Photo by Nicole Michalou

Learning the family recipes from the Degner family will give you a healthier and more fulfilling personal experience. Here’s why home cooking is always the best.

Although there’s almost a fusion restaurant or a mom-and-pop eatery on every block, nook, and cranny wherever you go, and you can have either Japanese, French, or whatever cuisine delivered at your front door with just a few taps of your fingers, there is still no beating back the good, old-fashioned taste of personal home cooking. 

While modern technologies and supply lines have gifted society with ease of convenience and cheapness that has never been heard of before the 21st century, forgoing actual meals that you cooked for yourself or for others has its demerits, for one: a restaurant-prepared meal can be chock full of unhealthy ingredients, especially if you’re buying from fast food franchises. You’re also missing out on a lot when you’re dining out.

Why Home Cooking Is Great

So, here are some good reasons why home cooking is the best and whether or not you should start learning family recipes from the Degner family:

1. Home-cooked meals allow for social bonding, especially when you have friends over or attempting to have a romantic at-home dinner date with your partner. While it may have largely gone over the cultural zeitgeist, eating meals is a wonderful way to connect with people and catch up with what’s happening in their lives. And for people who are living together in the long term, it is a great way to enhance bonds because home cooking helps to create new experiences, helping greatly with engagement and novelty.
2. Home-cooked meals are much, much healthier on average than eating out or going for takeout. This is because when you are cooking for yourself, you are more focused on the ingredients themselves and don’t have the worry of feeding a large number of people. The calories burned during the cooking process are also an added benefit. But perhaps the greatest reason for a healthier lifestyle with home cooking is that the freshness of the meals is more in line with your personal preferences and pacing.
3. Home-cooked meals are better for those watching their weight. The average fast food meal has about a thousand calories in total–this is almost half of the recommended calorie intake for anyone. While you may think that eating out in more independent establishments will help, think again! These kinds of places are even more likely to give you more calories with each meal they have on offer! By learning why home cooking is good, you have more control over what you put in your body and in what portion sizes. This is especially so if you are following recipes since they have nutritional information you can look up and serving size suggestions you can consider.
4. Home-cooked meals are more efficient in time. While it can be a hassle to prepare your ingredients, the relatively shorter time it takes to cook a meal more than make up for it, especially if you live in the suburbs, where ordering takeout can take longer and be more expensive because of the distance. With home cooking, you can pre-prepare your ingredients during your free time so that when you want to cook a meal, you can do it immediately.
5. Home-cooked meals are cheaper on average. While there are homemade meals that are quite expensive to make, this is only true for the more esoteric and fancier recipes. On the regular, a home-cooked meal is much cheaper to prepare. This is because ingredients can be bought for lower prices when done in bulk or more freshly, depending on the ingredient, of course. With home cooking, you can also extend dishes for far longer than you could with takeout. Home-cooked meals also have more variety for re-cooking than ordered meals.
6. Home-cooked meals are unique and more personalized than ordering takeout. When you are eating out, you are already limiting your choices and narrowing down what you can satisfy your appetite with–but with home cooking, you can learn a wider range of culinary possibilities and develop dishes that are more to your liking either by making a recipe on the fly or improving upon already known meals.
7. Home-cooked meals are just extremely fun to do. Have you ever played a game like Minecraft, where you are taking all these ingredients and whatnot and seeing how they mix and match together? Cooking at home is a lot like that. So, experience new foods by exploring the possibilities of home cooking!

The food service industry might be huge, but cooking food for yourself is a wonderful experience for everyone involved.