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If your homemade meals never quite hit the mark and cooking feels more frustrating than fun, you're not alone. Not everyone (myself included!) is a master chef, but understanding a few key fundamentals can completely change the way you feel in the kitchen.

Recently, I sat down with food writer and former butcher shop owner Steve Sabicer to uncover the small changes that make a big difference. We explored the top three mistakes home cooks make, the essential tools actually worth having, and the food chemistry tricks that instantly boost flavor.

Whether you're tired of bland meals or just want to feel more confident cooking for yourself and your family, these insights will help you finally enjoy the food you make.

The Three Mistakes That Are Sabotaging Your Meals

Steve's perspective completely opened my eyes to why so many of us struggle in the kitchen. After years of owning butcher shops and restaurants, he's seen the same patterns over and over again. The good news? These are all totally fixable problems that don't require expensive equipment or culinary school.

Here are three big mistakes Steve shared that are sabotaging your meals:

1. Under-seasoning your food - Steve pointed out something that changed my whole perspective: most of your salt intake comes from processed and packaged foods, not what you add at home. When you cook from scratch, you actually need to season properly for food to taste good. Salt isn't just about making things salty—it's like a flavor amplifier that makes everything else taste more like itself.
2. Not browning your food properly - That gorgeous golden-brown color you see on perfectly cooked food isn't just pretty—it's where all the flavor lives. This process (called the Maillard reaction) literally creates new flavor compounds. Think about the difference between toast and plain bread, or a beautifully seared piece of meat versus one that's just cooked through.
3. Skipping ingredients that seem "optional" - I used to do this all the time—sea salt in a chocolate chip cookie recipe or lemon juice in a savory dish and think, "I'll just skip that." But these ingredients actually work together chemically to enhance and balance flavors. As Steve put it, "If ingredients are in the recipe, they're probably there because they're interacting with each other and building more flavor."

Setting Up Your Kitchen for Success

Here's the relief I needed to hear: you don't need a kitchen full of expensive gadgets to cook well. Steve's approach is refreshingly practical—focus on a few quality essentials rather than a bunch of specialty items gathering dust in your drawers.

Here's what you actually need to get started:

• 8-inch chef's knife - This becomes your workhorse for almost everything
• Small paring knife - For detailed work when the chef's knife is too big
• Stainless steel sauce pan and frying pan - Start with these two, build from there
• Honing steel - To keep your knife sharp between actual sharpenings

The foundation is really that good chef's knife. Surprisingly, people actually get hurt more with dull knives than sharp ones. A sharp knife does exactly what you want it to do, while a dull knife fights you and can slip. Steve recommends getting a simple hand sharpener from the grocery store and using it monthly, plus a honing steel between sharpenings. It sounds scary, but it's actually pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it.

Another piece of equipment that seems more intimidating than it is? Cast iron pans. I'll admit something embarrassing here—I almost ruined my cast iron pan by washing it with soap before meeting Steve. Turns out cast iron is porous and absorbs everything, so the key is seasoning it properly. You apply oil to fill those tiny pores and bake it into the pan, creating a natural non-stick surface. The golden rule: never use soap (it strips away your seasoning), and always re-season after cleaning. It's not as high-maintenance as it sounds once you understand what's happening.

The Chemistry That Makes Food Actually Taste Good

Understanding why certain combinations work makes cooking so much more intuitive, even for simple everyday meals.

Here are the key flavor-building principles that changed everything for me:

• Fat balances and adds body - It's not just calories; fat mellows acidic flavors and gives dishes richness. Steve adds olive oil to tomato sauce specifically to round out those sharp, acidic notes.
• Acid brightens everything - A splash of lemon juice, vinegar, or yogurt makes other flavors pop. This is why pickles work so well with rich foods—that acid cuts through and balances.
• The magic trio: onions, celery, carrots - Called mirepoix in fancy cooking terms, this combination creates an incredible flavor foundation. Sweetness from carrots, natural saltiness from celery, body from onions.

Understanding these basics makes cooking way more intuitive. You start to see why certain combinations work and can improvise with confidence.

Easy Meals That Actually Work

Once you understand these basics, cooking becomes a lot less mysterious. Steve shared a couple of his go-to recipes that perfectly show these principles in action.

Steve's Chicken Mirabella is a perfect example of how these principles work together. It combines chicken with prunes, green olives, capers, garlic, and oregano, mixed with olive oil and vinegar, then baked for 45 minutes. The combination might seem unexpected, but it creates this beautiful balance of sweet, salty, tangy, and rich flavors while giving you plenty of protein. The best part? It's incredibly simple—just mix everything together and let the oven do the work.

For a vegetarian option, his lentil walnut bolognese completely changed how I think about plant-based meals. Using cooked lentils and crushed walnuts creates this "meaty" sauce that's incredibly satisfying. The lentils give you protein and texture, while the walnuts add that roasted, hearty flavor. Serve it over cauliflower rice instead of pasta, and you skip the blood sugar roller coaster while still feeling totally satisfied.

Pro tip from Steve: don't crowd your pan when sautéing. Give everything space so the pan stays hot enough to actually brown your food instead of just steaming it. I've been doing this wrong forever—piling everything in there three inches high and wondering why nothing crisped up properly.

Why This Matters for Your Health

In my practice, I see constantly how the fear of cooking leads to terrible food choices. When you can't make anything that tastes good at home, you end up relying on processed foods or takeout, which are loaded with exactly the salt and additives we're trying to avoid.

But there's something bigger happening here. When you understand that fat, acid, and proper seasoning create real satisfaction—both nutritionally and flavor-wise—you stop that constant cycle of snacking and sugar cravings. Food doesn't have to be just fuel that you break down into macro counts. When meals actually satisfy you, eating becomes naturally more balanced.

Steve's weekend confidence-building strategy:

• Pick 4-5 recipes you're curious about
• Spend one weekend (4-5 hours total) making them all
• Choose recipes with similar ingredients to save money
• Focus on getting repetition with knife skills and learning how your equipment works
• End up with a week's worth of meals in your freezer

You don't need to do this every weekend, but doing it once builds the confidence to recreate those meals quickly on busy weeknights. It's like giving yourself cooking boot camp, but way more fun.

Cooking really doesn't have to be this big, intimidating thing. With a few basic tools, some understanding of how flavors work together, and the confidence to actually season your food properly, you can make meals that are better than most restaurants.

The goal isn't perfection—it's just making food you actually want to eat. Start with one or two of these techniques and build from there. Your taste buds (and your health) will definitely thank you.

Want to hear the full conversation with Steve Sabicer? Listen to the complete episode for more kitchen tips, food storage advice, and his take on why cooking should be both medicine and joy.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Disclaimer: The transcript below is provided for your convenience and may contain typos, errors, or grammatical inconsistencies, as it has not been professionally edited or proofread. Please enjoy it as-is and read at your own discretion.

