Our Southern Odyssey’s
Journal
Not long back, I did not like to cook, and what I could cook was very limited (pre-made Quesadillas, hot dogs, Alfredo from a box). 
Reflecting back on it now I do not think that I ever really understood the appeal of cooking a meal from scratch, when you could go out and get a meal at a restaurant. My mom on the other hand loves cooking. I just assumed that the love of cooking had skipped a generation. Don’t get me wrong I love food, I was just not good at preparing it. However, when we as a family decided to change our eating lifestyle and began to eat meals that we prepared ourselves. I found out something about myself that I did not know before. I actually like to cook! I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I’m not that bad at it either. If you were as bad at cooking as I was, and now cooking actually made sense you 
would toot your horn too. And there is nothing wrong with a little positive reinforcement from oneself every now and then.
With all the prepackaged meals in the grocery store; that I relied so heavily on before, that’s marketed to make our lives easier when it comes to making a meal, actually hindered me. I realized that they distanced me from the understanding of the food. When all I was doing was adding a box of dry ingredients to boiling water and twenty minutes later dinner was on the table. What did I learn? Nothing! What story did that meal have? None! What enjoyment did I get from preparing that meal? 
Not a thing! No wonder I could not remember what I had to eat the night before. I believed that I could not cook and I never gave myself a chance, because I never really stopped to think that it might not be as complicated as I thought. In 2015, my perception on cooking changed, we began to work with ingredients we had never worked with before and we began taking whole foods and creating our meals. These were truly homemade meals that had life and a story.
When I needed to make a celery cream sauce to go over some chicken, I did not reach for a pre-made jar of sauce. I created my own. I would have never attempted to do that in the past, because I would have thought that I could not. It actually turns out that I was the one that was holding myself back when it 
came to preparing food. As long as I thought that I could not cook, I was never going to be able to cook. My philosophy now is “why not” because I am at least going to try. I might not get it right every time but I am not going to stop before I give it a chance.
It is true what they say about wanting to learn something, that you should submerge yourself within it. I took away the safety net — kind of. If something did not turn out correct, I kept trying instead of 
calling for a pizza to be delivered. However, my Mom was there with me in the kitchen helping me along the way. Even though we were cooking with ingredients we had never used before I would lean on her sometimes to know what seasoning to use or how long to cook something. Who knew, knowing how to cook did not skip a generation after all.
Forcing myself to cook when I thought that I could not allowed me to find a part of myself I did not know I had. Being in the kitchen cooking new recipes became the confident booster I needed. To ask myself, “What else am I good at?”. I hope cooking from scratch gives you the confidence you need as well.
