Setting yourself up for Cooking Success

A clean, well-organized kitchen free of clutter is very helpful for a successful cooking experience. The work you do to ready your kitchen will save you hours down the road. Here are our top tips for getting your kitchen ready to cook.

Basic Cooking Techniques

If you are an experienced cook, you might skip past the sections ”Understanding the Written Recipe” or “How to Boil Water,” but even experienced cooks can learn something new in this section. For the new cook, understanding how a recipe should be written can save you time and grief. After all, a well-written recipe will be one of the best cooking instructors you can have, so knowing the difference between a well-written recipe and a badly written one can make all the difference in your cooking journey.

Meal Planning Part 1

Meal planning is key to ensuring that you have healthy food options available. Incorporating batch cooking into meal planning is one strategy that can work well for big and small households. It saves time and money, reduces waste and stress, and allows you more flexibility.

Meal Planning Part 2

This lesson continues with meal planning for dinner and snacks. You’ll learn how to assemble meal bowls and a salad bar to increase variety in your meal plans. If you are part of a smaller household, remember to freeze leftovers for a future meal or to add leftovers from dinner to your lunch menu for the rest of the week. If you are a large household, you can make double batches of dishes to ensure everyone has enough to eat throughout the week.

Basic Cooking Skills

This section is where you put the cooking techniques you learn into action and begin to see all of the possibilities in WFPB cooking. Practice good knife skills to keep safety at the forefront of your cooking, and don’t forget about the basics of mise en place. It will make everything faster, more efficient, and more fun.

Whole Grain Baking in an Oil-Free Whole Food, Plant-Based Kitchen

Baking, unlike other forms of cooking, is more science than art. Most baked goods follow precise formulas to get the right flavor and texture, and those formulas hold true even in a whole food, plant-based kitchen. But the best bakers go beyond such rules. They are alchemists in the kitchen. They can achieve even better results with the right ingredients and techniques. Baking with whole grains and without highly processed ingredients like oils and highly processed sugars presents a few challenges. But this is the healthiest way to bake, and if you follow the guidelines below, you can make delicious quick breads, cookies, and other flavorful baked goods.

Dessert

Healthy living doesn't mean you can’t enjoy the occasional indulgence. Whole, unprocessed ingredients can come together in endless ways to create tasty desserts that are also good for you. If you do make desserts, remember that they are still often concentrated in calories and it is possible to overeat them.