Let's Learn English! Topic: Food! 🥦🥫🍲 (Lesson Only)

Well, hello and welcome to

this English lesson about food.

I've done lessons about food in the past, and it

is, I think, one of the most requested topics.

So I thought it would be fun

to do another English lesson about food.

I have done a few other ones.

You can go back and watch those someday.

But in this English lesson about food, I'll talk

about different ways to talk about preparing food.

I'll talk about where you prepare food.

I'll talk about what food tastes like a little bit.

And I'll talk about different ways

to cook food or prepare food.

So once again, welcome to

this English lesson about food.

I think you'll enjoy it.

To make or to prepare?

When you talk about food, you don't.

Well, if it's an apple, you can just eat it.

You don't have to do anything to the apple.

But sometimes you need to make food

or you need to prepare food.

This coming weekend is Thanksgiving in Canada.

It's a holiday, and so people will be going to

other people's houses to celebrate and to eat food.

That's what most people do when you celebrate.

So some people might need to make food

or they might need to prepare food.

We use both words interchangeably.

If people were coming to my house, I

would say, oh, I need to make food

because my brothers and sisters are coming over.

I need to prepare food.

Now, I didn't add this to the

lesson, but you can also order food.

Maybe instead of making food, you just order food from

a restaurant so that you don't have to make it.

But when you eat, like if you want

a sandwich, you have to make a sandwich.

You have to prepare a sandwich before you can eat it.

And you do this in one of two places.

You can do it in a kitchen or a kitchenette.

This might be a new word for you.

I'll explain it in a moment.

A kitchen is the room in the house

where you prepare food or make food.

It's also the room in the house where you store food.

You put food in your cupboards.

You put food in your refrigerator.

You put food in your freezer.

This is where you keep food and make or prepare

food and then also clean up after you have eaten.

You have to do the dishes or wash the dishes.

A kitchenette is a small kitchen usually found in maybe

an apartment or most often in a hotel room.

When you stay in a hotel

room, it might have a kitchenette.

A kitchenette usually doesn't have a big stove or oven.

It usually has a little microwave, a

sink, and then a little tiny fridge.

If you look and see the black thing

under the counter, that is a small refrigerator.

And then usually a coffee maker.

I don't see a kettle, but most of the

time a kitchenette will have a kettle as well.

So a kitchen found in a house or apartment,

a large ish room where you can make or

prepare food and keep all your food.

And then a kitchenette, a smaller area.

When Jen and I travel, if we stay in a hotel, we

try to get a hotel with a kitchenette so we can prepare

our own food to save a little bit of money.

Ingredients.

So when you want to

make something, you need ingredients.

If I want to make bread, the ingredients I need

are flour, water, salt, butter, or oil and yeast.

I think those are the ingredients for making bread.

Sometimes when you make things, it's far more complex.

You need to have ten or eleven

ingredients in order to make it.

I'm not sure what this person is making,

but it looks like they have all of

their ingredients cut up and ready to go.

So I think they're gonna make maybe a

little stir fry or something like that. I'm not sure.

But ingredients are the individual food items you need

that you can combine to make something yummy.

And you do that using a recipe.

Now, maybe the recipe is in your head.

Maybe when you make pancakes or when you make a meal

for your family, you don't follow a recipe like this one.

You in your head, know, cook this for this

long, mix this in, dice this a certain way.

You need two cups of this.

But a recipe would be written instructions

or instructions you have memorized on how

to prepare a certain food item.

The recipe for bread is to mix all

the ingredients and to knead the dough.

Let the dough rise.

Knead the dough again, let it rise.

And then bake it in the oven.

But a recipe would be written.

Instructions for how to make something.

I'm always looking for new recipes.

I like trying new food, and it's fun to follow a

new recipe and make something new or prepare something new.

And usually you will find recipes in a recipe book.

Sometimes people will have recipes on

little cards, like a recipe card.

It's a small piece of paper about this size.

But most of the recipes that Jen

and I use are in recipe books.

Sometimes we'll buy a new recipe book and we'll try

making different types of food using that recipe book.

Um, we don't have one called our family recipes. My.

Yeah.

You know, if my sister gave

me recipes, they would be amazing.

