Play With Your Food People!

This is perhaps one of my most favorite Food Roots/Routes. (Recommendations in Destination Real Food: Navigating Our Food System and Restoring the Soil to Improve Health for how to reconnect with your food.) Once a person learns how to have fun with their food, then their whole connection with food changes. It moves from one more thing that needs to be taken care of, to a wonderful creative process that we make time for.  I remember when I was kid and afraid to make a mistake in the kitchen, mainly for fear of wasting food. This fed into the idea that it was easier and more convenient to have someone else grow, process, gather and make my food. Someone who knew more about what they were doing. 

As I grew older, my disposition around food changed however. It changed because I began to understand that the only way I was going to be “in charge” of my food was to make it myself from ingredients that I trusted. And the only way to ensure that I would be able and willing to sustain it, would be to make sure it was fun! So here It is…..PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD! No food fights please but if you are the primary housekeeper in the family, that will be your prerogative!

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that every food you attempt to make is going to be a rockstar when the family gets together. But don’t be afraid to try new recipes with different seasonal ingredients. You will find that the more that you play with your food, the more that you will want to play with your food. It self perpetuates itself.  

Here are some ideas for getting started:

1. Talk with some friends and decide on one night a week to get the kids together to play in the yard while the adults cook some food together. Try to maintain this over time. 
2. Start your own food club if there are none in your location. This doesn’t have to be formal. In fact, some of the more fun clubs are informal ones whereby folks compete with new food recipes.  Everyone votes for the winner at the end of the meal gets a small prize. 
3. Become your own informal gourmet. This used to scare me!!! What no plan???? Some great recipes come from throwing together food that you have in the fridge that you have no plan for when you are willing to experiment. Recently, I had a client of mine call it Guessipe Night. How fun!
4. Get together with a single friend and cook a meal together. One person creates the entree and the other the sides. I split it this way just from the food cost standpoint but there are no rules.
5. About groups getting together. Decide on a theme- Mexican, Thai, Italian, Greek, etc.  Everyone brings a dish and a copy of their recipe. This provides an opportunity for a healthy sort of sharing and some competitiveness. 
6. Choose easy recipes to play with to start. The less complicated, with less ingredients the better when you are getting started. Make sure you have an accomplice even if it is a child. 

Share failures as well as successes. Everyone loves a good laugh about a messy kitchen, sauce splattered everywhere, the kombucha experiment that exploded because it was shaken before opening (I don’t recommend doing this!) or the burnt entree that forced the whole family to go out to eat for the evening. No harm done. Try to create food experiences that everyone wants to show up for rather than simply providing meals for the family. Turn on some music while you cook. Becoming more secure in our food journey is perhaps the one thing that allows us to be most creative moving toward healthy eating options. But most of all.....have fun!!