S18: E13: How I'm Cooking These Days
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In this practical and reflective episode of *Old Fashioned On Purpose*, the host shares her evolved approach to home cooking amid a busy, unpredictable lifestyle. Moving away from rigid meal plans and recipe dependence, she emphasizes flexibility, mindset shifts, and using foundational ingredients to create meals that adapt to real life. She outlines four core strategies: maintaining a well-stocked ingredient baseline, cooking by flexible meal frameworks rather than strict recipes, letting food respond to life’s rhythms (like using leftovers creatively), and embracing imperfect, no-frills meals. Drawing from her own experiences—balancing a restaurant, parenting, and seasonal changes—she reveals how she turns fridge scraps and pantry staples into satisfying, nutritious meals, often with surprising results. The episode is both a personal manifesto and a guide for others feeling overwhelmed by traditional meal planning systems.
Build a flexible ingredient baseline to reduce decision fatigue and shopping stress.
Cook by frameworks (e.g., soups, protein bowls, stir-fries) instead of rigid recipes to adapt to what’s on hand.
Use leftovers creatively—transform them into new meals like hashes, quesadillas, or soups to reduce waste and boost family satisfaction.
Let your kitchen serve your life, not the other way around—flexibility beats rigidity in real-world chaos.
Give yourself permission to make imperfect meals; they still feed people and build confidence.
Why This Episode Matters
“I'm not going to continue to do them. I mean, right now I am running the soda fountain... My daughter just completed a very intense high school basketball season... There's just so much happening right now.”
The Failure of Traditional Meal Planning
The host critiques rigid meal plans and apps, explaining how they fail in real life due to unpredictability, complex shopping lists, and inflexible schedules. She shares her own history of guilt and frustration with these systems.
Strategy 1: The Ingredient Baseline
“I have my ingredient baseline... I do keep a baseline of ingredients, which... I cook almost every meal from.”
Strategy 2: Cooking by Framework, Not Recipe
“I look at what I have, and then I go find a recipe that fits it. That's what I do almost always.”
Strategy 3: Let Food Respond to Life
She discusses how meal choices adapt to the day’s demands—fast meals on busy nights, creative reuse of leftovers, and seasonal or emotional cues like craving curry or using garden produce.
“It's not a meal plan. It's not a big recipe dump. You don't have to sort through it. It's just a way to understand how meals work so you can walk into your kitchen and feel like you're commanding it like an orchestra.”
“I actually find I love that type of cooking. And even though it's not like I am experimenting with some big fancy culinary technique, there's something so gratifying about turning random stuff that could probably end up in the trash in a few days into something really edible.”
“You don't have to do it like everybody else. You don't have to follow the rules. In fact, it's way more fun to not follow the rules.”
Host
Host
person
Old Fashioned On Purpose
media
Azure
organization
MealCraft
product
Soda Fountain
other
Mealcraftmethod.com
product
Pompave
other
Turkey Broth
other
Canned Beans
other
Frozen Vegetables
other
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