The Health of Home Cooking: Tomato Soup and Catfish (Catfish Bisque if Your Fancy)

 The quality of the food we eat matters. We’ve learned, especially in recent years, that home-cooked, local, and natural foods can be better for us than highly manufactured foods that often seem to win the grocery-store price competition. There is certainly a place for convenience foods, but one tends to give us more nutrition and fewer ingredients we need a chemistry degree to pronounce.

(Ilustrative Only)
Cooking tomato soup
and then putting catfish 
in it. 

The other day, I cooked catfish in tomato bisque.

Yes, catfish. In tomato soup. Sometimes you have to color outside the cookbook.

The process was actually pretty simple. I made a basic tomato soup using tomato paste, bouillon cubes, garlic, onions, and a few spices. That gave me about three meals. I ate one and saved the other two for later, because I have discovered the revolutionary concept of leftovers.The next day, I put one bowl of the soup into a pot and let it simmer until it thickened up a little. Then I added a few pieces of catfish and let everything simmer together until the fish was thawed and cooked through. I turned the heat up a little toward the end just to make sure the fish reached a safe cooking temperature.

And yes, it was store-bought catfish. I would have preferred to catch it myself, but the fish have not yet agreed to participate in my dinner plans.

The end result was actually pretty good.

This is one of the advantages of cooking in bulk: you can make one thing and then use it as the foundation for something completely different later. It saves time, reduces waste, and keeps you from spending your entire evening standing in front of the stove wondering what you're going to eat.

Multi-use cooking is a pretty simple strategy. Make a little extra, save it, and think about what else you can do with it later. Today it's tomato soup. Tomorrow it's catfish tomato bisque. Next week? Who knows. At this rate, that soup may eventually become a casserole and start paying rent.

The point is simple: cooking at home doesn't have to be complicated. Cook a little more than you need, save some for later, and look for ways to turn leftovers into something new. Your wallet, your schedule, and possibly your taste buds will thank you.

Cooking, Food Agency and Pro-Health Behavior

1. Cooking at home is associated with healthier eating patterns, including greater fruit and vegetable consumption and overall higher diet quality.
2. The authors introduce the concept of food agency, which extends beyond cooking skills to include the practical and cognitive abilities involved in planning and preparing meals.
3. Cooking confidence and frequency matter because individuals who feel more capable of preparing food are more likely to engage in home cooking and potentially make healthier choices.
4. The modern food environment creates barriers to home cooking. Convenience foods, processed foods, time pressures, and social expectations can make preparing meals from whole ingredients more difficult.
5. The authors argue that encouraging cooking and strengthening food agency could contribute to better nutrition security and public health, but more research is needed to understand exactly how these behaviors produce better health outcomes.

Trubek, A. B., Belarmino, E. H., Wolfson, J. A., & Lahne, J. (2026). Cooking, food agency and pro-health behavior. Current Environmental Health Reports, 13(1), Article 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40572-026-00541-x