The trick for me is to apply engineering to the kitchen. You can actually enjoy really elaborate meals if you simply make more each time and utilize pyrex+freezer. Why make only 6 servings of spaghetti when there's still 50% free space available in your instant pot? (that 'max fill' line is but a polite suggestion :D) Planning ahead, logistics, etc. can make all the difference in the world.
Imagine spending one hour in the kitchen to only feed yourself one time. That would be peak insanity to me today. I used to live it for about a decade myself. Ate out about every other day as a consequence. Ordered in a pizza once a week. Today, I eat out about once a month. I haven't ordered a pizza in 3+ years.
I absolutely hated cooking until I learned about terms like "mise en place" and realized that manufacturing/lean/six sigma principles work just as well in my kitchen as they do on a factory floor. Also, tools like the humble pressure cooker can take your 2 hour process cycle down to 20 minutes. It arguably tastes better in many cases too. Cooking is not a mystical process. Much of it (not all) is science and engineering. You can robotically produce incredible meals. And I argue you should - The food on America's shelves and restaurants is only worsening in my estimation.
"Imagine spending one hour in the kitchen to only feed yourself one time. That would be peak insanity to me today."
YMMV. For me, spending time cooking is a great way to take a break from my computer and spend time away from a screen. And like showering, the process of cooking is now mechanical enough that it allows me to focus on broader tangents in whatever I'm working on and set myself up for the next session of coding/building stuff, and now with a full tummy.
I life in a country where fresh produce is readily (and cheaply) available, so I find things like weeklong mealprep (especially, pre-chopping veggies for the week), and eating microwaved food from the freezer ridiculous, both from a taste as well as a health perspective.
Honestly, I think the trick is to have a set of a 12-15 recipes that you can fall back to, and once you have a hang of it, it's easy to create interesting variations with your food! Of course, YMMV
"Much of it (not all) is science and engineering. You can robotically produce incredible meals. And I argue you should" - This I agree with 100% with you on!
I think the general issue on cooking is similar to shopping, exercise, or "work" for some folks. Some have an interpretation of exercise = fun or pleasure. Some, like me, have a body that treats all exercise as the most dreadful idea ever, and even walking up a hill after years of walking up hills is an excuse for waves of fatigue. Endless little voices scream in misery with every step. You end up in a state of "how do I do this because I need to?" It's either lie down at the bottom of the hill because my body has immediately decided it wants to go to sleep with false exhaustion, or walk up the hill.
Eating can be close. Eat because my body makes complaints, otherwise would not even bother. Not even restaurants. More time, and food is often not very satisfying. The actual food made, whether its fresh, microwaved, ect.. does not matter, because my body has decided it no longer wants to enjoy food. I used to think the variation experimentation part was nice, until my body decided it was a mini game to eliminate that. I almost question the "Food you can make so you don't die."
One thing I've noticed: cooking for myself and my parents feels like less of a chore than cooking only for myself. That's a big part of why, for just myself, I'd rather cook up a big batch and freeze portions for later, aside from recipes not always scaling down well.
I agree with all that. I'll eat leftovers. For somethings they're great like a big pot of chili. For some things they're awful. For others, it's somewhere in between and/or some leftovers can be incorporated into a new dish.
Cooking a company meal can be an all-day affair but, especially when I was commuting into an office every day, I had a fairly standard set of recipes that I could whip up in very little time and with very little effort. It really wasn't worth preparing a larger quantity that I would have to reheat for a less good result.
As an engineer, I enjoyed the recipe presentation at Cooking for Engineers [1], which has been discussed here on HN 16 years ago [2], 12 years ago [3], and again last year [4]. In addition to typical step-by-step instructions with photos, the nearly 100 recipes each show a diagram combining an ingredient list (in the order needed) with a timeline showing operations to perform (see [5], for example). Sadly, there have been no updates for about seven years.
Something that I picked up after watching one of J. Kenji López-Alt’s videos was chaining ingredients. Specifically the difficult ones and not necessarily just reusing the rest of the green onion in the bottom of the fridge.
So, now I give myself a budget of one or two “difficult/time consuming” ingredients. This can be Demi-glacé or some other homemade reduction, soy-marinated eggs, slow-cooked brisket, etc. And I make more of it than I need to.
Then I make and eat the meal I was planning on, but I now have a leftover ingredient. Then for my next meal, I can re-use that ingredient and choose another difficult one. It helps with inspiration and effort level.
An example would be: make homemade tomato sauce then make Spaghetti. Next make dough and reuse the sauce into some homemade pizza. Then use the rest of the dough for garlic bread next to a salad (and maybe there’s a little red sauce left for dipping). Etc.
Of course, I’m not doing this for individual meals, I’m batching it up into 3-4 servings each.
The importance of the "max fill" line in an electric pressure cooker depends on what you're cooking. If you're cooking legumes, you should respect it, because they can foam and make a huge mess if you try to cook too much at once. But I've never had a problem cooking steamed vegetables past the line.
