What is The Cooking Solution?

We face so many challenges, every day.

We’re not as healthy as we’d like. Everything, especially food, especially at restaurants, is expensive. Maybe we’d like to lose a few pounds. We’re connected to the entire world through our phones, but we still feel disconnected from everything. Plus reading the news nowadays is exhausting.

We’ve got a lot of problems. And I think cooking can be part of the solution.

During my sabbatical attending graduate school in Italy, and working for several months in Barcelona, I learned a lot about cooking, about communities, about collaborating.

The food in Europe, especially countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, is not only superb, but really simple. As in, four or five ingredients simple.

There are two reasons why. First, the cooks in these countries use a lot of easy but super ways to coax the best flavors out of those few ingredients. Second, they use really good ingredients, fresh from the farm, or only minimally processed.

Back in the U.S., I saw how so much of that was missing here. The grocery stores in Italy and Spain had plenty of processed foods, with lots of ingredients, and even artificial flavors and preservatives. But grocery stores in the United States are stuffed with ultra-processed foods. We even have an acronym, UPFs.

And good food in the USA is expensive, or at least that’s what most people think. We’ve learned to shop for the lowest prices and not the best foods, which leads us to honey mixed with corn syrup, and peanut butter with added vegetable oil and sugar, and all the other UPFs in the middle of the grocery store.

Then we eat this cheap, bad food, and wonder why we’re not feeling great, and why we can’t lose weight. Well, it’s mostly because there’s a $13 billion industry aimed solely at making you eat more of their junk.

Americans miss a lot of the community of food, too. The small Italian town I lived in mostly closed down weekday early afternoons so people could go home and have lunch with their families. They did the same most of the day Sundays. These were times when people got together and cooked and socialized and enjoyed each other in person.

In the USA we eat lunch at our desks so we can keep working. We mindlessly eat dinner while watching television. Often, even when we eat together, we eat alone.

I believe learning to cook can help solve these problems.

Using a few ingredients, from the outer edges of the grocery store, and acquiring a few simple techniques, you can learn to cook great food.

The Cooking Solution is here to help.

A special thanks to Liz Spalding for her work on the logo!

This isn’t about subscribing to some breakthrough meal plan. We’re not selling a meal replacement drink or dietary supplements.

It’s about showing you some simple things you can do, easily and quickly, that will connect you to your food, show you how to make simple and delicious meals, and in general, make your life better.

You’ll learn how to plan for the week, and how to pivot when plans go awry. We’ll show you how to keep some basic things on hand to make a quick meal at the last minute, instead of ordering delivery or heading to the drive-thru. And we’ll share inspiring stories to help you keep on track.

If you already know how to cook, we've got you covered, too! You’ll find new cooking techniques to add to your arsenal, and we’ll explore different cuisines and dishes to add variety to your kitchens.

We’ll have in-person classes, held in the kitchen at Kakao Chocolate in Maplewood. If you live outside the St. Louis area (or even if you do) we’ll also have online classes where you can cook in the comfort of your own home. You can find our latest TCS classes here. And we’re building an “underground shop,” where you’ll be able to get some great ingredients you can’t find in other stores.

And, bit by bit, we’ll show you how cooking makes life better.