in the process of making a transition to eating healthier.

The second book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michal Pollan brought me even deeper into the world of agriculture.

This book posed exactly the same questions that I was seeking, which is what compelled me to pick it up in the first place, namely: what exactly am I eating? Where does it come from? Why should I care?

Much has been written about this book, so I won’t bore you with another book report. Yet, I feel compelled to say, his analysis of the various elements that create our modern food chain has profoundly and permanently changed how I purchase the ingredients that go into our meals. For example, I no longer equate organic with sustainability and I buy almost exclusively from the Farmer’s Market when it is in season.

Literally, not a day goes by where I don’t think about something I learned in this book.

Have you read any compelling books about food? If so, please share them! Have you read either of the books I mentioned here? If so, what did you think about them?

Continue on to read Part 2 here.

PS – I just love this poster. Even though I no longer AM that woman, it still makes me crack a smile. You can buy one on AllPosters.com.