Review: Cooking Traditional Foods

I recently enjoyed the pleasure of connecting with Kerry Ann Foster of CookingTF.com – a site devoted to natural family living, traditional foods and feeding your family well.   CookingTF.com provides a unique service to harried parents and traditional food lovers alike: weekly menu mailers complete with recipes, shopping lists and a real food-friendly brand guide.   Furthermore, her site is a wealth of other information including an active community message board in which members exchange information, answer questions and connect with other health- and wellness-minded folks.

Originally, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the menu mailers … that is, before I saw them and used them.

You see, cooking wholesome and nutritious meals – especially meals that require additional prep work as many of traditional foods do – can be daunting.   It takes planning, and considerably more planning than meals focused on the Standard American Diet require.   Soaking grains.   Planning which vegetables to serve to ensure your kids receive optimal nutrition.   Putting together wholesome, but natural desserts.   This all takes time, planning and effort. Much of that is lost on newcomers to the traditional and real foods movements.   It’s overwhelming to say the least.

Each weekly menu provides six well-rounded, healthy dinners focused on real food. The packet contains not only a dinner plan for the next week, but also a shopping list, a checklist outlining what you need to prepare for that day whether it’s thawing chicken for Curried Chicken or soaking pinto beans for refried beans.   Furthermore, the packet provides a quick and easy reference guide to fruits and vegetables in season for that month as well as a reference guide to optimal, real food-friendly brands like Thai Kitchen, Bragg’s   or Wilderness Family Naturals.

The greatest value is that these weekly menu subscriptions as well as her recipe archive take the extra effort and guess work out of cooking wholesome, traditional foods for your family.   It’s hard, especially if you’re a working parent like I am, to compile this yourself: meal planning, brand analyzing, setting up your to-do list and still feed your family well; however, the menus that CookingTF.com provides remove that extra effort.   The end result is that your family eats well, and you save both time and money by not making last minute trips to the store for something you’ve forgotten or giving it all up to go eat out because you have no idea what to put on the supper plate that night.   Furthermore, the subscriptions are affordable.   For as little as $6 ($5.40 for Nourished Kitchen Readers), you can subscribe to receive a month’s worth of weekly menu mailers.   It’s a remarkably affordable value and it save considerable time and effort on your part.

Between working full-time, mothering my son and helping my husband to run our farmers market … oh yeah … and blogging too, I can really see the value in CookingTF.com‘s service.   Furthermore, if I had known about this service when I first began my journey into real food, it would have saved me a lot of trial-and-error in terms of learning which nourishing foods to prepare and how to prepare them.   Plus, there’s just some really good recipes like the Chocolate Pudding featuring wholesome ingredients like dates, avocado and coconut oil.   It really is good food.

At any rate, please check out a sample menu package available online.   There’s also a   10% discount for Nourished Kitchen readers so please check out all the services CookingTF.com offers – take advantage of the discount.   It’s a good deal.   Also, please stop back by here on Thursday when we’ll be conducting a CookingTF.com giveaway.