Jess Jeziorowski

A bit of a rant, first.

I’ve written about this before, and my feelings haven’t changed: cooking good food shouldn’t have gatekeepers. Your olive oil doesn’t need to be imported from Italy, and your cheese can be the one out of the plastic shaker container. So long as you’re cooking food that’s delicious, nutritious, and satisfying, who cares how it ends up on the table and what your budget was. Produce doesn’t need to be organic, or imported, or even fresh — it’s all fine. Canned is fine, frozen is fine.

I feel like food influencers, everyone from Gordon Ramsay to Instagram and TikTok foodies, should bear in mind the responsibility of their platforms. This reminds me of an incident on Twitter a while back when a chef went on a diatribe about folks who use jarred minced garlic being inferior cooks, without taking into consideration that people may not have the time, means, or mobility to mince fresh garlic. Am I going to use pre-minced garlic or a jarred sauce? No. Am I going to say you can’t use either of those? Also no. Because I remember what it was like when it was easier and more affordable to use jarred sauce before I learned to make my own sauce. Like with any recipe I post, I am not going to be disappointed if you use jarred garlic or marinara.

That being said, I’ve seen some of the things TikTok moms throw together, and while I’m happy you’re feeding your families, you could probably save some money and your sodium levels if you made a lot of stuff yourself and kept it stocked in a pantry or freezer.

It comes back to ultra-processed foods and that alarming statistic that more than 50% of the American diet is UPFs. For example, this weird taco tater tot casserole I saw? A jar of salsa, sure, but a cheddar cheese sauce is really too much for people to make? Meals (and therefore people) would be healthier if they simplified things instead of dumping a bunch of jars and pre-made spice packets into a baking dish.

(I also Have Thoughts about there being no more home economics classes that teach basic cooking skills, but that is for another time).

Anyway, some may find the not-recipe recipes I post here difficult to follow because of the lack of measurements, not to mention the lack of step by step photos. If you don’t have any foundational knowledge about how to cook food, these recipes probably aren’t for you. I approach cooking as an intuitive thing, and I rarely ever measure when cooking on the fly. Instead, I taste my food as I go, and if I feel like something needs changing, I change it because I know and understand how to change it. However, I realize the ability to do this comes from experience, and that experience comes from using recipes, measuring every single thing, and making a lot of mistakes.