But I don't have a lot to say about

the rest of my family, actually, my older brother

might have some good recipes as well.

He's a pretty good cook.

So let's talk a little bit about that.

When you have food and you heat the

food, we usually use the verb to cook.

So you cook food.

And this is kind of a general term.

If people are coming over, I need to cook some food.

Okay.

I need to put it in a pan.

I'll talk about the different ways that you can

cook or prepare food, but generally, cook refers to

using heat to prepare the food so that it

is edible, so that it is yummy and tasty.

So this person has decided to

cook some sort of pasta dish.

That is the verb, the general term

that we use when talking about cooking,

cooking or preparing food with heat.

So over a fire or on the oven or in the oven or

on the stove or even on a barbecue, you can cook some food.

And then after you do this, the food is cooked.

And this is an interesting word as

well, because sometimes you'll say, oh, I

don't think this food is completely cooked.

If you don't cook food long

enough, it can be undercooked.

So when you cook food, when

you're done, the food is cooked.

So you could say this, oh, I cooked a lot of food.

You know, the more I say this

word, the funnier it sounds to be.

I cooked a lot of food because I have

a lot of people coming over to eat today.

And this is the opposite of raw.

Some food you eat raw.

When you eat something raw, it means

that it is not cooked at all.

We eat bananas, raw carrots, a lot of vegetables.

You can eat raw.

You don't eat meat raw, although

you can eat some seafood raw.

But usually when we talk about raw food,

we talk about food that you can eat

without cooking or food that is uncooked.

Okay, let me explain that a bit.

These are raw vegetables.

You can eat these.

You can also have raw meat, which means it

has not been cooked and needs to be cooked.

Okay, so you can eat raw vegetables, but you

should definitely cook raw meat before you eat it.

Yummy.

By the way, in this picture, my

most favorite item would be the peppers. I like peppers.

Green peppers are yummy.

I enjoy eating them. Okay.

A couple of different ways.

You can use heat to prepare food so you can cook food.

The general term, you can also bake food.

So when I think about baking, I

usually think about cookies, muffins, bread.

Those are the kinds of things we bake.

You follow a recipe you like.

I said, with bread, you do everything you need to

do, and then you bake it in an oven.

So generally when you bake something, I

think it's usually something made with flour.

You could do a casserole as well.

But when I think of baking, like, I think

last night, one of my kids baked some cookies.

This weekend I might bake some bread.

When I think about pizza, though,

I would probably use cook.

I'm going to cook a pizza in the oven.

You might say bake.

But generally, I think of this kind of food.

When I think about bake, fry, deep fry, air fry.

Let's back up to fry.

When you fry something, the first thing

I think of is an egg.

I think of a frying pan.

So a frying pan is a very low pan.

And generally we fry things like this.

Like you might fry an egg for

breakfast, you might fry some bacon.

You might fry a grilled cheese sandwich, even

though it has the word grill in it.

But generally, anytime you use this type of

pan, we almost always use the verb fry.

So I haven't eaten yet today.

I actually ate way too much food

last night, so I'm not even hungry.

But if I was to eat later, I would probably fry an egg.

There's something also called to deep fry.

When you deep fry something, you have hot oil and you

put the food in the oil in order to cook it.

In order to prepare it.

When I think about deep frying, I

think of things like french friesen.

French fries are made from potatoes, and then you deep

fry them in oil in order to cook them.

It makes food very, very crispy.

You can also deep fry fish.

I think these might be chicken wings.

So last night I actually had

some chicken wings at a restaurant.

They were very, very yummy.

But they would be deep fried,

basically, really, really hot oil, 350

degrees fahrenheit or 400 degrees fahrenheit.

And you put the food in it and it cooks.

It cooks the food very, very quickly.

And there's something called to air fry.

Now you can buy an air fryer

and you can air fry your food.

It's supposed to be healthier

than deep frying your food.

We don't have an air fryer, but people we

know who have air fryers say they are amazing.

It allows you to cook meat or even french fries and other

things so that it tastes like you deep fried it, but not,

but without all of the oil that comes with it.

So maybe someday.

The biggest problem with a de, an

air fryer is they're not very big.

And we still prepare food.

We make food for a lot of people.

As you know, I have five kids.