Please note: The content shared in this podcast and blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical guidance. 

 

 Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am recording this actually after the interview that I just had here with Steve Sabicer. He is a food author and I wanna tell you friends, this is an episode to listen all the way through the end. This episode is perfect. If you are like me and you are not a master chef, he is going to explain.

What are some simple ways that you can set up your kitchen? Some simple tools. What are the three biggest mistakes that people make when they're cooking at home? You know how your food never tastes good and you're like, why is this? And then you just wanna go back to the restaurant. So he gives us those tips.

He talks about some high protein recipes that you can try that are easy. He will explain to you some of the chemistry that happens when you're. Cooking at home that frankly I feel maybe intuitively I was doing some of these things, but I never knew why he really made it make sense. And we talk about a lot of preparing different things.

How long can things last in the freezer? It is endless what we talk about. I really think that you're gonna enjoy this interview. If you're loving this episode, make sure to share it with a friend. That's the way that we can really get the word out. It's super incredible that we have Steve er on today, and I hope that you enjoy this interview.

 Welcome back to another episode of the podcast everybody. I'm really excited. We are doing something different today. I have on today Steve Ker. Can we start, Steve, where you just introduce yourself, give us a little bit of context, who you are, and then I know we're gonna talk about a lot of great things today. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on the show today. This is exciting. Yeah, I'm actually a food writer. It's what I do most and I have a substack, called Enlightened Omnivore.

And what I try to do is tell stories about the history, the emotions, and the love of food, but not make it too intimidating because I think there's a lot of fantasizing about food and kind of the over romanticizing of food. And really, for me it is very spiritual. Food is something that's both medicine and joy for me, but it's really about, everything in moderation.

That's what I say on my podcast. That's what I say in my writing. It's all about how do we use food in our everyday life to make sure it's balanced, make sure it's wholesome and that it's enjoyable. I have a background in hospitality. I actually owned whole animal butcher shops here in southern California.

I've owned restaurant, I've owned, a brewery, and we, really worked to make all of these different, businesses sustainable, responsible, and really, wholesome and enjoyable for everyone. And that's where I think food is, its most powerful. It's really nice when you talk about this, how it has so much more meaning than just, I really don't like in the health space with food, how people say, oh, it's fuel. And then they break it down to a macro count. It just becomes this artificial thing that you have no relationship to.

It feels in your body anymore or where it comes from. I think that's probably why I really connect with your writing. If someone was gonna say I wanna get more involved in the kitchen, but I literally don't know what tools to have or what to put in the kitchen, would you have a starting place?

Like, I don't know, maybe like the top five things where if you have this, you might get better results down the road. Just like anything, the kitchen has a tool set and if we don't have the right tools, we can't do what we need to. And and I find that a lot of people who are intimidated by the kitchen is 'cause their kitchen's not set up right.

And from the basics of it, if you haven't designed your kitchen from the base up, you get what you get with your house or your apartment, but making it comfortable, a comfortable space for you because you're gonna be, in there for 15 or 20 minutes at least, if not a half. Hour. It depends on, how it, you want to get. So at the very least, keeping it ergonomic, like putting everything in the same place when you're done with it. Having things at, waist level or just above waist level so that you don't have to lean over with your back. Don't put things that you use often in hard to reach spots, all that kind of stuff.

That's, the first step. But then making sure you've got a handful of tools that are really what you like to use or what is comfortable for you to use. I mean the number one is a chef's knife. And that's like an eight inch, what people call in the movies, A butcher's knife , it's a big, long.

Thick, blade with a nice handle, and it's about eight inches long. And, if you Google Chef's knife, you'll see plenty of pictures of them. There's millions of options. I actually recommend, an inexpensive one that's very durable. Stainless steel because it's easy to sharpen, but not so cumbersome.

They can run 30 to $40, but if you have a good chef's knife that's comfortable in your hand and you feel the comfort when you're using it, you're gonna be more inclined to do more in the kitchen. Well, can I ask, is, is that the point that the knife feels good or is it that it cuts stuff better?

Or is it literally just that the job is easier so you don't give up? You know, it's all of the above. I mean, a good knife. Is a sharp knife. It doesn't matter how, I mean that, it's that simple. I mean, it's simple, but do you know I have never sharpened a knife in my house? So is this, , are people doing this?

Because I feel like that's not a concept to me, what you're describing. So there's a lot of ways to do it. I find that people get hurt more in the kitchen with dull instruments than sharp ones. Yeah. And so keeping your knife, what we call in the industry honed, which means rather than removing parts of the blade, you know, metal from the blade, you're just straightening the blade.

And you've seen this, all the time on cooking shows. They've got this rod, which is a honing steel. It's often called a steel or a honing steel. And then you'll see the chef, slide the blade across it, it makes great noise and it's all, it actually is serving a function.

It's keeping your blade straight, which then gives it a sharper edge. But after a while, that doesn't work anymore. You've rubbed it against that metal so much that it's actually taken dent, it's dented and taken metal off of your blade so that it's no longer sharpened. And with a stainless steel knife, which is easy to clean, it's dishwasher safe, it's gonna become dull more often.

So I would recommend if you have a stainless steel knife that you buy one of these hand sharpeners, you can get 'em at the grocery store. And all they are, are sharpening stones that you can drag the blade across a number of times. There's always an instruction guide. It's, five or 10 times on each side, and then you wipe the blade off because there's gonna be some metal dust on it, and that gives you an edge.

And then if you use your steel again, your honing steel in between sharpenings, you can prolong a blade's sharpness for weeks, if not months. It depends on how often you use it. Okay. In the butcher shop, we would sharpen our knives, every week, and we would hone them every few minutes because we're using the blade for hours at a time.

In the kitchen. If you're only using it for, a few minutes. That blade is probably good for a month or two. And then if you have one of these simple sharpeners, you can do it at home. And there's actually people who do knife sharpening, in your area. There's folks that you'll see, I mean, actually we've got a guy who's like on the side of the road in our neighborhood who just like has a setup in his truck.

That's so funny. Yeah. And he's like an Instagram account and you just like, go to him, you know, where is he today? And you can pull up and he'll sharpen your knives in 10 minutes. If you have really nice knives or you use them a lot, that's a great service. But I think these store bought solutions get you 90% of the way there with less of the fuck.

Okay. So that's the number one tool is the chef's knife. It's. Partner is the pairing knife, which is just, they have like a little one inch blade on them, and that's simply a tool so that when the chef's knife is too big, and you might hurt yourself using it, you use the pairing knife, and this is to cut the tops off of strawberries. Maybe to dice up vegetables a little bit.

