Make Your Dinners Great Again

How To Make Your Dinners Great Again

Are you in a food slump? Are you stuck making all the same old 'safe' recipes out of fear of wasting time and money experimenting with something different?

This pattern of behaviour is very common, especially amongst young people who haven't picked up a lot of advanced cooking skills and have settled into an easy routine. While you might be getting the nutrition you need, if you're not getting excited about your weekly dinners, then it can subtly affect your mood and ultimately your overall happiness.

Sometimes, all you need is a fresh outlook and some great suggestions from sources like the delicious HelloFresh recipes list. With the power of the internet, there's no shortage of resources you can leverage in order to create a mouth-watering meal.

However, making dinnertime an exciting experience often takes more than simply learning new recipes. Let's take a look at some advice for those down in the dinner dumps.

Replicate your favourite 'eating out' dishes
If you are feeling unmotivated in the home kitchen, chances are you've opted to eat out or order in a little more often. You probably have a few favourite dishes that you always order when eating out with friends or on a date but have never considered actually making yourself.

So why haven't you? Do your favourite dishes seem too elaborate or advanced to make? This is a perfect opportunity to learn something new while treating yourself to a meal you would happily pay for outside the home.

While you're DIY creations likely won't be immediately 'as good' as what you're used to in the restaurant or diner, they are still a special dining experience simply by virtue of the fact you prepared them yourself.

The obvious benefit of doing this is that once you get proficient at making these meals, dinner time will be far more exciting as you'll be able to easily replicate your go-to 'eating out' meals from the comfort of your home.

Invite friends and family over for regular dinner parties
A lot of people have never hosted a proper dinner party, either because it never occurred to them or they think that they're only appropriate for special occasions. In truth, there's no reason not to have a dinner party every week if you have people who are keen for it.

Perhaps calling it a dinner 'party' is making it sound too formal, so call it a 'group dinner' or 'feast session'; whatever helps make it more casual for you and your guests. The point is that cooking and eating with your friends and family members instantly makes dinner time a social bonding experience that's about far more than just the food. As long as you remember not to get stuck staring at your phone!

You could just invite everyone over and cook for them, and this might have been the expected norm in older generations, but it's still perfectly acceptable to ask people to bring a side dish over or help you in the kitchen. As long as you frame all of the kitchen activity as a fun social experience, perhaps with a glass of wine as you go, people won't mind dicing a few vegetables as long as they're telling you about their day.

Spruce up your kitchen
You may not even realise that the mediocrity of your kitchen is what's holding you back from getting creative and pushing the envelope at dinner time. If you have a cooking space that's cluttered, grimy or filled with faulty or broken appliances then you obviously won't be very excited to use it.

Apart from giving your kitchen a general clean, consider giving it a whole makeover. Short of spending money renovating the entire space, consider buying some new appliances, new utensils, new chopping boards; whatever it takes to give your kitchen a new lease on life.

Now, go and make your dinners great again!
While there's certainly plenty more advice out there on ways to reinvigorate your enthusiasm for cooking dinner, the above tips are as good a place to start as any and after some time will become entirely natural to you.