June 30, 2026 – Ann is in OurLittleCorner today

Let’s Get Cookin’!

I thought I knew the reason I should be cooking a lot for Andy and me. I thought it was so we both were healthier because of all of our home-cooked meals, but now I know the real reason. It’s so I keep my almost 83-year-brain intact!

A recent study published in The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health followed almost 11,000 Japanese seniors for 6 years, tracking the frequency of their home cooking to see if it was connected to their cognitive health. The resulting data show that “people who cooked a meal from scratch at least once a week had a roughly 30% lower risk of being diagnosed with dementia compared with those who cooked less often.”

You can read Food & Wine‘s analysis of the study here – or read the actual report here. But here are some of the findings:

Meal preparation, including home cooking, is a lifestyle factor with the potential to improve diet and promote physical activity.

Cooking-related activities such as going to the supermarket, preparing meals and cleaning dishes are major physical activities for older adults....The household chores in which older adults are most involved are shopping and meal preparation.Therefore, daily cooking-related activities represent an important source of physical activity for older adults.

Meal preparation provides opportunities for cognitive stimulation because it involves a cognitively complex series of tasks with multiple steps: (1) meal planning, which consists of thinking about menus and which ingredients to use; (2) selecting and acquiring ingredients, which involves selecting and purchasing ingredients with a budget and use-by dates in mind; (3) cooking procedures, which include turning ingredients into a meal; and (4) serving.

Last week we decided it was time to be pro-active with our brain stimulation…and make some kind of fruit dessert using local produce. To do this Andy and I had to (1) decide what kind of dessert to make. We picked blackberry ice cream. Then we had to (2) make a trip to the Watmaugh Strawberry Stand (if you’re in Sonoma, I don’t need to say more) and buy 5 baskets of their amazing blackberries (we’ll make strawberry ice cream next week). Then we had to (3) find a blackberry ice cream recipe and follow it. We picked one from Serious Eats; following it is another part of the story. Finally we had to (4) decide when and to whom to serve it.

All went well until Step #3…when I got to these Serious Eats ice cream instructions. Read them carefully. I think you’ll agree with my assessment that they’re unnecessarily “cognitively complex.”

So as it turns out, Step #3 was a total brain stimulator, not because I followed the unnecessarily-challenging instructions, but because I took the Serious Eats recipe and simplified it so that both you and I could prep it with a little more ease and enjoyment.

And, to be perfectly frank, my brain was also stimulated by the fact that our ice cream freezer didn’t freeze the blackberry ice cream correctly (maybe we had brain fog and didn’t leave the container in the freezer long enough ahead of time?), so I had to figure out what to do with a quart of un-frozen ice cream. And, after some frantic googling, the answer is, tadah! – you remove the ice cream after the first 30 minutes in the freezer, mix it up vigorously, put it back in the freezer for another 30 minutes, and repeat, mixing it vigorously again. It was suggested you should do this pull-out/mix-up/put back in for 3 hours, but we quit after repeating it 3 times and the ice cream has set up with a nice consistency.

Was the whole process worth it? We got tons of brain stimulation, an amazingly delicious dessert, and the motivation to have friends over to enjoy it with us (which is also good for our mental health), so there is no doubt. Mission accomplished.

Make this your mid-year resolution: get into your kitchen and cook something “from scratch” once a week or more. Think of the brain benefits. Think of the health benefits. And think of the enjoyable result. Try it! You’ll like it!