Bringing Pleasure Back to the Table

About Me:

Day after day, my mother would come home from a long day at work and conjure up a warm, home cooked meal as I sat at the counter doing my homework and telling her about my day. Sitting at the dinner table and sharing stories with my family are probably some of the most cherished memories of my life at home. Cooking has always been a way for my family to come together and connect with one another; whether we were cutting the ends off of green beans or simply watching my mother move swiftly about the kitchen. However, the tranquility and comfort that I felt in the kitchen started to slowly fade as I stepped foot into the unknown world of college. 

My name is Jovanna Franco and I am, quite frankly, a frazzled freshman college student. Compared to my experiences with food back home, my current sugary and salty food selections have surpassed the healthy options my mother used to plate in front of me. In this blog, I am going to attempt to train myself to think of healthier options than an Easy-Mac and half a chocolate bar for dinner by choosing to cook my own dinners. College has given me the freedom to eat whenever I want and whatever I want, but the ultimate challenge is to make exactly what I please. At the end of the day, I want to be happy with the food I am choosing to consume at all hours of the day. 

Welcome yourself into my archaic community kitchen where the recipes I choose to cook will come from a nutritionist named Joy Bauer, who specializes in food diets that can drastically improve one’s health. While I learn to cook and attempt to eat healthier, I will also be documenting the affects these foods have on my overall mood. I have little to no culinary experience, but I plan to learn, laugh, and most importantly, EAT all along the way! I love watching The Bachelor on television, painting my nails, and procrastinating on homework but my new favorite hobby is going to take a detour down the food alley. I want healthier food options and hopefully a better attitude will accompany my cooking stories.

Introduction:

The problem shopaholics have when they are continuously swiping their credit cards for an overload of clothes is equivalent to the struggles I have with spending meal points on my random food cravings. I dread going to the cafeteria at school because after about the second week, good old Benson has continued to lose its vitality and has me dragging my feet to the longest of lines. It is week four in the college world and according to the quarter system this means the start of midterms. In my world, this translates to the beginning of a large decline in my health. Chocolate automatically becomes my best friend and suddenly the healthy, organic rice cakes and carrots are not making the cut. Boredom with food leads to experimentation with dangerously addicting sugars, fats, and salts. This is my time to pull myself out of my vortex of unhealthful doom and change things up a bit. 

I am clearly not an expert in neuroscience or cognitive psychology but I would like to see how much cooking has an affect on emotions. In my perspective, cooking really does bring people together and I want to watch this get put into action. Step one is picking a delicious, yet nutritious recipe to cook in my small and extremely limited dorm kitchen. Step two is rounding up my friends in the evening to assist me in creating exactly what the recipe dictates. Step three (if I make it this far without destroying my food) will incorporate the documentation of my feelings of how the process went, how my body feels after, and if there were any obvious vibes in the kitchen. A before and after scale of my emotions will determine my personal progress and my accounts of how productive I felt that night or the next day will also contribute to my state of emotions. By far, the happier and more productive I am the more successful I will feel in taking control of my own meals. However, if my cravings come back twice as hard and I am just as cranky and stressed out as before, maybe my college cafeteria is not the problem. Difficulties, teamwork, and emotions will all be elaborately recorded in the blog post and I hope you continue to come back to read my moments of chaos or composure within the kitchen. 

The main ingredients of my food are going to correspond with a specific mood that is supposed to accompany it. For example, a food such as spinach that is supposed to give a natural boost of energy to the human body would be a starting point for a recipe of a spinach and chicken pesto pasta. With these nutritional tips as my guide, I want to create a consistent food choice for myself at the dinner table and maybe skip the dining hall for something I can genuinely call my own masterpiece. Cooking on my own is a healthy alternative and I want to give other college students just like me another reason to analyze their moments of gluttonous oblivion. In the words of Julia Child, I am “taking the fear out of cooking” and trying a new lifestyle change. So with that said, I will be making a trip to Safeway, my local market, in the next couple of days to collect my healthy ingredients for dish number one. What is the dish I am going to be preparing? Well, it looks like it is going to remain a mystery until you wander back to “Foods, Moods, and Attitudes.”