I still have two living at home right now.

And so we have to prepare rather large meals.

You can also barbecue or grill.

This is very common in Canada in

the spring and the summer and fall.

It's less common in the winter.

But there are people who will barbecue in the winter.

They don't mind standing outside wearing a winter coat and

a winter hat and cooking food on a barbecue.

So by the way, you could call this a barbecue.

This type you could also call a grill.

And it also works as the verb,

I'm going to barbecue some hamburgers.

I'm going to grill some hamburgers.

I'm going to barbecue some hot dogs.

I'm going to grill some hot dogs.

When I visited Brent last summer, we went to

his brother's place, and his brother barbecued some food

for us, and it was very, very yummy. Roast.

So when you cook meat in an

oven, we usually use the word roast.

And this piece of meat here is

actually called a roast as well.

So don't get too confused.

But I could buy a piece of meat

and I could roast it in the oven.

So I'm going to put it on a pan or in

a pan, depending on how you like to do it.

And then you put it in the oven at

a certain temperature, and then you roast it.

So, yes, and this, that is

actually also called a roast.

Roast beef.

You can boil food.

So when I think about boiling food, you can boil

eggs, you can boil noodles, you can boil rice.

Anytime you put food into water that is boiling in

order to cook it, we use the word boil.

So when water gets to 100 degrees celsius

or 212 degrees fahrenheit, I think it starts

to bubble and steam comes off it.

By the way, it depends where you are.

I think at sea level, water boils at 100 degrees.

Again, this is not a science lesson,

but I do know about boiling food.

So you heat water up in a pan when it starts to

boil or even before, but when it starts to boil, maybe you

put in noodles or you put in rice or however you cook

things, and then you boil it for a certain amount of time

and it will be cooked and ready to eat.

We mostly boil noodles, and sometimes we boil eggs.

Those are the two things that we boil the most often.

You can also steam food.

Jen and I haven't done this for a while, but

we used to steam broccoli or we would steam rice.

These are yummy looking dumplings.

You can steam them as well.

This means you are cooking the food with steam.

So when water boils, steam rises from the water as

it boils, and that steam is very, very hot.

And you can use that steam to cook things.

So you basically have a pan of boiling water,

and then you might have another little pan that

goes in the top of that pan and the

steam comes through and cooks things.

Steamed broccoli is quite yummy. Actually.

Steamed vegetables are really good.

We should find our steamer. We have a.

We have a little rice cooker food steamer.

We should find that somewhere because that is

a yummy, yummy way to cook food.

And then, of course, sometimes you cook food

for too long, and then food is burnt.

So this toast is burnt.

It was in the toaster for too long,

and so it started to turn black.

So this is a burnt piece of toast.

We also sometimes have food

that's overdone or overcooked.

I'm not going to say who, but as a

child, when I had cooked vegetables, they were often

the person making them, often overcooked them.

I like my green beans.

Usually we boil beans.

That's another thing we boil.

I usually boil them for two or three minutes, and

they're still quite bright green and a little bit crunchy.

These beans, in my opinion, are a little bit overdone.

They're a little bit overcooked.

Whoever made these beans cooked them

for too long, in my opinion.

Some people like their beans to be a

pale green like that, but not me.

I like things to be cooked just right.

And I don't think I have a slide for this.

But you can also have food that's undercooked.

So overcooked means you cooked it for too long.

Undercooked means you didn't cook it long enough.

So you might say, oh, this pasta is.

Isn't soft, it's undercooked.

Or this boiled egg isn't

fully cooked inside, it's undercooked.

Okay, let's talk briefly about the types of meals.

In the morning, you eat breakfast

around the middle of the day.

You eat lunch.

At night, you have either supper or dinner, depending on

what part of the English speaking world you live in.

We use both words, like, what time

do you want to have supper?

What time do you want to have dinner?

And then you can also have a snack and a pick me up.

So let's go back to the beginning.

Breakfast is the food you eat in the morning.

It's actually a combination of

two words, break and fasten.

A fast is when you don't eat

food for a certain amount of time.

Some people fast because they

would like to lose weight.

Some people fast for religious reasons.

Maybe you fast for a day or two for religious reasons.

And then breakfast is actually two words,

break fast to break your fast.

