People often ask me what “hands-free cooking” actually means. Juggling your food? Cooking with your feet?
Not so much. Hands-free cooking is more like a philosophy, an attitude towards cooking. It’s about not being afraid to cook for yourself. It’s about eating good food and being aware of its impact on the world. It’s about using food as a tool to change the world. Hands-free cooking means:
- Cooking for yourself, as often as possible
- Being comfortable in the kitchen, with or without recipes
- Celebrating things that taste good
- Using simple ingredients and making things from scratch
- Buying fresh, local, organic foods
- Making sure that what we eat has a positive effect on the world around us
If you do these things, you keep your hands “free” to make delicious food, instead of “tying them up” with following instructions, worrying about how things will come out, feeling like you have to order takeout because cooking is too hard, feeling like what you do doesn’t matter in the world. Hands-free cooking can help you keep free of all those things.
In my experience, many people learn how to follow recipes instead of learning how to cook. A real cook should be able to walk into a well-stocked kitchen and pull a full meal out of it, because they understand how ingredients interact. They have a knowledge of how to cook simple dishes, and the confidence to experiment. This sort of cooking is more fun than following recipes, because it encourages and requires creativity. If it takes more mental energy, the food is that much better in the end. And it’s a useful skill even when you are following a recipe: when something goes wrong, you need to know how to improvise and correct the problem.
Hands-free cooking demands a greater awareness of where your food comes from. When you make things from scratch, you recognize how paltry many of our food industry substitutes are. Bread from the store is never a substitute for fresh-from-the-oven homemade bread; it’s not even the same species. Cooking with real ingredients, preferably local and organic, instead of convenience foods means that we know exactly what we’re eating, and we can make it just the way we like. Even better, we’re supporting small farmers, local shops, and people who care about the environment and good food as much as we do.