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The Benefits of Home Cooked Dinners For Your Family

Section 1 [00:00 - 02:47]

Hi y'all and welcome to Texas Real Food, my name is Stephanie and today I want to talk to you about the benefits of providing home-cooked dinners for your family. The benefits reach far beyond the simple goodwill and high spirits of showing your amount of effort and care towards your loved ones. Preparing your family's dinner from scratch ensures that you know exactly what is going into your meal. (1)Even with nutrition facts and ingredients lists on packaged foods the truth can sometimes be elusive. Not only are some ingredients hidden or disguised on product labels but the quality of the individual ingredients can vary widely. Handling each raw ingredient yourself means (2)you can personally guarantee the quality of what will end up in your family members’ stomachs. Shopping at farmers markets and other avenues for directly buying food items is a great way to ensure quality.

(3)Fewer ingredients can often make for healthy food items. Let's take a look at french fries. As an example a Mcdonald's french fry is made up of 19 different ingredients. You can make french fries in your own home with as few as three ingredients and the result will be much healthier and still tastes great. (4)Questions about cleanliness are thrown out the window. You know exactly how clean your hands and kitchen workspace are. You can't know for sure how clean the hands of the cooks in a restaurant's kitchen are or how about their plates and silverware. The same goes for the hundreds of industrial agricultural employees that handle your meat and goods before they even made it into the supermarket shelves. You don't ever need to worry about e coli or salmonella recalls when purchasing directly from local farmers or ranchers.

And preparing the meat yourself right at home, preparing home-cooked dinners can be a great way to save money, especially if you follow a couple of key suggestions. Planning out your meals for a week or two in advance will help save additional money on raw ingredients and improve the efficiency of your cooking and your food storage. Prepping

home cooked meals on the larger side and then saving leftovers is another great way to maximize your spending dollar.

Cooking for your family will always be cheaper than eating out at a restaurant. Up charges and service costs are an integral element of restaurant eating since you are not only paying for the food but the preparation, the service, the hospitality, and the atmosphere of the restaurant. (5)When done smartly, cooking dinners for your family can be more cost effective than grocery store prepped meals as well, and even more time efficient in the long run.

Cooking meals yourself means you get to decide exactly how much food you and your family is presented with. Receiving too much or too little food when dining in a restaurant or purchasing meals from a supermarket can be a legitimate concern. (6)This is never a concern when cooking for yourself as you directly control the proportions. Whether you want to cook on the smaller side for perfectly sized meals, ingredient conservation and diet assistance, or cook on the larger side and have exciting bountiful meals and have leftovers for the future, you have the power when making meals in your own kitchen.

Section 2 [02:47 - 04:47]

Cooking can be great fun. In addition to all the other benefits to home cooking, let's not forget the fact that many people find it to be a source of great enjoyment. If you don't have much cooking experience (7)because it seemed too time consuming or too difficult, then give it a try, and who knows you might just find a new hobby that lets you do something you love while providing for the people you love. You can even involve your kids in the cooking process. Knowing how to prepare a healthy meal is a great skill for a child of any age to have. Getting your kids involved can be just as fun for them as it is informative. Cooking with your children is a great hands-on way to promote food literacy right in the kitchen.

(8)Home-cooked meals encourage the whole family eating together and sharing in meaningful conversation. Researchers at Washington state found that the average American eats 46 percent of their meals alone. Eating as a family unit helps to promote positive mental health and better moods. Dinner time can become something for the whole family to look forward to, rather than just another necessary part of the day.

There are clear environmental benefits to cooking at home too. Restaurants and grocery stores contribute high quantities of both concentrated waste and spoiled food, which becomes additional waste. (9)Transportation lines, packaging and industrial kitchens can also contribute to the pollutants and emissions that are damaging our atmosphere. Cooking at home and being sure to avoid spoilage helps minimise your footprint.

There are hundreds if not thousands of easy to make recipes made from fresh healthy ingredients. Cooking at home doesn't have to be a daunting affair. You start off with simple and or quick meals and you can even stick right there if that's all you're comfortable with. The benefits will still come rolling in.

I hope the many benefits of home-cooked family dinners have convinced you to give it a try. Any one of the myriad benefits should be enough to make home cooking appealing for you and your family. Thank you for watching this video at Texas Real Food. If you learned something or found something useful then do us a favour and like this video. We would love to hear your opinions so head on down to the comment section and join the conversation. Be sure to subscribe and check out the other videos here at Texas Real Food.