It's to take the ends and the tops off of fruits and vegetables especially. That's just really helpful to have because if you use the chef's night to do that work, you're likely to hurt yourself. Mm-hmm. , And I'm all about, I mean, pots and pans, we could talk for days about that.

And I have my own, cast iron pan fetish, which is, another discussion for another time. But, but stainless steel pans, a sauce pan, and a frying pan. Those are essential. You need those two things and you can get a lot of other pans and for the most part, when you buy a set of pans, you get.

More pans than you'll ever need. Yeah. So if you have a small space or, you're starting out and you can't afford a full set, I would just buy a sauce pan and a frying pan. And,, if you're a small family or an individual, an eight inch frying pan is fine. You could go up to a 12 inch. But, that's the simplest way to start.

Yeah. There's a bunch of other tools like I 10 or 12 are in my house essentially. But,, if you wanna check those out, I have a list on my website, or we could talk more about it. Perfect. Let's link to it. Because one, okay. I do wanna talk about, the cast iron skillet for a second because I, this was so serendipitous.

'cause before, meeting you a few months ago, I had bought one at home and I thought I would just wash it normally. And you're like, no, no, no. So can you tell people what to do with it? 'cause maybe I'm the last one to know, but I didn't know there was like a special way to handle it. A true cast iron skillet is made out of this substance called cast iron.

This is like, it's a, actually a low grade metal, that is really heavy and really dense. It's also a great absorber of heat. And so what it means is that you can store a ton of heat in this metal, in this pot or pan, and when you add anything to the pan, it doesn't lower the temperature of the pan very much.

And so you keep the heat going. And when you're doing intense frying or searing, it's perfect. Especially for meats, like it is the best for searing meats that the issue that a lot of people have is that cast iron is porous. Yeah. And so it absorbs everything. And if you put an egg in a cast iron pan that has not been properly seasoned or.

Prepared, the surface prepared. You'll never get that egg off. That egg will stick to that pan forever. It's shocking. I literally did this, so don't worry, don't worry. We have a solution. The answer. Yeah. So I wish more cast iron pans came with instructions. You can Google an instruction on how to season the pan, but it's basically applying oil to fill in all those nooks and crannies and then baking it in to the pan so that it creates a layer between the metal and the food that's organic.

That's natural. And so what happens is, as you use that pan more and more, more of the organic material from all the things you've cooked, fill in all the nooks and crannies and create this natural Teflon across the top of the pan. Mm-hmm. And if you use soap. To wash your pan or you don't season it first.

By applying this oil, you tear all that Teflon off, all that natural layer off of the pan and then it's gonna stick every time you use it. Okay. So I literally met you before, like I had it coming in the mail and then we had the conversation. So I feel like I didn't screw it up too much based on what we just said right now, but, 'cause you told me that, but that's, I wonder why they don't have instructions for it.

'cause I feel like, I don't think everyone knows this at all. Well, and I think Americans too, we're, we're really, , germ conscious. Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. And, and clean, cleanliness conscious. And so I think they'd sell less pans if you really told people how to use. So there are other types of cast iron pans too that, that do away with this issue.

They're called enameled cast iron. And so it'll be a cast iron center and then it's enameled with a porcelain, around the cast iron. Mm. And that doesn't need to be seasoned., That porcelain is a smooth surface. You still need to use cooking fat, so it's not a non-stick surface.

And that's the big difference between cast iron and like a non-stick pan. You know, Teflon was the old brand. Now they have all kinds of new technologies, some of which are just Teflon by another name. Others are a little less chemical. I'm always nervous of plastics and chemicals and so there's a ceramic non-stick, all kinds of different surfaces.

But these pans often are sold as pans that say that they don't need any fat for cooking. So you'll see them drop a fried egg in there, drop an egg in and fry it without any butter or oil. I would never encourage you to cook without oil or fat because fat is flavor and fat has a lot of nutrients in it.

And it also ensures you get browning on your food, which is also flavor. And so if you go without the fat, you're gonna go without flavor for sure. Non-stick pans are great because they're easy to clean, but you sh, in my opinion, you should always apply some fat to your cooking if you're frying or sauteing.

I know it feels like we went down a rabbit hole, but this is actually very helpful because when I make eggs and stuff, I actually do use a little bit of a fat, and it's a hundred percent what you're talking about. My satisfaction levels through the roof, everything about that meal is different.

And I often find with patients that they're so scared of calories, so they think, what's the first thing they think cut the fat. Right. And then they're scrounging all day long. They're eating random snacks, they're having urges and cravings for sugary things. It's like, we need protein, we need fat and we need carbs.

We actually need all of it. Right? Yeah. And so I'm actually glad that we're talking about this with the flavor because I think that that's one of those senses that if we're not gonna meet the need, we pretend like we can just do random diets and stuff. But if we're not gonna have the flavor there, it's not gonna work long term.

I don't see it work for people. The biggest mistakes I find people making in the kitchen, especially first time cooks. Yeah. There's three of them. Yeah. One, they always under season their food. And there's actually been a ton of studies to show that the majority, when people, you know, we always hear about people having high blood pressure or too much sodium, too much salt in their diet.

And the FDA's done studies on this, the vast majority of your salt intake comes from processed and packaged foods. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it's, it's foods that have been, that are on the shelf in a box or a bag. That's where the majority of your salt comes from. And so when people cook at home, they're actually shocked at how much salt you put in your food to it.

It's a flavor enhancer. So the whole point is salt is magnifying the natural flavors in the ingredients you're cooking. A hundred percent. And if you don't use enough, yeah. Yeah. If you don't use enough, the food taste is bland and you're like, why can't I make my homemade food taste as good as the restaurant or as good as out of this box?

And it's not, you don't wanna add as much salt as you're seeing in these processed foods. There's a whole lot of reasons why they put that much salt in them. But you can use, you know, if you're using a tablespoon of salt in a, in a recipe, that's actually well within the dietary guidelines of how much salt you should have, and it's helping the food taste better.

So that, that's the biggest mistake I see people make is they skimp on the salt and then they feel like the food doesn't taste good. Yeah. And then the other one is kind of what we were just talking about is not browning your foods well enough. And so if you're, if like you're saying, if you're making those eggs and you're not using the fat to, to brown the food, you're not searing the meat.

If you're eating meat, you're not toasting the nuts that you're putting in a salad that browning. Process enhances the flavor too. And it's free. It's not adding anything to the food. It's actually converting the energy, the calories in the food from a starch to a sugar. It's this thing called the my yard reaction, which is, you know, kind of a chemically cool thing.

You can, there's awesome videos online, if you wanna see exactly what's happening, but it's chemically changing the food in a natural process. Just like if you put a piece, you know, put a slice of toast in the toaster and then eat a piece of bread out of the fridge. If you, if you taste those two things, they taste completely differently.

