empowerment | Gotta Eat, Can't Cook

Posts Tagged ‘empowerment’

March 18th, 2025

Blog, Empowerment, How To & Tips

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Only You Have the Power to Empower You!

Bringing self-empowerment to life is entirely your own superpower

No one, no matter what they say – even with best intentions, can empower you. Only you can empower you. The reason: empowerment doesn’t come from without or outside you. Empowerment comes from within. Yes, you can get help to learn the skills you need. But that help itself won’t empower you. You then have to internalize what you learn and make those learned skills a living part of you – and that is nothing like what you see in the magically blissful and freeing but cliched, unrealistic images below.

Empowerment comes from within and is not a magical blissful feel good moment

No. Real empowerment starts with awareness that will probably be uncomfortable to acknowledge. That’s exactly how it has been for me on many fronts, including cooking – and that’s normal. That awareness means knowing, really knowing and feeling inside you completely, that you want to empower yourself in a specific manner, like develop the self-confidence to stand up for yourself, overcome a particular fear, manage emotions better, forgive others, forgive yourself, or, right here, adopt life-promoting eating habits and feel confidently comfortable in the kitchen making meals that support those quality-of-life enriching habits.

Awareness is step one, and it’s an empowering first step in itself because it requires you to admit, with strength, your want and need to change.

The next step is finding trusted, verified guidance that really can help you learn and adopt the skills you need. That guidance can come in the form of a friend, a mentor, a course, a book – or a resource like this site when it comes to empowering yourself in the kitchen. Just bear in mind, and this is most important, that taking on trusted guidance can only provide you with the skills you need to empower yourself. The rest: learning, adopting and internalizing those skills so that you can apply them in real life circumstances, is up to you exactly as well-recognized spiritual and secular leaders and teachers have said completely correctly forever, “I can show you the path, but you have to do the work”.

Don’t let that four-letter “work” word stop you. The work is entirely achievable and noble, and you have the no-kidding power to do it, especially if, just as it is necessary when building any foundation, you take it one doable step at a time.

When it comes to empowering yourself to make and enjoy quality-of-life enriching foods, I look forward to helping you develop the skills you need, all step-by-step and in pictures – and, most of all, having fun doing it!

Any questions or suggestions, just pop me a note at bruce@gotta-eat.com.

Best always,

January 3rd, 2025

Anti-Inflammatory Foods, Anti-inflammatory Recipes, Blog, Cycling Food, Fitness Food, Hiking Food, How To & Tips, Running Food, Salad Dressings, Salads & Salad Dressings

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Making Your Better Eating New Year’s Resolution Easy to Start with This Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing Picture Book Recipe

I just asked ChatGPT (Open AI’s artificial intelligence source), “What is the most popular new year’s resolution in the USA for 2025?” The answer was interesting. ChatGPT said it did not yet have enough qualitative information to give an accurate answer. I like that answer. But, based on trends over recent years, the AI took what it called “an educated guess” that resolutions to improve mental health would be highest priority followed by resolutions to improve physical health, specifically regarding both diet and exercise.

That makes a lot of sense. I’ve believed for a long time that the three things we can do to make the best of our quality of life is eat life-promoting foods, move our bodies rigorously and manage stress, all of which go a long way toward regulating our physical, mental and spiritual well-being.

Considering this site is focused on how to prepare life-promoting foods as easily as possible, I asked AI, “What is the easiest recipe to teach a person new to cooking?”. The answer: scrambled eggs and toast, which required 5 needed ingredients plus optional ingredients to taste and 12 steps to complete. I think I have an easier answer and one that’s far easier to make and much more versatile than what AI offered: Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing.

Helping veterans make life-promoting meals at Veterans Incorporated, Shrewsbury, MA

First, a quick back story. The first time I ever made this recipe was with a group of fellow veterans who were turning their lives around through Veterans Incorporated (Vets Inc.) in Shrewsbury, MA. One of the guys in the group, a fellow Navy veteran – not the guy shown above – chimed in when I listed the seven ingredients I intended to use: garlic powder, salt, ground black pepper, mustard, honey, vinegar and oil.

“Why do we need the added salt and sugar? A lot of guys here have diabetes and/or high blood pressure. We don’t need that _____(4-letter word for “stuff”)!

I get blunt great and agreed. But this was the first recipe I was teaching these guys, let alone the first time I’d ever met them. My inner dialog: “Fine, I’ll cut the salt and honey – but, boy, this dressing’s gonna’ taste horrible.”

