Introducing the FF Cooking Club!

Hi Everyone!  If you haven’t noticed, I love doing my cooking blogs.   I love inspiring people to cook and entertain.  It truly is one of my passions and always seems to bring family and friends together.  As much as I enjoy entertaining and hosting, I really cherish weeknight dinners and cooking for my family.   The idea of my family getting together after our crazy days to sit down and spend some quality time together is the most important reason I cook weeknight meals.  I think it gives us a break from our busy lives to truly slow down, talk to each other, enjoy each others company, and appreciate what’s most important in life, our loved ones.

After speaking with many of my friends and colleagues, I realized that cooking dinners during the weeknight can be very challenging and overwhelming for a variety of reasons (not knowing how to cook, busy schedule with the kids and after school activities, exhaustion and not wanting to cook/clean after a full day, challenges with picking out recipes and going to the grocery store, etc.).  These are all valid and understandable obstacles that make calling in for delivery or getting takeout way more appealing.

After giving much thought to all the feedback, I started thinking, what if there was a way to make weeknight cooking easy, fast, fun, approachable, and maybe even enjoyable?  And then it came to me…

The Forever Freckled Cooking Club

I use the word “club” lightly.  There are no memberships, no requirements, no criteria. I am simply going to start recommending 4 weeknight meals, provide great tips on how to prepare the meals for all my cooking novices, and create an organized shopping list to take to the grocery store (or to give to your significant other or delivery service to do your shopping).  We will then engage and discuss how the meals went, problems people encountered, which recipes you or your family liked, and suggestions for easier preparation during Forever Freckled’s “Meal Mondays” on Facebook.  I would like to give my readers an easy and interactive way to begin the process of cooking weeknight dinners, learning how to cook, organizing the kitchen to be “cooking ready,” and making weekend grocery store shopping easy and efficient.

Let’s get the Kitchen “Cooking Ready”

Pantry Essentials

There are a list of ingredients that you should always have in your pantry that are needed to prepare a meal.  By having these staple items in your kitchen, you can easily whip up a meal, but more importantly, it cuts down your grocery list by half and makes grocery store shopping way less intimidating, time consuming and tasking.   You can certainly go out and buy all these products in one trip, however that is absolutely not necessary.  As you go along the process of cooking, you will slowly build up all these necessary items.  When I was teaching Katie how to organize and prepare weeknight meals, (Pepperplate Part 1, Peppeplate Part2) this is how we started!

Cooking Tool Essentials

The second part of getting your kitchen “cooking ready” is to have the proper tools in your kitchen that will help you prepare recipes quickly and efficiently.  The link above provides a list of the main cooking tools you should have in your kitchen!

I am so excited to write these blogs, and I hope this will help start you off on your cooking journey.  Stay tuned for my first official FF Cooking Club Blog where I will recommend 4 weeknight meals, have prepared organized shopping lists, and provide great cooking and preparation tips for each recipe.  I am excited to get our readers engaged, inspired, writing comments, questions, and sending pictures of their experiences.  Look out for “Meal Mondays” on Facebook where we will be encouraging our readers to interact and tell us how the recipes worked for them. I hope everyone enjoys The FF Cooking Club.  Happy cooking!