Radical. Yeah. And that's because of this, this my yard reaction. And the same thing happens with all your food. Yeah, a note on this, and I don't know if this applies, but,, there's this,, dessert, this high protein dessert that I love, where it's literally you have, you know, spring roll, so like a rice wrapper, you know, you get it wet so you can work with it.

And then I put Greek yogurt in it with some, like frozen strawberries or blueberries that I've melted down and do it in a pan, both sides. And the fact that the yogurt gets warm, the bear, the berries are warm, the crispness that develops, and yeah, there's a little bit of a spray in the pan, right?

But it is so different compared to eating cold yogurt. Everyone's like, oh, does that work? Is it good? It's another level of amazing, but no one would think to warm a yogurt. Like, that's like, I don't know, like, why do we not warm yogurt in in the US When, when I see how that recipe works. Well, and you're talking about the third mistake I think a lot of people make when I see it, and that is, leaving out ingredients or, or in this situation, like second guessing an ingredient because you, you see it in the fridge.

So should it be warm? You know, the, my arbery reaction is actually changing the surface. And so that's when you're toasting that spring roll, you're turning the flavors that are turning brown into these more toasty flavors Yeah. That are gonna add not only, dynamics in flavor, but also in texture.

And so that gets your body all excited and that gives you crunch. It's as much a mental game as it is what's going on on your tongue. Totally. But leaving out these other ingredients is a huge loss in terms of flavor profile as well. And so, like back to salt, if you take salt out of things like baked goods, like it's an, it's a flavor enhancer and it's also a sweetness enhancer.

So if you are cooking like a low sugar chocolate chip cookie, let's say you're baking that, adding some salt will actually intensify the chocolate and a sweet. Profiles, it'll make the cookie taste sweeter without as much sugar. And that's something that's counterintuitive. People like, why am I putting salt in my baked goods?

I mean, bakers know, but the rest of us, I'm not a baker really. My daughter is a great one, but I'm like, why are we adding salt to this recipe? And she's like, no, no, this is gonna intensify the other flavors in it. I'm so glad that you, that you brought this up because I always do this 'cause I learned it from my mom, but I didn't know why we did it.

And I'm like, well, it's just what you do. But like, I didn't understand why, so this is great. I haven't been doing that wrong. No, it's totally right. My mom would do the opposite. She would take the salt out because she didn't really know why, and you end up using more sugar to make things taste sweeter than you need to. And then the other thing, omitting ingredients. You talked about yogurt. One of the things that people don't realize about yogurt is it's actually acidic. Yogurt has lactic acid in it, and acid is a really important flavor enhancer for us for food.

I mean, when you, you think of like, okay, salad dressing, it's oil and vinegar mostly, and that vinegar is an acid that brightens flavors. Intensifies flavors, gives you tang in your mouth. All of these kind of enjoyments with food. And so if you leave out things like lemon juice or vinegar or in your case, adding that yogurt to that spring roll is adding some tang and some zest and some acid that brightens it up in your mouth and also intensifies the flavors of the vegetables.

Or maybe the wrapper itself. And so all of this stuff is chemistry working together. We don't need to remember the chemistry, but we need to remember that the ingredients are in there for a reason. If they're on in the recipe, they're probably because they're interacting with each other and complimenting each other and building more flavor for us to enjoy the food normally without a ton more calories.

This is so fascinating, everything you're bringing up, because I'm thinking to myself, like, I love when I have a plate to have some pickles on it or something, right? Like I always talk about this, I want the sweet and I want the salty. Just when I think about from a health lane, for me, I used to make that a problem and then I started to decide like, no, we have to make this work.

So it's like we'll have something salty and then we're gonna figure out something that works that's in the sweet lane, whether it's, I don't care if it's a protein drink or what it is, but the point is, it's exactly what you're talking about, which is like, the desire remains to make this need met. And how do you do it in a way that I think a little bit, it could make more sense based on what you're talking about.

Is there anything else besides salt and, the tangy stuff that you think people leave out or is, are those like the main ones? Well, the fat is the other one you talked about. Oh yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, feeling our bodies need fat. It's a great energy. And you could talk more about the nutritional benefits of it.

But for me in cooking, fat really rounds out the other flavors and it adds body. Yeah. Like I'll take tomato sauce that I'll make a spaghetti sauce and if it doesn't have any meat in it, I'll add some olive oil at the end. Not to saute or, you know, help cook the ingredients, but to actually round out the acidic flavors that are in there.

All that tomato juice is very acidic and the vegetables, and maybe if you've added wine or something like that to it. And so the fat will actually round out those bright flavors and give you more mouthfeel and then more calories and sustenance. I mean, there's very few calories. Yeah.

It's almost all carbohydrate in a tomato sauce. And so if you wanna add some fat, to round that out. And protein, if you can add, meat or you can also do things like lentils and nuts if you're a vegetarian. And round that out so that you're getting a more balanced, caloric intake.

And it's also culinary. Like that's, we talk about it more in how it changes the flavor, but I think there's a direct connection to, I believe there's a direct connection to the nutritional benefit. Your body's craving these things because it needs them a hundred percent. Like I don't actually, in my philosophy, I don't tell people go buy the low fat yogurts.

People end up massively overeating. They're never satisfied. It's like you a hundred percent with needing the fats. Now I have a question. If you buy, like a store bought like a REOs, right? Like it doesn't have added sugar, da da da, can you add the olive oil to that? Like can you prep it in a little pan or is it, or is this like you have to make it for you to do these kind of techniques?

No, I'm a big believer in doctoring up prepared things. Okay. If you, you know, you always need to look at the label because it's shocking what things have in them. Extra sugar, extra salt, extra ingredients that you might have allergies to. But yeah, with a tomato sauce, you can buy something off the shelf that's low sugar or no sugar, if that's what you're looking for, and then bring it home, put it in the pan, and yeah, add your favorite things.

Like if that's, I always add, a pound of ground beef to my spaghetti sauce. And like I said, you can even add like, a dollop of butter if you don't like the flavor of olive oil. Um, there's different ways to doctor. There's no rules in cooking, all right? You should be able to do whatever, satisfies your, your body's needs, but you can do it in a way where you know what's on the label.

And then if you're actually, needing to manage your calories or, or needing to manage your, allergies or allergens. You can do that. It, you don't have to start from scratch. I love that. I'm a big believer that you, there's a couple things you can start from scratch that are cost effective and easy to do, and spaghetti sauce is way up on the list.

'cause I don't know about you, but when I go to the grocery store and see spaghetti sauce now for five, six, $7, I saw a $10. Jar of spaghetti sauce. It's like, how is spaghetti now a $20 homemade meal? When I get home with you, I feel like I'm, I'm buying that $10 bottle because those are the ones that don't have added sugar.