So basically you don't eat

at night because you're sleeping.

So it's kind of a fasting state.

The opposite of eating is fasting.

And so when you get up in the morning,

you have breakfast in order to stop that.

So that's where that word came from.

Typical breakfast in Canada would include

eggs, maybe bacon, toast, bagels.

We don't.

Besides bacon, maybe sausage, like meats.

Not a super popular food for breakfast, but

also people will go through a drive through,

so they might get a coffee, they might

eat a donut for breakfast, although that's considered

unhealthy and people try to avoid that.

Probably the most common fast food at breakfast

from a restaurant would be a breakfast sandwich.

So an egg with bacon and cheese, maybe

on a biscuit or on an English muffin.

I don't want to go into too many details.

For me, a typical breakfast might be some oatmeal,

maybe some cereal, an egg, maybe some toast.

Although lately I don't eat breakfast

as often as I used to. Lunch.

Lunch is the meal that you eat

in the middle of the day.

You might pack a lunch in the morning and take it

to school or work with you, or you might buy lunch.

You might go out for lunch with some colleagues.

A colleague might say, hey, you want

to go for lunch at 1230?

And you'll say, sure.

By the way, you can go out for lunch or go for lunch.

Here in Canada, lunch often consists of sandwiches.

People will get bread and they will

put, you know, lettuce or tomato.

If they eat meat, they might put some

sort of meat on the bread, they might

have peanut butter, they might have jam.

But sandwiches are still a fairly

common item to eat for lunch.

Something that's made with bread and something that you

can eat quickly and on the go, and it's

easy to take with you as well.

And then supper or dinner.

So this is probably one of the bigger meals of the day.

This is the meal that might

take the longest to prepare.

In Canada, people eat a variety of

foods for supper or for dinner.

They might eat something where they

have meat, potatoes, if they're vegetarian.

They might have beans, they might have

hummus, they might have pizza, they might

have hamburgers, they might have.

I can't think of.

They might have soup, they might have stew,

they might have fresh bread with cheese.

There's just a variety of things

that people eat for dinner.

And a common question would be,

what would you like for dinner?

That's something you hear quite often, even at work.

Someone might say, what are you, what

are you having for dinner tonight?

I need some ideas for what I want to make.

And the other person might say, oh, we're

having spaghetti, or we're having lasagna, or we're

having soup because it's getting colder here.

So soup will become much more common.

And then a snack.

A snack is just something you eat between meals.

So if there are three meals in the day, if that's

how you like to eat breakfast, lunch, and supper, maybe in

the middle of the morning, you get a little bit hungry.

So you have a snack, maybe a cookie, maybe

a granola bar, maybe a banana, maybe an apple.

You might have a healthy snack.

But a snack is just a little bit of food in the

middle of the day because you're feeling a little bit hungry.

Um, it might be coffee time at work.

Some people have a coffee break in the morning,

and so they might have a cup of tea

or a cup of coffee and a little snack.

And then there's also something called a pick

me up, which is, it's a snack that

you eat when you need some energy.

Yesterday, Jen and I were selling flowers at market and

we worked for about 3 hours without eating and we

didn't have time to stop for supper, but we needed

a little pick me up, so I.

I went and bought a couple empanadas and we ate them.

So it wasn't like a full meal, but it was

something that just helped us to feel better and get

a little bit of food in our stomachs.

Groceries, this is a general term

for the food that you buy.

And even to the point where we call the

store where you buy groceries, a grocery store.

So I regularly go to the grocery store.

We sometimes call it a supermarket.

I go there to buy groceries.

So when you go to a clothing

store, you go to buy clothes.

When you need food, you go buy groceries.

You go to a grocery store or supermarket.

Our grocery stores have almost everything.

In Canada, there's a produce section

where they have fruit and vegetables.

There's a bakery.

Usually in the grocery store, there's canned food,

food in boxes, there's milk, there's frozen food.

Everything you want for eating is

found in a grocery store.

And pretty, I was going

to say pretty reasonably priced.

Although food has gotten quite

expensive here in Canada recently.

In the last year or two, someone

who loves food is called a foodie.

I think we talked about this word in a previous lesson.

