Todd Sumamno
The simple act of cooking a meal has brought people together in communities across the globe for millennia, but since the onset of the pandemic, cooking has evolved into a much less communal, and more personal activity in 2021.
Today, as many people find themselves staying home more often, cooking itself is becoming more popular than ever before. So if you’ve jumped on the home-cooking bandwagon and are searching for some culinary inspiration, check out these top seven trends that are happening right now.
Hot breakfast
In the past, many people had little to no time for a decent breakfast in the morning. Simply getting your kids out of bed and out the door for school on time can make breakfast seem like an unnecessary burden, but as we’ve seen over the last nearly two years, most kids have started schooling at home, leaving more time in the mornings for a hot meal.
The beauty of breakfast food is that it’s really difficult to mess up. Scrambled eggs with bacon and toast, pancakes, and waffles are all incredibly quick and easy to make and can easily turn a rough morning into a great day!
Convenience Cooking
On the other side of things, many parents became full time teachers for their kids -on top of working full time from home. This places an obvious burden on their shoulders, making the efficiency of their cooking more important than ever.
When it comes to convenience cooking, simplicity is key. Recipes that allow you to add all your ingredients to one pan, or slow-cooked meals you can leave in a crockpot all day have grown in popularity -especially since more inexperienced cooks are having to forge their skills in the fires of necessity, as the restaurant industry dwindles. You may check out sites like https://makeadish.net/recipe/lobster-shrimp-bisque/ for more delicious and healthy recipes!
Canned food meals
Since going out to the store or out to eat isn’t always an option, people have begun to look inward -in their pantries, we mean. Most people already have tons of canned ingredients ready to go, so exploring the boundaries of their culinary skills with what they already have on hand has become a new trend.
Canned food meals certainly don’t sound appetizing, but you might be surprised at how delicious a meal can be -even when it’s made from canned ingredients. Whether it’s a hearty beef goulash or amped up black bean tacos, you can probably create something special with what you already have on hand!
Conscious cooking
More and more people are using their kitchens as an escape, and understandably so! Whether you’re prepping ingredients or sautéing veggies, it’s easy to get into an almost zen-like rhythm and completely forget about all the struggles and concerns of daily life.
Mindfulness and cooking go hand-in-hand, and when you implement that sense of self-awareness into your process of selecting ingredients, you’ll find that creating delicious and healthy meals is easier than ever.
Trying new things because they’re good for you, and making them delicious is the foundation of conscious cooking. It’s like buying broccoli because you know it’s good for you. You know it’s packed with nutrients that will help alleviate pain and inflammation, provide calcium, dietary fiber, and much more -despite it being a vegetable that you may dislike.
Cooking with cannabis
This trend has grown over the last few years, as more and more states have legalized cannabis for both recreational and medical use. Spending lots of time in quarantine means having the freedom to get high however you want, so many people have become experts in creating their own cannabis concentrates to cook with -from cannabutter, to sugars and oils.
Cooking with cannabis isn’t the only thing folks have caught onto though. There’s an entire world of aromas and terpenes in regular foods like mango and chocolate which people have begun to pair with cannabis in order to heighten the high even higher! To learn more about that particular field of magic, check out this article on Veriheal.
Flexitarian diets
It’s no secret that the meat industry places an enormous burden on the environment. Miles and miles of natural forest regularly get flattened into vast expanses of monoculture to be used for feeding livestock -which produce obscene levels of methane harmful to the air we breathe. So it’s no wonder why people are choosing to eat less meat.
Flexitarian (as opposed to vegetarian or vegan) is just that. People recognize that it’s healthier to eat less meat for both themselves and the environment, so it becomes more of a special occasion type of dish -not to mention the money you can save!
Homemade bread
There are few things in this world more satisfying and liberating than the feeling of successfully baking your first loaf of bread. Recently, more people are spending time at home, and prefer to rely less on the grocery store supply chain, so they bake bread from home!
It’s not difficult to bake really good and healthy bread either. Once you have a sourdough starter, you can continue to use it as long as you continue to feed it weekly -it’s sort of like having a pet living in your fridge. Not familiar with sourdough or sourdough starter? You can learn more about it here!
Conclusion
Over the last year, cooking at home has become more popular than ever, and understandably so. If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out these top seven cooking trends, and go make something delicious for you and your friends!
Brittany
