How to Cook Like Great Grandma

Not only did she make delicious meals, but great grandma probably also raised the vegetables in her garden, the fruit in her yard, churned the butter, collected the eggs from her chickens, and butchered the beef and pork for the pot roasts and pork chops. You might not want to make everything from scratch, like your great grandmother did, but you can take some steps in that direction.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• energy
• time
• a garden or balcony for growing some vegetables
• pressure cooker and canning supplies
• cookbooks

1. Learn to cook from scratch and that requires learning some basic cooking skills. Do you know how to properly use a kitchen knife? How to properly and safely chop vegetables? What various cooking terms mean, and how to do them? Do you know how to can? Use a pressure cooker? A blender? Bake a roast? Fry chicken? Make biscuits?
   Wherever your skills are lacking, you need to find someone who knows how to do it to teach you how too. That might mean a cook book, if you can learn from a book, asking your mother or your grandmother to show you how to do it, taking a cooking class, or watching how-to videos on the internet.
2. Save money and make your own food, rather than going out to dinner, or ordering in, or buying ready made dinners of any kind.
3. Start a food garden in whatever space you have, even a tiny balcony in the city can grow a few tomatoes and herbs.
4. Cook three delicious, wholesome meals a day for the whole family, even if one of those is a lunch that the children and working members of the family take with them when they leave the house. Your health and your pocketbook will both benefit from this.
5. Teach both male and female family members basic and advanced cooking skills.
6. Start a food pantry. One of great grandmothers cooking secrets was her pantry. Most people in the past tried to keep a complete and well-stocked pantry, full of home canned and preserved foods to last a year or more. There was usually preserved meat of some sort too. Nowadays your extra meat will probably be in the freezer, but in the past, before electricity became commonplace, great grandmother had to use other methods to preserve meat.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider it a challenge to learn new skills that were commonplace in the past.
• Celebrate with food. Learn how to make some fabulous old-time desserts for example.
• Read all the various warnings for canning and preserving foods, and follow them to the letter.