If you know someone who loves to cook and

is really good at it and they love to

go out to eat and they're always talking about

food, we might call that person a foodie.

Someone who really, really enjoys eating food, talking about

food, watching videos about food, making food, definitely talking

about food would be a big one.

And then, of course, when you are done eating, you

have to do the dishes or wash the dishes.

You can use either term.

You might do the dishes by hand in the sink.

You might wash the dishes by hand, you might put the

dishes in the dishwasher and which we still might use the

phrase do the dishes, but we might just say we need

to clean up and put the dishes in the dishwasher.

When I think of doing the dishes, I actually

think about scrubbing and rinsing and drying the dishes.

If food is sour, it's like when you eat a lemon.

Lemons are sour.

It makes you make a face like that.

It's a little different than bittereen.

Bitter means like cabbage is kind of bitter.

So if a lemon is sour, cabbage is bitter.

Some raw vegetables are a little bit bitter.

I would say sour and bitter are closely related.

But if you think about it, I would say a lemon is sour.

Cabbage is bitter.

Sometimes if you harvest vegetables too early, they will

be bitter, which means they don't have as much

natural sugar in them as they normally would.

And then, of course, we have sweet, which means

something has a lot of sugar in it.

I like candies.

I like brownies.

This is a brownie.

We would call that. I like cookies.

Those are all things that are very sweet.

As I mentioned last night, one of

my kids made cookies, chocolate chip cookies.

They used white sugar, brown sugar, chocolate chips.

It's a very sweet thing to eat.

And then, of course, there are things that are salty.

So chips, pretzels, popcorn, all of these have salt put on

them and, or have a lot of salt in them.

And so they are very, very salty.

In Canada, we use the word spicy and

hot and spicy can mean two different things,

and hot could mean two different things.

If I say something is spicy, I might mean that it

has a lot of pepper in it and it's actually like,

burns my mouth when I say something is hot.

It can mean it has a lot of peppers and

stuff in it, or it can simply mean the food

has been cooked and it's steaming because it's hot.

But I'm not someone who eats a

lot of spicy or hot food.

There are a lot of foods from other

countries, like indian food can be described as

very spicy and it can be hot.

When you order indian food, they might ask you if

you want it extra spicy or like, north american spicy.

So it's not as spicy, but certainly spicy food. Yeah.

Like, I like, you can get hot

wings, like chicken wings that are hot.

I don't mind those, but I eat

less hot food as I get older.

Hopefully I explain that well enough.

We have vegetables and fruits.

So vegetables are anything that is

green or red or leafy.

It's usually something that's grown on a plant

or maybe like, carrots are in the ground.

Vegetables are very, very healthy, and they, like, you

can eat as many vegetables as you want in

a day and you will not get fat.

Okay, maybe that's not totally true, but definitely if you

eat nine or ten vegetables a day and not very

much bread or meat, you will be nice and healthy.

I think fruits are, of course, things that grow on

trees, usually, although some things like strawberries are fruits and

they grow on plants, but things like apples, bananas, oranges,

limes, lemons, grapes, all of these things that are actually

a little more sweet as well.

Fruits tend to be sweeter than vegetables.

And some people have questions about the

word fruit and the plural fruits.

So I was thinking about this when

I go to the grocery store.

There's a fruit and vegetable section.

You can buy fruits and vegetables there.

You can buy fruit and vegetables there.

The word fruit, I tend to put an s on it

sometimes and not others, and I don't fully understand why.

Like the doctor said, I need

to eat my fruits and vegetables.

So there, I would put it in the plural.

But when I talked about the grocery store

earlier, I said, there's a fruit and vegetables

section or a fruit and vegetable section.

So a little tricky.

I'm not explaining it well, but

you have some freedom there.

No one's going to look at you funny if you

don't pluralize fruit correctly in a, in a sentence.

I don't think you have grains.

So this would be anything made from

Wheatley or rye or even rice or.

Let me think of another grain.

Barley, oats.

All of those things are considered grains.

Usually used to make things like

bread or even different cereals.

So I don't eat as many grains as I used to.

The doctor told me I was eating

too many carbohydrates and not enough protein.

So I eat a little less.

A little less grains.

I gotta stop eating the cookies, though. Lentils.

