Everyday Systems

I joined Relish! (http://www.relishrelish.com/) today. It's a menu planning site that gives you a choice of meals for the week and spits out the recipes and shopping lists. I'm really hoping it will get me cooking more often, because I find it pretty impossible to lose weight when I'm eating in restaurants all the time, even if I'm careful to divide out a reasonable portion from the heap of food they give you. I'm not sure exactly why that it is.

Anyway, besides being healthier, it's also less expensive, higher quality and, to me, more gratifying and fun to make food at home. I don't do it more often because I've historically decided that day what to make and gone to the supermarket, which is hard for me to sustain.

I just got back from my first shopping trip with enough for three meals (starting small) and - since some of the recipes require one - finally got a slow cooker after years of thinking about it!

Well done!

Restaurant food has tons of hidden sugars and fat, not to mention sodium which makes one puffy and is rough on the blood pressure.

You are doing yourself a huge health favor by eating more at home with homecooked food and not just for weigh loss purposes.

Blithe Morning wrote: Restaurant food has tons of hidden sugars and fat, not to mention sodium which makes one puffy and is rough on the blood pressure.

You're right about that! Although, it does depend on the restaurant.

I belonged to another menu planning site for a while. They used so many processed foods in their recipes, I may as well have been eating at a restaurant. In the time I belonged, I found two recipes I liked and could use.

The recipes Relish lets you see seem to use fewer processed foods.

I think I have brought this up. I bought a "Montel" pressure cooker several months ago. Aside from a pressure cooker being a pressure cooker, it is very handy, can cook meals thta take 8 hours in the crock pot 40 minutes, and the food is quite tasty. There are volumes of cookbooks on using presure cookers, and the recipes are very adaptable. If you are a beef eater like me they take the toughest cuts and tenderize them.

O43

I like pressure cookers, too. Although, with the slow cooker you can put ingredients in it in the morning (or even the night before and refrigerate them) turn it on and dinner's ready when you get home.

wosnes wrote: You're right about that! Although, it does depend on the restaurant.

Yes, I should have said chain restaurants. You might have to visit around to find a place that prepares most of their food from scratch/with minimally processed ingredients.

wosnes wrote:I like pressure cookers, too. Although, with the slow cooker you can put ingredients in it in the morning (or even the night before and refrigerate them) turn it on and dinner's ready when you get home.

I like the slowcooker as well. But, in the mornings, at times, by the time I am dressed, have cooked the kids breakfast, and have my lunch made, something as simple as a slow cooker can be something that I don't pay attention to.

I also like the spontaneity of the pressure cooker. I bought my mom one from Macy's. I bit more upscale than Montel and she loves it.

Blithe Morning wrote:

wosnes wrote: You're right about that! Although, it does depend on the restaurant.

Yes, I should have said chain restaurants. You might have to visit around to find a place that prepares most of their food from scratch/with minimally processed ingredients.

Casual chain restaurants (TGI Fridays, Chili's, Applebee's, and places of that sort) are often particularly bad about this kind of thing. They use a lot of high-calorie and high-sodium ingredients, and they serve large portions. They're actually even worse than fast food places, in large part because the portions tend to be bigger.

I highly recommend Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything for new cooks. I prefer the old yellow edition, but the new red one is OK, too. It has info on what to look for in the store, and how to know if something is done- the stuff that people who aren't used to cooking don't always know. There are also lots of simple recipes.