Chicken at 204kPa

In my last post, I made mention of the pressure cooker as a brilliant tool for getting in the habit of cooking for yourself.

Meat comes out tender and juicy, root veggies are done to perfection, and nothing we've yet cooked takes longer than about an hour and twenty minutes from start to finish (not including prep time). That means, you seal it up, get it up to pressure, cook, and let it cool to the point you can open it. Some things are stupidly fast... winter squash only takes about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes for hard squash to cook! And, most of that time is spent coming up to pressure... it only cooks at full pressure for four minutes. Then, you can stick it under the faucet and douse it in cold water to quickly de-pressurize it (NOTE: you can't use the quick-cool method with everything).

So, Darren had some experience with this cooking tool when we met, I had had none. Recently, he tried putting a whole chicken in there, something he had no experience with. Had just never occurred to us. Maybe because it seems like it might be unworkable, a whole bird, with all the bones and whatnot.

Turns out, it's bloody awesome! The bird comes out tender, juicy (even the often too-dry breast meat), and the bones are no problem; the meat falls right off them.

So, it turns out that a basic Googling of  "whole chicken pressure cooker" yields loads of tasty recipes. Guess this is old news to most folks but us. However, because we hadn't ever thought of it, I'm going to go ahead and guess that some of you haven't ever tried either. It's dead easy to do, and you can choose from the wide array of available recipes on the net, or try ours:

Pour about an inch of chicken or beef stock into the pressure cooker. Place one whole chicken into the pressure cooker with some thyme (we use fresh cut from the garden, just throw the whole sprigs in), a few cloves of garlic, salt and pepper. Seal it up, let it come to pressure (you'll know this has happened when the weighted rocker on the top of the lid starts hissing in a steady rhythm), and let it cook for about 20 minutes (this may need to be adjusted slightly if your bird is exceptionally large or small, there's a chart here). When the timer goes off, take it off the heat, and let it sit until the little lock pin valve in the handle drops.

Presto! (Hah! see what I did there?) A fabulous chicken dinner!

Making the Time to Eat Right

This tasty meal took hours... of sitting by itself, getting cooked, while I did other stuff.

There are posts on this blog about how you can shop locally and sustainably, and how it can be made more affordable. It is also no secret that I vehemently recommend that you all eat real food, avoid processed crap, and minimize (or eliminate) grains and other super-starchy stuff like legumes, and maybe dairy (depending on how much you're consuming and where it's coming from). But, I still know of many folks who seldom, or in some cases very nearly never, cook for themselves.

The two biggest reasons I hear for people not making sure they're eating well are that they don't have the time, or that they can't cook. To be blunt, you get only one body and if you want it to hold up well for a longer than average time, you must address these "issues." These two most common excuses are not insurmountable problems, they're barely even obstacles and you can and must get past them and start feeding yourself quality nutrition on a regular basis, especially if you take a moment or two to sanely order your priorities... again, just a reminder, you only get one body.

Priorities in order? Sweet... now, a few pointers on addressing those two primary stumbling blocks.

Firstly, we'll address the time issue. Honestly, the issue of having time to cook should have been eliminated in American culture with the advent of DVR and services like Hulu and Netflix...I know I'm generalizing, but certainly almost everyone I know personally fills several hours per week of their conscious-yet-non-working time consuming media. Whatever media you habitually consume, if any, it is now fully possible to store it or access it later and shift around the time you spend when not at work or sleeping to make space to feed yourself properly.  Those I know who don't consume much media tend to be socializing during that time, which is great and necessary and probably a better way to spend your time, but again... time can and should be carved out of that for properly feeding yourself.  

I don't know what's going on in your life, it's true, but I would bet anything there's room in there for time to be made for you to cook. In addition to the suggestions I made in this post about simplifying your Paleo dietary habits, here are a few more tips to help make that time efficient:

Shop for produce which is in season. This one is probably a little counter-intuitive, but hear me out. Besides getting better quality produce and taking your individual stab at the beast which is Big Agrabiz, eating in season does something else useful... by reducing the variety of the produce you're getting, the methods and recipes which you might choose for cooking it are similarly reduced. If you live in the Midwest, you'll be eating hard squash in winter, but you won't be eating tomatoes (unless they've been canned or frozen). Eating winter squash means mostly roasting in some form, or perhaps making a soup (which still means roasting it first). And, as for those canned tomatoes, there are only so many ways to use them because they're basically already a sauce.

Yes, if you want, it's entirely possible to find creative and unusual recipes, but by and large your eating will be simplified by eating in season. Once you've roasted a couple squash, you'll know about how long it takes, and can plan accordingly. While I am all about variety in the diet, having seasonal staples reduces the necessary decision making process of planning your meals, and will save you some time.