So lentils are kind of a new food to me,

it's something that you can boil and they soften up

and you can make really yummy dips with lentils.

You can put lentils in your soup.

They are, I think, what's called a pulse crop.

Very popular in other parts of the world.

Starting to become popular here in Canada.

And they're also relatively cheap.

Like a big bag of red lentils

is quite cheap, by the way.

There's different kinds, like red and green.

I think there's even yellow.

And then rice.

I think one of the most common foods in the world.

I think rice is probably eaten

in every country of the world.

I'm just guessing again, this is

not a geography or science lesson.

We eat rice a couple times a month.

Usually we eat white rice, but

we sometimes eat brown rice.

Rice is something that you either

cook by boiling or steaming.

And it's very, very tasty.

It's very tasty to eat rice with other foods.

So quite yummy.

Then you have your meats.

So this could be anything from chicken

to pork to beef to seafood.

So here we have, I think this is salmon.

So meat is, of course, food that comes from an animal.

And you have people in the world that will eat meat.

And you have people in the world

that have decided to not eat meat.

They are either vegetarian or vegan.

I am someone who does eat meat, and I

know I do have respect for people who don't.

Some people have decided not to.

But meat would be food that comes from

animals generally that are raised on farms.

So you will have beef, pork, chicken, and

or meat can come from fish as well.

So you might have salmon or tuna.

There's a lot of different kinds of fish in the world.

And then dairy.

So dairy is anything that's made

from milk or that is milk. Okay.

If I go to the dairy section, my grocery store,

they will have cow's milk, sheep milk, goats milk.

They will have butter, they will have cheese.

Cheese made from cow milk or sheep's milk or goat milk.

There's a wide variety of things you can buy

in the dairy section of the grocery store, and

it's usually all kept in a refrigerator.

Dairy goes bad easily.

So basically anything, either milk or things that

are made from milk, cream as well.

Canadians buy a lot of cream to put in their coffee.

Then there is, of course, junk food.

We use the term junk food to talk about any

food that isn't good for you and usually food that

you can eat without having to cook or prepare it.

So chips.

These might be called crisps, depending on what kind

of English, you are learning chocolate bars, candies, all

of the things that you can buy.

We also say that are ready to eat.

So you just open the package and eat it.

And usually food that isn't good for

you, it's usually high in sugar.

It usually has a lot of fat in it or oil.

It's just not healthy or good for you.

Then we have kind of the complete opposite.

We have organic food.

Organic food is food that is grown without

using any pesticides or herbicides or chemical fertilizers.

So let me explain that.

You can grow a tomato and you can put chemical fertilizer,

and you can spray the tomato plant to kill the insects,

and you can spray the soil to kill the weeds.

In that situation, the tomato is not organic.

Or you can grow a tomato using basically pulling

weeds with your hands, covering it with a net

so insects can't get at it, and then maybe

using some sort of organic supplement instead of fertilizer.

So organic food supposed to be healthier for you?

Although it depends on what studies you look at.

My view is this, if you

want organic food, grow a garden.

You get organic food.

It's healthier in a lot of ways.

You get some sunshine, you get time outside, a

little bit of exercise, and you get free food.

Well, you got to buy the seed.

Health food is a term we use to

talk about food that is healthy for you.

So usually when you say, I'm going to eat mostly

health food, you're going to eat a lot of vegetables,

you're going to eat a lot of fruit, you're going

to eat healthier meats, like maybe seafood, which has less

fat in it, basically food that is good for you.

And then we have fast food, which is food

that you buy from a restaurant and generally food

that is prepared very quickly or is already ready

for you when you get there.

So things like hot dogs and

french fries and hamburgers and pizza.

In North America, in Canada, we

would call that fast food.

At lunch, I can go to town and I can go through

a drive through and get a hamburger in less than five minutes.

We call that fast food.

I can go to the pizza shop and get a slice of

pizza and they'll have it ready for me in two minutes.

They have them all cooked and

in a big, like, warming rack.

I can get a slice of pizza.

If I want shawarma, I can go.

There's not one in our town, but there, there are a

lot more of those types of restaurants around really fast.

They slice the meat off, they put it

in a pita or another flat bread. Really yummy.

But fast food.

Fast, convenient, but not necessarily healthy.