I quickly made the dressing with just 5 ingredients: garlic powder, ground black pepper, mustard, vinegar and oil and asked the guys to taste a spoon of it before I tasted it myself. The stunner? They loved it, so did I – and I’ve never looked back.

Not only does this dressing taste great (most important), but it’s also incredibly easy to make and versatile. As shown in the few sample pictures below, it goes great on any kind of warm or cold salad, over cooked vegetables, meat, chicken, fish, pasta, rice – imagination is your only limit.

3 photos show examples of how versatile instant 5-ingredient salad dressing can be.

The toughest part about making this dressing is gathering the ingredients, like those shown below. You actually see six ingredients because I often use two different types of vinegars for added flavor (flavor rules here!), which you certainly don’t have to do.

Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing ingredients

Click this link or any picture on this page for a complete step-by-step picture recipe that includes information about the sourness of different vinegars and why this recipe is considered low in both salt and sugar.

Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing Recipe 3 Shot

I wish you the very best starting both the new year and your resolutions and will do my best to help you stick to those resolutions related to eating better to improve your quality of life.

More very soon!

September 16th, 2024

Blog, Empowerment, Food & Health, How To & Tips

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Gotta’ Eat, Can’t Cook: Empowering Yourself Beyond the Kitchen

Gotta' Eat, Can't Cook is all about providing the skills you need to empower yourself in the kitchen and beyond.

3 primary concerns determine your quality of life: what you eat, how regularly and rigorously you move your body and how you manage stress.

To illustrate that point, even though the photo below is fairly current, this is what we humans (homo sapiens) looked like 10,000 or so years ago.

Up until 10,000 to 12,000 years ago we homo sapiens were all hunter gatherers.

10,000 years is nothing relative to the 10 to 20 million years it took for us to develop as hominids (early forms of humans) from primates or even the 200,000 to 300,000 years since we started to develop as “modern man”, or homo sapiens, that we are today.

Now, fast forward to more “current” times. 10,000 – 12,000 years ago, we were all nomadic hunter gatherers. That meant we had to move our bodies – almost always a lot – to find or hunt for food. At the same time, we had to manage stress to survive periods when food couldn’t be found or avoid being eaten by the same wild animals we were trying to kill to eat to keep us alive.

The fact is: our bodies are still hunter gatherer bodies that developed over millions of years. I joke that despite food that’s now available 24/7/365 in developed communities around the world, we haven’t yet become “homo couch-us potato-us”. That means our hunter gatherer bodies still require foods that promote life, regular and vigorous movement (aka, exercise) and techniques to manage stress so that we can think and behave clearly when life demands it most.

This site is about providing you with the skills you need to empower yourself to make the foods your body needs on your own. Like I’ve mentioned before, no one, no matter how well intentioned or influential they are to you, can empower you. Empowerment comes from within. That means only YOU can empower YOU. And this site provides picture book and video guidance and support to help you do just that in the kitchen – and beyond – because real empowerment begets more empowerment.

Ha! Then there’s the fun of it all. That’s up next!

January 15th, 2024

Blog, Empowerment, Salads & Salad Dressings

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Helping Seniors Empower Themselves to Make Life-Promoting Foods with AARP and Eastway Rec.

I’ve written this here before, and it’s entirely true; only you can empower yourself. Sure, others can help. But the best anyone else can do is provide you with the skills you need to empower yourself because empowerment comes from within. You have to feel it, own it. Once you do, ha!, you’re off to the races!

I’m now 65 1/2 years old, a legitimate senior citizen. And I’ve just started working with AARP to help fellow seniors learn the skills they need to empower themselves to make quality of life-promoting meals on their own though a program we call “Gotta’ Eat Smartly” at Eastway Rec. Center in Charlotte, NC.

To pull back a bit to the bigger picture, even though we’ve just begun, the program’s intent is to start locally, right at Eastway, to develop a proof of concept that connects directly with seniors and shows positive results. Those results include growing participation and seeing how seniors actually apply the skills they learn at our live in-person sessions and at home.

Once we do that, we can then replicate those same skill-providing techniques and use them more widely throughout central North Carolina and beyond. Like throwing a stone in a pond, it’s all about creating an enthusiastic splash that ripples out and connects with as many people as possible by providing seniors – and eventually others – with the skills they need to make life-promoting foods, foods that our bodies and mind need to function as effectively as possible, give us the foundation to live the best quality of life possible – and taste killer good!

Regarding flavor, the next two posts will show the two recipes we put together at Eastway last week: Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing…