Cooking is a team sport in our house (well, apartment). The kitchen is the place where we spend the most time together whether it’s a lazy Sunday morning breakfast, a special date night, or lunchtime on work from home days.
About the Chefs
Megan is the youngest of five from a house where everyone had a job before dinner could be ready. She started helping out in the kitchen as soon as she could reach the counter and thinks that making and serving delicious food is the best way to show love. Her formative experiences cooking include a lot of boxed brownie mix, helping Dad pull off Thanksgiving the year Mom threw out her back, and hosting friends for dinners in college to give everyone a break from the dining hall and microwave ramen.
Alex grew up in rural Maine in a home where family-style meals were prepared not just for his immediate family but for any of the extended and chosen family who wanted to come by. He helped his mom out and learned all the most important basics from her, but his passion for cooking came later in life when he was in college. During Alex’s senior year of college he began exploring meal prepping and turned to a low carb diet to lose weight and build muscle.
So a ketogenic meal prepper meets an intuitive eater…
And falls in love!
From the start, it was obvious that we approached food in very different ways. Alex was six years into a steady routine of painstakingly measured, extremely repetitive meal prepped eating (Megan’s words). Megan was 24 years into eating whatever she wanted whenever she wanted (also Megan’s words).
All this didn’t have to change too much until C*VID. We were already hunting for our first apartment together, but when the Governor ordered a statewide shutdown Alex began toting his most important possessions the 2.9 miles to Megan’s place in a duffel bag on his bike. What were the items he couldn’t live without? A pressure cooker. Another pressure cooker that’s also an air fryer. Cast iron pans. A 12” nonstick pan. Protein powder. You get the picture- there was a lot of biking.
Suddenly, we were stuck together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the enormous differences in how we prepared and planned our food had to somehow get resolved.
The method to our madness
Luckily, despite a lot of differences in how we planned our meals there were some common values. We both prefer cooking with whole foods and lots of fresh herbs and spices. We enjoy the challenge of developing new recipes and especially like to recreate favorite products from the store or the best dishes at restaurants we’ve been to. Our perfect home recipes taste gourmet, are intentional but not fussy, and save some money over takeout.
We slowly settled into an intentional and balanced method of batch cooking that strikes a balance between meal prep and intuitive eating. Our delicious elements use high quality ingredients and can be used over the course of several days or even weeks to create fresh, nutritious meals to fit your diet and cravings. Hopefully this blog will inspire you to try new things and see that high quality meals with complex flavor profiles are within reach.