A Couple Cooks | Pretty Simple Cooking

Ten years ago, my husband Alex and I set out on a journey. We wanted to know how to cook—and to find food that tasted good and was also good for our bodies. And we knew nothing, not one thing about what it took to get there. Fast-forward ten years and we know a thing or two. But what’s more important than knowing how to roast a sweet potato or chiffonade basil are the lessons we’ve learned along the way. The most important one:

YOU HAVE TO FALL IN LOVE.

Cooking is not a one-time transaction, where ingredients go in and food comes out. Cooking requires surrender. It demands expanding your mind to new habits and possibilities. Living in the face of failure. Thinking on your feet, being resourceful.

And the only way to make the kitchen part of your life in the face of these challenges is, really, to fall in love. You must fall in love with the process, the tastes and smells: the fragrance of sizzling garlic, a nutty cinnamon wafting from the oven, the tang of fresh lemon. You must fall in love with making something from nothing.

But challenges abound. Cooking takes time and energy, especially after a long day. The only way you’ll keep going is if you start to fall in love with the process. And at the same time, you must also do something else:

YOU HAVE TO CHANGE YOUR MIND.

About food, that is. You have to believe food is worth the time and energy spent preparing it. Worth the money to purchase wholesome ingredients, worth messy kitchens and hungry moments.

Because it is worth it. Food has the power to transform your body, your mind, your relationships, and the world around you. Cooking can be one of the most life-giving, fulfilling parts of your day.

We’ve heard it many times: nourishing, seasonal home cooking is inaccessible, expensive, and impractical for the modern man and woman. We’re here to say that with the right attitude, cooking healthy food at home truly can be pretty simple. And so worth it.

Speaking of falling in love, that’s what happened to Alex and me. We met as awkward, wide-eyed freshmen on the first day of university. I was a young music student from Minnesota, he was an art student from Indiana. They say that love at first sight is real, and though we couldn’t articulate it, we found it that day. When he finally asked me on a date, I said no. But he was very, very persistent. And I knew in my gut that I would eventually say yes.

I did, and the rest is history. We got married a few years later and bought a little 1920s bungalow in Indianapolis, with a white picket fence and a tiny galley kitchen. (And a dog, naturally.) After settling in, we decided the next step in life was to invite guests for dinner. The problem was, we didn’t know how to make dinner. Our normal rotation of cheesy microwave meals, breakfast cereal, and fast-food tacos certainly wasn’t going to cut it.

My first boss lent me a cookbook, written by a woman named Julia Child. The name was meaningless to me, since this was just before Meryl Streep would portray her on-screen in Julie and Julia. But as I paged through the book, Julia’s personality burst into life. Here was a woman passionate about the act of home cooking, who assured me I could make an omelet with the ease of a Frenchman. Alex’s confidence to try new things and zest for learning made him my perfect teammate, and after hours of planning and preparation, we concocted a fancy French dinner of lamb and mashed celery root for our unsuspecting guests. It turned out, well, delicious. We were hooked.

One meal turned to dozens, and soon we were cooking almost daily. Inspired by Mark Bittman’s book Food Matters and Michael Pollan’s mantra, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” we became inspired by the idea that eating more vegetables could have a positive effect on both personal health and environmental sustainability. We began eating one from-scratch vegetarian meal per week, and a new rainbow of flavors gradually came into focus, like seeing in a new dimension. Our local farmers’ market became a playground for fresh food sold to us by the kindest people we’d ever met. The year’s rhythm of tomatoes and peaches and kale and squash became our muse. We felt better, had more energy and fewer stomachaches. We got sick less. And most importantly, we felt happier and more fulfilled.

How was it that we spent so much of our lives not knowing food could taste like this? And that I, the girl who couldn’t so much as boil a pot of water for pasta, could actually learn to cook? And that it could actually be fun instead of feeling like a chore?

After living twenty-five years in a society obsessed with doing anything but cooking, we were finally learning to feed ourselves. It was 2010, so naturally, we decided to start a blog to document the process. We called it A Couple Cooks.

Our approach to home cooking is pretty simple. Pretty simple cooking:

Here’s our not-so-hidden agenda: to inspire your cooking. This book is not here to convert you into any particular diet or way of life. Whether you’re a seasoned cook or just starting out, our hope is that you’ll find love in the cooking process and that it brings infinite value to your life.

EMBRACING VEG

This book is for eaters of all kinds who want to eat more vegetables and enjoy it. We embrace omnivores, vegetarians, pescatarians, vegans, flexitarians, Paleo eaters, gluten-free eaters, and everything in between. Using trial and error, we encourage you to find the diet that is right for your body and personal tastes.

Alex and I didn’t set out to become vegetarian, we just wanted to eat more vegetables—both to improve our health and ease our footprint on the planet. Starting with one meatless meal per week, we gradually increased our veggie-centric eating as we found it to be delicious and enjoyable. We now eat about 80 percent vegetarian on a regular basis; sustainably raised seafood and meat are part of our 20 percent.

Though we’re not strictly vegetarian, 100 percent of the recipes in this book are. Why? One of the biggest challenges we hear from people is how to incorporate more vegetables into their diet in a healthy and delicious way. Everyone knows that vegetables are good for us, but many of us carry some boring, bitter, icky vegetable baggage. Whether you eat meatless once a week or every day, we hope you can find recipes you love.

RETHINKING HEALTHY

Healthy used to be a dirty word. Before we started this cooking thing, healthy felt negative, like tasteless low-fat yogurt, cardboard energy bars, and limp salad greens. Healthy was not on our radar. But after ten years of learning and cooking and reading and tasting, we’ve found that healthy can be flipped to the positive. Our definition of healthy is getting in the kitchen and making meals from scratch—nourishing dishes, heavy on the vegetables, that emphasize flavor rather than the number of calories. Cooking with real food: unprocessed whole ingredients like vegetables and whole grains. Often, this means embracing the seasons and hunting out local ingredients at the farmers’ market. And of course, our healthy has plenty of room for guilt-free splurges on the occasional sweet treat.

Since we started eating this way, more and more research has been published on the health benefits of eating whole foods and lots of vegetables. Hospitals and clinics are now starting to prescribe fresh food to prevent and combat disease. An eighty-one-year-old reader wrote to us that our recipes are helping her get her energy back after being diagnosed as diabetic. With more evidence about the benefits of eating fresh food, it’s something we believe can be life changing.