And so they feel like, well now we're gonna, because we made it healthier, now we're gonna up the price. Yeah. You can make a spaghetti sauce in 10 or 15 minutes and you can make, and that's if you make a single serving or 20 gallons, it really doesn't take any more time. Okay. And then you can store it, you can save it.

And so I make spaghetti sauce all the time and I always at least double or triple the recipe. What do you, how do you make it? And that way I've got like, what goes in it. Yeah. Start out really simple with you. You know, one of the things that you'll see or hear about is mi POIs or sofrito. These are European terms for three ingredients, the kind of the trifecta of any soup or sauce.

And that's onions, celery, and carrots. Ah, start out with that. Th talk about chemical reaction. These things as you cook them down on a low heat for five or seven minutes in a pan, in a sauce pan with a little bit of olive oil, they start to change flavor profile. They start to work together, and they actually are like this fantastic partnership of flavor, and they are the base for almost all European cooking.

Mm. And if you think about it makes sense. The carrots add that sweetness, you talk about the celery is a natural MSG actually it's an incredible salt. And the onion goes, it creates that body. It goes from, a very, you know, if you've ever tasted a raw onion, it's. Very sharp and can be overpowering.

But once it cooks down, it gets sweet and smooth and it flattens out those bright flavors. Yeah. And it creates body, it almost feels like meat. And so those three items create that base. Yeah. And then you add your canned tomatoes or if you've got fresh tomatoes in the garden and cook those for a long time, 20 or 30 minutes to soften the acids and the tomatoes so that it doesn't taste so fresh and bright tomato, it starts to have that umami flavor that comes from cooking a tomato for a long time.

And you almost get little brown edges around the sides of the pan. You wanna reintroduce those? 'cause that's all flavor country, that's all beautiful flavor. That my yard reaction and then salt it. Put, put your favorite herbs in it. Rosemary and or oregano are kind of the go-tos, garlic, but you can experiment.

I use Herb de Provence, which is a French Mediterranean blend of herbs. You could put cumin in it, and make it a little, kind of more central American flair. Whatever you want to do. But if you want a nice European Italian spaghetti sauce, it's six ingredients. It's tomatoes, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and your favorite herb.

Gosh, I, I, people that are listening are gonna be like, what is happening to Matea? Because I always like food that's already prepped and easy. This sounds really amazing. And it's interesting. I grew up with,, a mom from Germany and we made, we would always make, stuff like this, right? I always remember, we always start with the onion and then, and there would be like a timing of the veggies, right?

Because this has to go first and then that comes next. But this does sound easy and amazing. Like, it, it looks like you wanna do it. Yeah. This sounds doable. Well, and if you are excited about cooking or you make this for the first time, you're like, oh my God, this is great. I wanna do this again. You can, you can experiment with the, the process and which goes first.

And you can research. I mean, when I was a kid, I was an unusual kid. My mom had the book, the Joy of Cooking, and I would just sit there on the weekends and read the joy of cooking, . And so I wanted to learn everything about eggs. I would read everything about eggs. Not everybody wants to do that.

So. I'm a believer that homemade, with minimal procedure, minimal finesse, yeah. We call it in the industry is better than anything processed. So yeah, just get in there, put everything in the pan at once. If you give it a good saute, I know a good brown, great. Five, seven minutes of that don't burn anything.

If it starts to turn dark brown, turn the heat way down or take the pot off the flame. Yeah. And then add the tomatoes and then there's little hacks too, like, you know, you can add things like wine or like I said, garlic or other ingredients that are special. You can also just add things that have flavor, like soy sauce.

Some people are shocked. But if I don't have wine, I add soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce to my. Spaghetti sauce, and you don't add as much. Like if the recipe says a cup of wine, you really want to add like a half a tablespoon of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce as a substitute.

I mean, that's obvious, but I'm glad you said it. No, be well, you think about it, right? It's like it tastes wine. It has, a watery down flavor, right? I mean, it has flavor, but it's basically. Worcester shear sauce is got wine in it that's been reduced. Totally. So it's just totally, all the moisture's been taken out of it, but the flavor's still there.

And I mean, there's a lot of other things in those two ingredients, but they add that umami and the rounded out bright flavors that you don't have in the basic ingredients alone. Yeah. And they add a lot of salt, which, you know, that salt flavor. You wanna make sure you don't add as much salt in the recipe if you're adding those two ingredients because there's so much salt and soy and so much salt and Worcestershire sauce.

Leave out the salt, taste it, see if it's okay. And then always throughout the whole process of cooking, you're adding salt along the way because you wanna make sure every part of the dish is seasoned. And because it changes over time as things cook that, these chemical reactions are happening.

So the flavors are changing and you might wanna wait a little while before you put all the salt in because you may not need it. Totally. I remember we would make a lot of, veggie soup growing up. It's one of my favorite things, it's like bullon broth, all the veggies chopped up, and then I add a little bit of pickle juice.

This is, this is my thing. Um, it's, it's such a nice, it's, it's everything that you're talking about, but now I understand all the different parts. But one thing, if it would be too salty, I know my mom would be like, Hey, let's add some more potatoes. 'cause they can kind of like, get some of that salt, if that makes sense.

But it, it's really amazing hearing you talk about all these things. 'cause I know that it's all chemistry, but I don't think I've had someone explain it easily like you have. And so it's really hitting home. Can I double back to one thing here? When you're talking about, under seasoning foods, you talked about salt.

Are there any other, herbs or spices where you feel like, hey, if you needed like a few in greet a few of them in the house, you'd be like, buy these. I know it can be palate specific based on a culture and stuff like that, but what do you think? Yeah, that's a hard one because to your point, we're such a diverse cultural community of food in the us I, I find in my house what I have is always have garlic.

Mm-hmm. I always have, oregano and rosemary and cumin because we make a lot of, Mexican and South American food. We also make, a lot of. Middle Eastern food in my house. And so cumin is really popular and I think delicious. Even if you're not familiar with that spice, it's really, really fantastic.

And then, some people ask me the question about fresh garlic versus, yes, powdered garlic. Yeah, they are slightly different in flavor profile. But quite honestly, if you don't cook a lot or you're intimidated by buying a clove of garlic and how to use it, definitely use garlic powder because it's adding, it's about 50% of the benefit that I think you would get from fresh garlic.

And that is a really powerful ingredient because garlic adds both aroma and flavor and it also interacts and rounds out the other vegetables in a dish. And so sometimes you talked about soup. You know, I mean, one of the things that's in your pickle brine is garlic. And so you're getting the tang and the sourness, which is an awesome flavor, that brightness, that acid in your soup.

