Anyone even remotely interested in improving their skills as a home cook will often look to how they can improve complexity, be that learning to garnish correctly, preparing the same ingredient in multiple different ways, or finding the right blends of herbs and spices to make their dishes sing anew.

Of course, all of this is wonderful, there’s no shame in learning added techniques, challenging your preconceptions, and most importantly of all, leaning into healthier, more sustainable alternatives where you can.

However, it’s also true that from time to time, you may feel a little overwhelmed with the number of ingredients you have, recipes you hope to make, or adjustments you feel you need to keep up with. When you have a cupboard full of hot sauces you’ve seen online, too many preserves you’ve forgotten the contents of and an ever-full freezer that you should really focus on before buying new foods – you can get ahead of yourself a little.

This is why there’s real virtue in finding simplicity in your dishes, and moving on from there. In this post, we’ll discuss how to do this, and what the benefits of such a new approach can be:

Ensuring Simple Ingredients Stand Out

It’s amazing just how much you can achieve with simple, but versatile ingredients. You may even be able to save money by using a subscription plan that provides “wonky” vegetables that might not have made the picture-perfect supermarket selection, to ensure you always have a basic set of veggies to work with. 

Steaming broccoli, and carrots, learning to cook with potatoes, grilling green beans and cauliflower, all of this can work wonders for adding some dense texture to your dishes, while also remaining as healthy as possible. Ultimately, this works better than flavourings, artificial sweeteners, and any other shortcuts out there. It will also help you gain real confidence in your food choices because if you can nail your vegetables, many dishes reveal themselves to you.

Perfecting One Cooking Method

It’s also good to specialize where you can, for instance putting together small sources for your chicken can help a bodybuilding diet remain much more diverse and palatable. Getting involved with grilling can also be quite healthy, from grilling fish that you can then fillet and add to your dishes, to the aforementioned vegetables, all of this can taste delicious and ensures no matter what, healthy food is simple, quick to make, and always fresh.

Of course, it can also be nice to have an appliance to help you out during the rushed moments of your day. A rice cooker, air fryer, or slow cooker offers “set and forget” cooking methods that genuinely do work very well. Over time, the staples of your diet will be simple to make, but always uniform in quality, and prepared with perfect portion control.

Meal Prep & Storage

Rotating meals throughout the week is still possible with meal prep, you just need to cook in vaster quantities. After all, simplifying your cooking also means simplifying the time it takes to meal prep, wash your dishes, and implement good eating into your lifestyle.

So, if you’re cooking a large chilli, you might double up on the quantity to make sure your essential ingredients are used up, then portion those into perfect meals, freeze them and heat them up later in the week with the exact same taste profile you enjoyed previously. For those who often have a busy working lunch, or have little time after work to deal with, this can be a genuine timesaving effort.

Ultimately, simple meals work best for meal prep, as separating ingredients by food group helps retain freshness when you come to eat them. As such, there’s no better way to learn disciplined, focus cooking than this.

Disciplining Your Indulgences

Simple recipes are often the most impactful, and this can certainly be felt when it comes to indulging in beautiful desserts. For instance, taking the time to make this lemon cookie recipe can be nothing if not delicious, because the ingredient list is small yet the power of the lemon really cuts through – the essence of good, simple cooking is making basic ingredients sing, and so this would be a perfect example.

This way, you realize you don’t need overbearing amounts of sugar, or millions of hot sauces in your cupboard, or huge sets of spice rubs and blends to get the most out of each ingredient. For every meal, making a certain ingredient sing will always work out better.

With this advice, you’re sure to simplify your cooking, and see the virtue in that pursuit.