Before you decide to spend another evening sitting in front of the television screen and eating delivery food, imagine the following scenario. You enter the house and after taking a shower, you put on your beloved home-wear and you put on your old music compilation. As the familiar sounds of your once favorite songs fill up the air, your doorbell rings and a friend arrives holding an iced bottled of white wine and a bag full of fresh groceries. You both enter the kitchen and in less than an half an hour you leave the kitchen premises with a feeling of happiness all over your faces. In an hour the dinner will be ready and you take advantage of the time to catch up and remember old moments while building new ones.

Cooking can easily turn to be a fun and relaxing process that requires nothing more than your own imagination to turn a classic and boring dinner into a colorful, tasteful fiesta. Whether you are cooking for yourself or you are exposing your cooking talent to a group of friends, who are willing to taste your efforts, cooking can be more than a simple act of preparing food before consumption. With the variety of cooking techniques existing today, your next cooking challenge can become a new hobby you will probably decide to invest more time in exploring. By selecting, measuring and combining the different ingredients with a handful of creative spirit, cooking in itself can become your next favorite sport. Before concluding that your cooking attempts will never resemble the cooking masterpieces you always enjoy when visiting your mother's or even grandmother's kitchen kingdom, keep in mind that like all sports, cooking takes practice before you can be officially named the next master chef. With the plethora of cooking recipes worldwide and with the variety of ingredients and methods of preparation applied to food, cooking something unique you can even name after you, is not that difficult after all.

Changing the flavor, texture, and appearance of your food is not only a highly creative process, is considered by many to be an extremely joyful experience. Vegetarians or meat-lovers can easily enter this game of competence and creativity and taste the outcome of their efforts proud of their newly acquired skill. Thus, next time you decide to pick up the phone and order your combo pizza during another late night craving, give your body and pocket a break and attempt to experience the cooking temptation of creating your own pizza heaven in the comfort of your own house. Friends and family members can always be part of the process of act as the final culinary judge. Organize cooking nights, exchange recipes, rent a movie, play a game, or just hang around feeling relaxed. Your cooking days can be tremendously altered by adding just one crucial ingredient; your imagination.

Kadence Buchanan writes articles on many topics including Cooking, Boating, and Outdoors