But you're also getting things like garlic and salt, lots of salt to really intensify the flavors and interact with all the other flavors that are going on in that vegetables. Oh, this is fascinating. I feel like I'm gonna have to, we had a guest on a while back and she had a chicken soup that she really liked and we asked for the recipe.

Right. And so we have it now I need to look at it and be like, what's happening in this soup? That, it's so good. I have new, new eyes for all of it. Well, that's another thing. You bringing up soup? I'm a big, I'm very passionate about broth. Okay. And a lot of people are, there was a whole bone broth.

Craze for 10 years when I, we sold more bone broth in our butcher shop than anything else. People were drinking this stuff. I don't know if you have, is it because of the protein aspect? Is that it you think? Well, I mean, it's interesting. Broth is a lot of things in cooking. It has great nutritional value because bone broth is made out of bones which are full of nutrients and it's one of the easiest things to do in cooking where you literally just put the bones in a pot and keep the water hot enough that it'll take all the flavor and all the nutrients out of the bones, but not boil off, all of the water.

Right. The fad with bone broth was that it was nutrient dense. It's filling and it's also, it's got lots of electrolytes and other benefits and it's really flavorful. I mean, it's a delicious, it's almost like a cup of coffee in the morning if you've ever had a heated cup of bone broth.

Yeah. But I use it mostly in cooking and I use it as the base for soups and sauces. Yeah. And, it's free to make, because if you eat anything, if you don't eat meat, you can make it out of vegetables. So all of the scraps, like if you cut even the skins off of your onions, the tops of your carrots, , the browned ugly parts of your, your celery, any of your other vegetables, you put all those on, a baking dish with a little bit of oil in the oven at a low temperature, like 200 degrees.

You brown them and then you dump them into the sauce pan and fill that up to the top with water and let it cook for a while. You're gonna get a great vegetable broth and that'll have all kinds of flavor for your soups or your sauces, and that's free. That's literally the things that, that you were going to throw in your composter, in your trash.

And the bones are the same way. With a bone broth, a traditional bone broth, you just, if you have a chicken or a chicken leg, even save the bone if you have a steak that's bone in, save the bone, even if somebody's been chewing on it. Like my kids who are getting every last morsel. Because what you're gonna do is you're gonna put all that in the freezer, just wrap it up with some foil, put it in the freezer in the same spot so you don't lose them.

And then when you got so many bones, you can't close the freezer door anymore, you take everything outta the freezer, put that on a sheet tray as well, on a low temperature for about a half hour. It'll start to smell fantastic in your house. 'cause it's gonna smell like roast chicken or roast steak again.

And then all of those go into a sauce pan with water. And you know, you could boil these things for days quite honestly. But the nutritional value is, starts to break down after 24 hours. And what I do is I just use actually a pressure cooker and I put everything in the pressure cooker and I set it for an hour and a half.

And then, sometimes I'll do two batches where I'll use the same batch of bones. I'll just dump all the water out after it's gone through the pressure cooker and refill it and put it back on. And so I get two batches out of the same set of bones, and then I've got two or three gallons of stock that I would pay $4 for a quart of stock or, organic, bone, bone broth, well promoted, well marketed, but you're talking, it's probably 20 or $30 worth of bone broth there.

That was literally stuff you were gonna throw away. The taste is horrible oftentimes when you buy it. And then, I don't know if you've seen that, you probably have never eaten this before, but they sell it in, dried packets. And I find when you reconstituted it's horrendous. You, you probably never even had this, right.

You've only made, you probably only made fresh. You're like, I don't even know what you're talking about, Mateo. No, I, I know what you're talking about. I mean, I've seen a lot of substitutions. Bullon is basically the same thing. It's dried bone broth. It's all the flavor and the salt left from the bone broth.

And I know that there are all kinds of things that are trying to encourage people you know, the easier way to consume bone broth. Yes. Fresh made bone broth is always gonna taste better. I'm not as such a purist that says that you have to use bone broth, but why wouldn't you? I mean, if you plan this as this is a three hour project once a month, that's gonna save you money.

Yeah. And it's also what I love is if you've got young kids, it's a great way to engage the kids in a project. You're already gonna do something with them that day to entertain them on the weekend. So why not make it something that saves you money that's nutritious for your family, and that's teaching them lessons that they can then take on to their families in the future.

Well, and part of what you're hitting on, I don't know if you would call it this, but it's this like sustainability aspect where you use every single part of things, right? Like, I mean, you've talked a lot about this and I think there's something nice about. When like, okay, it's not perfect, these veggies at the end.

Like that's ultimately why I make the veggie soup because the, veggies that I have, they just kind of get nasty at the end. I'm not gonna lie. Like, I just don't wanna eat them. And, but it's really different when it's in the soup. It's, it's, no, it doesn't matter. It's no longer a raw veggie and a dip, right?

And so it's nice to know that there is an evolution of what you can make. And it still is amazing. It's not like, and now I have to suffer through this. Like, no, it's kind of amazing what ends up coming out at the end as well. And soups and stews were invented for that reason. When food got too old to eat raw, they then put it in a pot and cooked it a long time and added some seasoning to it to disguise that.

I mean, that's essentially how it started. I don't recommend that, but I use bruised fruit and, and bruised vegetables or even vegetables with some mold on 'em. Or I'll cut the ends off that are rotten. And rather than try to then use that vegetable in a salad or in a normal recipe, yeah, I'll cook it in a, I'll put it in a stock pot or I'll, I'll cook it in a soup and it's actually more flavorful.

It's almost like, you know bananas when they go, when they, when they darken? Yeah. They're adding more sweetness. Right. And vegetables the same way as they kind of mature, they get more flavorful. They get more aromatic, for sure. And, you don't wanna put anything in that has off flavors. Yeah. That, that, like bitterness or, or rotten flavors, that's not gonna, it's too far gone at that point, but, but if it's, if it's wilted or if it's starting to get soft or Yeah.

Changing texture or just not looking as bright and fresh time to put that in, spaghetti sauce or in its own soup. Yeah. Oh, this is fascinating. Can I ask you, 'cause I'm, I'm thinking along the lines of making things, do you have any protein recipes, like some easy meals that people could make where, you know, that have a good amount of protein in them?

Yeah, I'm a big believer in protein. We're very pro protein in this former butcher house., Obviously for us meat is a big, way that we get our protein. And so one of the great recipes. It's super easy, and it's one that maybe our moms and dads, at least I'm a Generation X, moms and dads, love this.

And it's chicken mirabella and it's a Mediterranean inspired single dish meal, and it's a casserole dish. Or you could use a Dutch oven or even a sheet tray, and it's chicken prunes, green olives, capers, garlic, and oregano. Yeah, and sounds a little weird, but the chicken and bone in chicken best would be dark meat, if you like.

