For Sarah Pound, cooking has always come naturally. Growing up in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, she would flip through her mother’s vast library of cookbooks, looking for inspiration.

“I used to love just sitting there reading through them all and tabbing them,” says the recipe writer and newly minted cookbook author.

As one of five children, though, Pound saw not everyone gravitated to the kitchen like she did. Some of her siblings shared her love of cooking, others found it more of a chore.

Now, with two children of her own and a third on the way, she also appreciates how much personal palates and food preferences can vary, too. Parents especially can struggle with the challenge of putting dinner on the table night after night.

“It’s very normal to dread dinnertime or to dread cooking,” she says. “It’s not this [skill] we’re meant to be born with, and you’re meant to love doing. I think because we have to do it every day, people think they have to feel that. But it’s very normal not to enjoy it, or to find it stressful.”

‘I can’t give you exact recipes that are going to work for your kids because every child is different.’

That in part prompted Pound to start posting recipes online two years ago. With a catering business in limbo due to Melbourne’s lockdowns, she found herself at a loose end and bought a professional camera to start shooting food videos and photos for her then business website.

Her aim was to share easy and affordable recipes anyone could cook and help others gain confidence in the kitchen.

“I was just quite amazed by the response from it. People were actually cooking the meals and I thought, ‘I’m surprised that people are actually finding this valuable.’”

The positive reaction sparked a bigger ambition: to give social media a proper “crack” and start posting new recipes Monday to Friday.

Now, her Instagram account has nearly 700,000 followers, mainly women, and she has a growing audience on TikTok, Facebook and Pinterest.

Pound today releases her first cookbook, Wholesome by Sarah, a collection of straightforward family-friendly meals including soups, salads, stir-fries and one-pots, many employing everyday ingredients such as mince or canned tuna.

She credits part of her success to this non-intimidating approach, saying it resonates with a generation of home cooks with scant basic skills. Mothers in particular, many of whom still do the bulk of family cooking in Australia, find her recipes give them more belief in their own abilities and a wider repertoire of meals.

“[They] didn’t learn in the kitchen next to mum or grandma, like we used to,” she says. “And therefore they really, really lacked confidence in the kitchen, and they’re a bit scared to try things and use different ingredients.”

Turning down the tension

Confidence isn’t the only thing in short supply, Pound says. Time is also sorely lacking. “Our mums generally had more time to take half the day to prepare a meal,” she says. “A lot of people had vegie gardens, or they knew their local farmers. And that kind of fed into the sort of meals that we had.”

The challenge for today’s busy parents, Pound says, is many feel they are still being held to the same standards. Feeding children a complete balanced meal is seen as central to the concept of “good parenting”, creating unnecessary tension over food and increasing stress, for mothers in particular.

“It would be so nice to just drop the pressure a bit,” says Pound, who is also a qualified nutritionist. Instead, she suggests parents focus on easier and more effective ways to instil healthy eating, such as involving children in cooking and shopping, exposing kids to a variety of foods and talking positively about healthy ingredients rather than “good” or “bad” foods.

Simple, quick meals also help lighten the load and shouldn’t be seen as inferior to complicated dinner spreads. Even for someone as passionate about cooking as Pound, an egg on toast is sometimes all she has the time or energy to cook.

“It doesn’t have to be this elaborate meal every night of the week,” she says. “You can just make something out of 10 ingredients or less, and it can be using canned lentils or tinned tuna or a packet of pasta, and that’s totally a beautiful meal to serve your family.”

The ‘hour of power’ approach

Pound’s cookbook reflects this philosophy, focusing on unfussy healthy dinners that aren’t too prescriptive. She provides adaptable formulas for building salads and stir-fries using a variety of vegetables, proteins, sauces and textures that cater to different palates.

“I can’t give you exact recipes that are going to work for your kids because every child is different,” she says.

It’s a flexible approach to meal-planning, using ingredients most people already have in the fridge or pantry.

That said, it takes a certain level of preparation if you want to reduce cooking stress, Pound says. One easy way to start is with an “hour of power” devoted to chopping ingredients, making a salad dressing or roasting a tray of vegetables for the week ahead. Letting children choose recipes can also help give them some autonomy about what they’re eating.

“If you’ve never meal-planned before in your life, don’t start by trying to do five to seven nights a week because that’s just so overwhelming. I always say just start with two or three,” she says.

Eventually, with practice, most people will become calmer, more confident cooks. Pound doesn’t promise everyone will learn to love being in the kitchen, but in most cases they can take the stress out of feeding themselves and others.

“There are people out there – and fair enough – that will never reach that level of joy in the kitchen,” she says. “But obviously, we still have to eat and we still have to have dinner every night. So if you have a desire to be a good home cook, I think you absolutely can be. It just comes down to practising and trying new things.

“Just do the best that you can. Some nights that will be a well-balanced and delicious meal that’s taken you an hour.

“Other nights it will be tinned tuna on toast. Both are perfectly fine. We’re all managing really busy lives and I think sometimes you need to give yourself a break. It’s just one meal – you have three meals a day every day for your whole life. Every meal doesn’t have to be an extravaganza.”

Follow Sarah Pound’s Good Food column. Each month she’ll explore a different theme, such as gut health and fibre, and include three simple recipes.