I've taken up cooking the majority of our meals in the last couple years. Before that we ate out almost exclusively. It started as a goal to just eat healthier,

I've taken up cooking the majority of our meals in the last couple years. Before that we ate out almost exclusively. It started as a goal to just eat healthier, to know more about what was in our food and to simply eat fewer unpronounceable chemicals. I used to hate cooking, but now that I'm into it, I'm really enjoying the development of the various skills that come along with it: from picking fresh veggies to basic knife skills. I've slowly been ramping up the complexity of the kinds of meals I'm able to make. I'll spend a bit of time every week trolling various youtube cooking channels to find new menus I think I have the skill to make or have one or two new things that I can reasonably learn without introducing any "use only for this recipe" ingredients. I don't think I'll ever get into meal prepping, I like too much variety in my diet. I've found a few channels that have meals at a variety of skill levels from "I can do that in my sleep" to "this is going to take some intense study to get right". It's been an incredibly rewarding experience and we've gone from freezers full of microwave meals to empty freezers and a fridge packed to the gills with greens and other raw ingredients. I've come to feel a great sense of pride when hitting the checkout line at the grocery and every single ingredient in the cart is raw and unprocessed -- and most of the cart is full of veggies. Bonus: since my wife is Korean, I'm also learning to cook stuff from her culture and it gives me two menus full of recipes I can draw from when making the week's meals.