Also, as a side note, this habit will ensure variety in your diet. Again, a bit counter-intuitive... but, if you have at your disposal the whole mega-grocery of produce shipped in from around the world, you could easily develop the habit of buying and eating the same stuff all year and never getting around to things that are only available in certain seasons. Sticking to what's in season ensures variety.

Buy and use a slow cooker. I've got a whole other post about the wonder of slow cookers, commonly known as Crock Pots in exactly the same way that all facial tissue is commonly known as Kleenex, but it bears repeating; they are fabulous. And, seriously, you cannot complain about having time to cook for yourself when you can dump all the ingredients into a pot and leave it by itself for hours. Yes, there are recipes which potentially have a significant prep time, but there are dozens, if not hundreds, out there where all you have to do is spend 15 minutes chopping veggies, and then dump them into the crock pot with some meat, stock, and spices, and then go do anything else you want while you wait for it to become a meal. It's awesome, and I love that there is a form of cooking so laborless because, while cooking is very often fun, I could be happy in a world where tasty healthy food just happened with instantaneous magicality and until Science gets around to building us a Star Trek-esque replicator, this is as close to a no-work cooked meal as you're likely to get in your own home.

Buy and use a pressure cooker. This is kind of the opposite of the above; foods cook fast in here, and meats that you might otherwise have to prep elaborately come out tender and tasty. Root veggies cook much faster than they do if you just roast them. And, again, it's brilliant because it's mostly self-regulated (though not to the degree a crock pot is)... you seal it up, apply the heat, and when you hear it start to hiss set a timer for the specified time. When the timer goes off, take the cooker off the heat and wait for the little valve to drop. Simple.

Buy foods you can eat raw (there are more of them than you might think). When we think of grabbing a piece of produce and snacking (I'm assuming here that you do think of produce and not of Doritos, and if this is not true then the first priority is making it true) we usually think of fruit, and in fact I make the recommendation of fruit as a snack in that above referenced post, along with cautioning that too much fruit is not a great idea because of all the sugar. But, you're in luck; the number of veggies which can be eaten raw, and which are thusly tasty, is pretty large. There are the usual suspects, the ones you find on the obligatory veggie trays at parties; carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower (though those last two, and their cruciferous fellows, get you a little more nutritional mileage if they're cooked at least a little). You'll often find green peppers and olives lurking there, too. But, what about zucchini and yellow squash? Various varieties of onion? Also avocados, jicama, tomatilloes, celery, sweet peas... the list goes on. You can grate root veggies like beets or turnips into a salad (speaking of salad, greens are a whole other category of raw food). And, nothing saves time on eating food like not having to cook it.

Put a TV in the kitchen. Or, bring your laptop in, set it out of the way on the counter or the kitchen table, and open up your Netflix account, whatever works for you. The point here is that you can catch up on your shows or news while you're prepping your meals (just do not, I repeat, do not ever try to look at anything but what you're doing when you're at the cutting board, busy with a knife.)

Cook and prep food ahead. In that post about simplifying eating Paleo, I mentioned loving the leftovers and cooking in bulk. Allow me to now expand upon that; after you've prepared a large amount of something in the crock pot, or done a whole roast, or whatever it is, you can break that up into meal-sized portions and containerize them separately. Presto! Lunches at work for the whole week. You can also freeze these so they last longer than a week and bust them out when you're feeling hungry for whatever that particular food is.

Prepping ahead is a similar concept, just with ingredients instead of finished product. If you've made the time to chop carrots to make dinner, go ahead and chop all the carrots you bought (you've already got the knife and cutting board out, so it'll only add a couple minutes... stop watching the TV...) then stick the unused portion in a container to use in a couple of days in another meal. This approach does depend upon you intending to use the pre-prepped ingredients a similar way in a future meal as you're using them presently, so it may come up as a time-saver less frequently than cooking ahead, but since people tend to have a staple set of recipes for cooking certain things certain ways, it will probably save you some time if you start to develop the habit of applying it where you can.

Make cooking a social time. Darren and I often chat about our day while cooking is happening. Sometimes just one of us is cooking, sometimes we're both involved, but we're together and involved in quality time.  This is, of course, harder to do if you don't live with another human (unless your dog or cat talks back, in which case you may need more help than I can provide). But, you could bust out your bluetooth earpiece or put your phone on speaker and catch up with a friend or make that long-overdue (in her mind, at least) call to your mom while you're making dinner. Have a family? Find ways to get the kids involved, and start building their habit of being responsible for their own health and well-being early. And, a meal and it's preparation can always be turned into a social event... dinner parties don't have to be about just the eating.

Now, how about that second excuse for not eating well, "I can't cook," and it's cousin, "I don't like to cook."

First of all, you can cook. Unless you're dealing with some kind of disability that would physically prevent or inhibit your ability to perform the necessary actions in the kitchen, if you're an adult human being with access to fire and water, you can cook. Everyone can cook. Baking is more complex (though everyone could learn basic baking, too, if they wanted); you must carefully measure and get things right because chemistry is happening. But most cooking is putting stuff together in a pan or pot (or putting things in separate pans or pots) and applying enough heat to get the job done but not so much you turn it into charcoal. This is, seriously, not that hard to do. Everyone can cook.

Definitely, some are better at it than others, especially when it comes to putting flavors together... I don't mean to diminish the skills and talents of those who are brilliant at this stuff. My husband is far better at improvising and being creative in the kitchen than I am, and generally much more capable when it comes to feeding us. When it's my turn to cook I often come to him with questions. But, when I'm on my own I can still cook. Maybe it doesn't turn out quite as tasty, but it's still tasty enough (or at least not bad), and it's nutritious, and there's a certain visceral satisfaction to eating food you've prepared yourself.

If you've never cooked for yourself, yes, there will be some learning to happen... but, the beauty of the Information Age is that there are millions, literally millions, of pages of recipes you can choose from. If you narrow that down to include only Paleo-friendly recipes written in the English language there will still be several thousand, I'll wager. All you have to do is apply heat in the specified fashion for the specified length of time and food will happen. Have faith.

Yes, especially if you're just starting to learn, you will screw it up occasionally. You will burn something. You will experiment with a flavor combination and it will not go well. Just yesterday I told our Loretta (who, like my husband, is brilliant in the kitchen) about a failed experiment involving apples and cabbages that made her say, "Oh, Frank..." halfway through the story and look at me with sad and pitying eyes. But, that's OK, because I learned, and I won't make the error again. You will learn. You can, and must, learn to cook for yourself because that's the only way to ensure you're getting the kind of nutrition that will keep you happy and healthy and long-lived. And, I promise, it isn't that hard to do. Honest.

Now, let's say you don't like to cook. My first instinct is that it's really more of a case of the above, you've never really learned to cook. Or, possibly, you've tried to figure it all out for yourself and it's not gone well. Maybe your parents didn't set any example, or they did and cooking for you means dumping the can of chicken noodle soup into a bowl and nuking it. Or possibly you grew up with dinner always being an elaborate three course affair, but you're not a stay-at-home mom and you just don't have the time to cook the way your mom did, so you just have to go out to eat all the time.

Whatever the case, the truth is that you can learn to cook meals which are simple, and tasty, and when you discover that you can cook in a reasonable amount of time and enjoy the results, you'll start to like cooking. It's as simple as that, you'll learn to like it, or at least be neutral to it, and you will definitely learn to love food in a way you hadn't before because you're making it yourself. You will also learn to love cooking because you will see the difference eating a quality diet will make in your health and fitness. I know of no one, not one person, either in my "real life" or anyone I communicate with only through the internet, who has experienced positive changes in their health and fitness by following the Paleo diet who have not started cooking for themselves regularly (assuming they weren't already) and become more excited about the time they spend in the kitchen, trying new recipes, etc.

Also, as mentioned above, if the real issue is that you don't know how to cook, or don't know how to cook in a way which fits into your life without being a stressful time crunch, there are vast resources of recipes and tutorials and techniques all over the internet to help you get started. Google "quick paleo recipes," "no prep prep paleo recipes," and "easy paleo recipes." That'll get you started, you can keep Googling from there.

Don't get me wrong... there are times you don't feel like cooking. You've had a long, crappy day... you forgot to go to the market and there's nothing in refrigerator. I get it. Shit happens, and there are days when Darren and I don't feel like cooking. It is totally fine to go out sometimes. Humans are happier and psychologically healthier when we indulge sometimes. And, if you're feeding yourself quality nutrition the majority of the time, going out to eat now and then, letting someone else do the work, and even indulging in that double fudge chocolate volcano cake ala mode (with whipped cream on top) isn't nearly as big a deal as it would be if you were eating lunch at Burger King four days a week.

If you want to live long, and be healthy, and keep yourself fit you must take your nutrition in hand. You've got to make the time to eat right. We are, quite literally, what we eat. In some parts of our bodies cells die and are replaced very frequently, in other parts less frequently... but all of the new material for replacing and repairing tissue, and the energy to transform that material into new cells and structures, comes exclusively from the food we eat and the air we breathe. That's all there is to it. So, it is vitally important that you do a good job of fueling your body.