If you don't like dark meat, you use, the tofu of meat, as I call it, the chicken breast, but okay, there's no flavor there, but lots of protein. So put all that in a bowl and mix it up together with some olive oil and some white wine vinegar or red wine vinegar. And olive oil. And then, and then pour that out on a sheet tray and you bake that in the oven for about 45 minutes and all of those flavors mixed together.

It's not high in sugar, it's not high in salt, but it has that sweet, it has the tang has the sweet from the prunes, the tang from the capers, and then all that protein from the chicken. And it is, people wonder what I did with these meat. This is such a simple recipe and it's an old recipe, but it's fallen out of fashion.

And I think it's an a no brainer during the week because prep is 15 minutes, cook time is 45. You can go do something else and in 45 minutes you come back and you just throw it on on the table and people can scoop it onto their plates and it's delicious. I have not heard this at all, talked about.

'cause I feel like, I hear things that people make and I, this is not one that you hear. This sounds amazing. I mean, the way that we just described. The other one is, for vegetarians, how do you make a bolognese or a meat sauce? This is, we have a marinara sauce as kind of the traditional spaghetti sauce, but if you wanted to create a higher protein meal, I create a lentil walnut, Nona. And so basically, again, single pot, you start out with that trifecta I was talking about in this case, if it's an Italian sofrito, so this is the onions, carrots, and celery, and you saute those up. You then add the lentils and the crushed up. Walnuts to that with a little bit more olive oil.

And you let those, the lentils are already cooked, by the way. That's an important piece. So you can cook those in advance and then add them to the base of this sauce. And it's okay if they start to break down too a little bit. You want that it, so they kind of disappear in shape and they kind of create this almost meaty texture.

And then you add the tomato sauce and you let that simmer. And again, you can add the wine and like I mentioned, or you can add my secret, hack with a little bit of soy sauce, a little bit of Worcestershire sauce, and then let that cook down and it's high in protein, it's got great fats in it, it's a lot more filling.

And then you don't need the carbohydrate. Put that over some rice cauliflower instead. And so you don't get the carbohydrate spike from the pasta, but you get all this protein from the sauce. And I eat that once a week. Either the vegetarian option or a meat option. Like we'll just put, ground beef in it instead of the lentils and the walnuts.

It works the same, but eating it with rice cauliflower instead of with pasta. And I don't get the glycemic jump that I get with pasta, and it's a very protein heavy meal. I have a question. What's the ratio of the lentils to walnuts roughly, is it like a cup to a fourth of a cup or is it based on taste?

Like how do you decide? Yeah, you can do one-to-one, so Oh, I, I don't find, yeah, I find that the walnuts add, more of that roasted flavor, the lentils are really more for the texture and obviously the extra protein. The walnuts kinda cancel out the lentil flavor of the lentils, if you will, so that you, okay, you're getting this more kind of.

Meaty texture and meaty base. Yeah. That's replacing, the animal protein. The other thing I'll say on this one, and it's back to that my yard reaction. I was talking about the browning. A lot of people, I don't know about you, but I mean, I've, you probably have heard a lot about rice, cauliflower.

That's like the big substitute and it was popular for, years. Everybody was putting, the cauliflower tote or the cauliflower, pizza crust and all these things, right? Oh yes. So I, rice cauliflower just heated up in the microwave is horrible. I am not a fan. And my wife even attest to this because she eats a ton of rice, cauliflower and she says, what do you do different with your rice cauliflower?

What are you putting in it? And all I do is I heat it up in a pan with a very small amount of olive oil and I heat it up on long enough that it. It dries it out. It defrosts, the moisture, and then it starts to brown and actually change color, and it gets a little yellow and then a little bit brown if you go further.

And that flavor profile is delicious. Browned cauliflower or roasted cauliflower is one of my favorites. Riced cauliflower, straight out of a frozen bag is one of my least favorites. Same ingredient, just slightly different cooking method. I'm actually really glad that you brought this up because I've tried the, like the steamer bags of the rice cauliflower and it was so disgusting.

I was like, there was no amount of sauce or whatever I could do that could recover it. So then honestly I gave up on cauliflower rice. 'cause I was like, if it tastes disgusting, I won't do it. But the way in which you're saying it, that gives me hope because I can just stick it in the pan and let life take care of it.

Are you able to just like easily, take a raw cauliflower pulse it? I mean, is there a way that you could make it at home without buying it already pre-made? Absolutely, absolutely. What we do, the easiest way is to take apart the cauliflower head, you destem it and then break all the heads apart and.

In the oven for at least a half hour, at about 400 degrees, and you cook it that way. It might be a good idea to, to put in a bowl first and add some olive oil and kind of mix it up so that you distribute some fat all around it before you roast it. But you roast it and it softens, it adds that browning texture and the browning flavor that I talked about.

And then you can just dice it up with a knife. Just get that trusty chef's knife out that you bought. Put it on a wood cutting board and chop it up as finely as you can and use that as your base for a substitute for rice, cauliflower. It's really no difference. It's gonna be chunkier than like a rice.

Like it's not gonna be as small as rice, but if you're putting, spaghetti sauce on it or, sauteing some stir fry over it, it's still so serving as that kind of base for all this saucy, delicious goodness that you're cooking in the other dish. So that's the easiest way I think if you're not gonna rice it, Ric is literally pro pushing it through a device that kind of breaks the apart.

Mm-hmm. You can use a rice surf for, potatoes too. That's the one of the starting processes for mashed potatoes. Yeah. And so, you know, rice cauliflower just has gone through a ricer, which you don't need. And, and that makes it smaller pieces. And to your point, if you just heat that up in a steam bag or in the microwave, it's gonna be soggy, it's gonna have a lot of moisture and the texture's gonna feel like orange.

And so. The frying pan really, adds some character to it and gives it more life. I'm excited to try that because I think this is, I need to give cauliflower another try. Like, I like it when it's just like, bigger chunks. I've, we've always been down with that, but what you're saying, I think this is really good to, I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna report back.

This is gonna be good. Awesome. One, one last tip on that. If you're gonna saute anything, you don't want to crowd your pan. And so what that means is putting too much of whatever you're sauteing in the pan at once, okay? If you're using a small eight inch pan, you'd wanna put about the half of the surface area of the pan is covered.

And if you've got a 12 inch pan, maybe half or two thirds of the surface area of the pan. So that just means don't fill the whole bottom of your pan, fill it about half as much, use, a teaspoon or a tablespoon of oil. And then allow the, move the cauliflower a around, spread it out so that it's not all lumped together.

And what you're doing is you're letting the pan remain hot so that it has time to brown. Because if you don't, if you crowd the pan, all the things that are in the pan are cooling off the surface of the pan and the pan's never getting to the temperature it needs to, to brown your food. Oh my gosh. Okay.

Give it some space, give it some love. Let that pan do its job. I've done all of this wrong. This is so good to hear. Because yeah, like sometimes it turns out and sometimes it doesn't. It's like, uh, yeah. 'cause I've had it like three inches high all together. Yeah. And then, and then you're really just steaming most of that cauliflower like you would in the microwave because it's not getting anywhere near the heat.

It's just kind of sitting in its moisture, with the rest of it. So. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Totally. Do you think, how long does stuff keep in the freezer if you had to? Because I feel like a lot of times, I'll tell you something that my people face is that, let's say they make some of these recipes right, and they just, they can't get to eating it that day, the next day.

Can you give us some reference on some products, like how long can meat stay in the freezer? Do dairy products freeze? Just give us some reference on this. What would be good to stick away and like tomato sauce, could we freeze that? You know? Yes. There are some things that freeze really well and others not so well.

It's really about how you store it and how often you access your freezer. Those are the two biggest, the biggest, variables to consider. And so if you, if you store something in a freezer safe container that's not going to transfer moisture or that's not going to expose parts of whatever you're freezing to more cold than other parts, you're gonna reduce the chance of freezer burn, which is basically just causing, so much of the moisture to leave the food through the freezing process that, it exposes it to air and then that error.

Change. I mean, if you ever smell your freezer, it doesn't smell so great. It almost normally has like a metallic smell, but it can often just smell like whatever's in your freezer. And that's great if you only have tomato sauce in your freezer. But if you have tomato sauce and ice cream in your freezer, the ice cream's gonna start smelling like tomato sauce and you don't want that.

So that's the first one is how are you storing things? Wrapping them in parchment paper if it's, let's say a piece of meat, or some vegetables that you wanna hold onto, or those bones, I was talking about wrapping it in some parchment paper first. And then tinfoil is perfectly fine. If you can have an airtight container, that's even better because. Oxygen causes oxidation and causes off flavors. And so, that's why vacuum seal is so popular. Again, it's plastic heavy, so I don't always recommend that, but it's great if you wanna preserve something a long time, honestly. I have frozen things that I made double of for the holidays and thawed them the next year for the holiday.

So a year later, and they're perfectly fine. Oh, amazing. You're not gonna get sick, you know? So I, I don't wanna, again, I'm not the FDAI, you know, don't come back. No. I don't wanna get a bunch of, you know, accusations that I'm poisoning people. But you're, you're more likely to be unhappy with the flavor and the texture of the food after a long time, rather than it be a danger to you physically.

Right. That's what I experience more so, you know, things lose, they lose their essence over time. But calorically, they're probably exactly the same. The flavors will probably get duller over time. And again, that's that oxidation I was talking about. It's the exposure to moisture. Every time you open your freezer, it thaws a little bit.

Things defrost, and then they freeze again. And that constant process, reintroduces new flavors and. And more oxygen to whatever you froze. So, so these kinds of things are happening all the time, as you know, throughout the year. So best thing is if you're gonna hold onto something for a long time, put it in the furthest back part of the freezer, closest to the condenser, where it's gonna stay coldest.

And then yeah, tomato sauce, soups, meat, everything freezes great. And there's really very few things that I would discourage you from freezing. Steaks. You know, again, I come from a world of meat and steaks. Anything that you're gonna sear and anything where texture is super important in the experience, you don't want to freeze because when you put things in the freezer, the water molecules expand.

It's like, whenever you have, ice cubes in the tray, if you fill them overflowing and then you put 'em in the freezer, they're gonna spill out because the water actually expands. And so when water molecules expand inside things like meat, they make the meat taste more mealy and less firm because they've broken apart all the proteins and everything and the meat as it's frozen.

And then when it defrosts they shrink again and they leave all these gaps and then the meat gets mushy. And so some people complain that steaks are not as good, frozen as they are fresh. But I have a dirty little secret to tell you. Pretty much 99.9% of the meat or anything else, quite honestly, that you get at the grocery store has been frozen at least once.

Wow. Wow. There's nothing left in our food system that doesn't go into a deep freeze. Wow. 'cause it's such a great preservative. And that includes even, maybe not fruits and vegetables, but it includes everything across the board has been frozen meats, especially, just to maintain freshness.

So, yeah, I mean, it's just interesting, you know, when you don't think about it. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so we've talked about so much. I know that people are gonna have a ton of good ideas of how they can get started and just things to look out for. Do you think there's anything we've missed that's really important for someone that is just starting to gain more skills in the kitchen, trying to get a little bit more into things?

Well, cooking in general is super intimidating, especially if you're cooking for others, right? Yes. I mean, it's one thing for us to cook for ourselves, but when we have to cook for other people, even I get super nervous, you know, when I'm catering or when I'm cooking for friends.

And so I would highly recommend you spend a weekend familiarizing yourself with your kitchen and your recipes before you share them. And a great thing you can do is spend one day, you know it's gonna be four or five hours, but spend one day and make four or five recipes that you're curious about.

And it's gonna take a while. It's gonna take an hour, probably each recipe. If you're smart, you can put, recipes with similar ingredients so you don't have to buy so many different things. But then cook each of those things in one day, over four or five hours, you're gonna get repetition of how to use your knife, you know how your stove works, how your pans interact.

You're going to see patterns. In terms of how you do things to make them easier, more streamlined and more comfortable. And then you're gonna get five meals at the end of this that you can put in your freezer or in your fridge and you've done all of your cooking for the week. Yeah. And that way you get exposed to, the basic actions, the basic needs and the timing that it's gonna take to make these meals.

Yeah. I wouldn't recommend doing that every weekend. Who wants to spend a whole day cooking for the rest of their week. Right. But it does mean that you can kind of practice your skills and then these meals you can make on the fly and they might only take half as much time because you've already done it.

Yeah. Okay. I love this. You know, it's interesting, I'm thinking why did I fail with this in the past? 'cause I used to spend sat Saturdays doing a lot of prep, and what I realized is I try to do it every Saturday. So it's like, I think you hit that on the head because I. I think that we think, oh, this is so unsustainable.

It's like, yeah, no one was asking you every day to do this, but you know, I took it in a direction where I couldn't keep going with it. Right. So this is so good. Now, can you tell everybody how can they find you to follow you, to learn more, to sort of tell us all the best places to find you?

Well, I've got a great article on my substack, enlightened Omnivore that summarizes a lot of what we talked about. There's a few other things that I go into called The Essential Kitchen, and you can reach [email protected]. I'm also on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok, enlightened Omnivore.

And I write weekly, a newsletter. And then I have a podcast that comes out once a month, so you can check that out anywhere that you get your podcasts. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on and just sharing all your knowledge. I learned so much and I know all the listeners are gonna get so much insight as well.

Thank you again. Oh, thank you, Matea. It was great. It was a lot of fun.