In my experience, going past the max fill line is mostly a problem when using the “rapid pressure release” on a recipe with lots of liquid. Pressing the release button can emit a a superheated geyser of soup with enough force to hit the ceiling.
Even building a pizza up from a prepared crust is way better than frozen. My mother needs gluten-free, and there was a GF frozen pizza we liked that a local store carried. But then it disappeared, and I decided to try building my own from a GF crust. The home-built pizza was so much better that there's no going back - not to mention the opportunity to try different toppings.
I haven't done it in a while but the flatbread pizza crusts/naan that at least in the stores around me make a good base for a superfast pizza that's definitely better than the frozen pizzas I very periodically try and am disappointed in. Using sliced through French bread is another good option.
Alternatively, one can enjoy cooking and don't mind spending time in the kitchen. Freezing food degrades the taste imo. But in my country eating out is considered a luxury activity, homecooking is the norm (the Netherlands)
I think it should be noted that it is not universal. In other places, having the time, the space, the electricity or gas, to home cook a meal is the luxury, and eating out is the default.
I never noticed any difference in taste from freezing food. Freezing only harms the texture of food, making it softer. If you serve the frozen food with a crunchy accompaniment, e.g. raw onion, or crackers, you'll hardly notice it.
Home cooking is why you guys are just sort of almost boringly healthier-looking than the rest of the white western world! :-)
Cooking at home in a way that allowed me to cut down on my bread consumption, manage lactose intolerance without entirely losing cheese from my life, battle ARFID into insignificance and eat from fresh is a habit that has taken me well into mid-life to develop, but the benefits are obvious, because I am no longer skinny-and-fat-at-the-same-time.
Now if I only had a repertoire of more than about nine dishes. Going to have to read this book.
This is increasingly difficult as you have more mouths to feed. Not only would you need to produce a very high yield, you need the space for it.
The balance for us is to make only 2-3 separate dinner meals per week and have leftovers. That way we have some variety but don't have to cook every night (plus when we do cook, we don't mind spending the extra time for a delicious meal. If you're cooking on a time constraint you want a super-fast one-off).
Breakfast for me is a solved problem, I just have overnight oats with fixings. Lunch is whatever, usually eggs, legumes, sardines, tofu.
It's increasingly difficult to prep more meals. The difference between one and two or three is vanishingly small though. For me (active adult male) I can prep up to six meals at a time. More than that would require a larger pressure cooker and a lot more fridge space.
For a sauce sure, but developing a process for reheating spaghetti that results in good spaghetti sounds a lot more complicated than taking 10 minutes for fresh spaghetti, or really no additional minutes given the sauce has to heat up from frozen.
If you're an engineering-process junkie, then cooking can feel like the most interesting parts of engineering stripped down to their essence. We strive for an ideal of immortality in our reusable, flexible code components, never quite attaining it and always bemoaning the amount of duplication in effort.
But cooking is all process, with the best possible outcome being not durability but an immediate destruction of the results -- I made a dish, and my family ate it all!
And then the real challenge reveals itself: they loved the dish, but can I make it again the exact same way next week?
You had me at "pressure cooker". I don't even want to remember how [cooking] life was before I discovered the InstantPot, and the world of options such opened in kitchen.
Agreed. I know someone who refuses to cook at all under the guise of "anxiety" and I do not understand how some people are fine with not being able to provide for themselves on a very basic level. Automate your cooking and meal prep as much as possible and the process becomes quick and easy and you always have tons of food on hand.
If you have not experienced food or diet-related anxiety, try not to write it off as being "fine with not being able to provide for themselves on a very basic level".
There are several kinds of anxiety/phobia/disorder that leave people unable to cook, and I am sure their anxiety at some level encompasses exactly the thing you think they haven't noticed.
What about those that get anxiety when they are in the kitchen due to past trauma or something? To brush them off as “fine with not being able to provide for themselves” is shaming them for having said anxiety. Maybe the last time they were in the kitchen was with Mom when she had her stroke and her face plant into your eggplant is a memory you get every time you see your mixing bowl? Everyone has something, so be kind to those who suffer.
anxiety can be very disabling, and can indeed leave people unable to provide for themselves at a very basic level; they will, as you seem to have correctly inferred, die without support
fortunately most of us live in a society, so we don't have to be robinson crusoe or the man of the hole to survive
but a lot of foods taste terrible defrosted. Freezing can really dry up ingredients, or render them soggy.
that said, I buy pre chopped frozen ginger and garlic, I can't really tell the difference between that and cooked fresh. Jury's still out on frozen chopped onion.
> the humble pressure cooker
Pressure Cooking can easily turn the stuff you put into it into bland mush, where all the flavours meld together too much, so it's good for one aspect of your meal (maybe the base soup / mush) but not all.
When It's really bad I just buy multiple costco rotisserie chickens, some frozen veggies, put food on plate, microwave, cover in sauce, eat. Add in premier proteins, fit crunch, and clif builders and you can shop for like 2 weeks in a single run and not die.
My "I cant be bothered" template is the following. is essentially pick one from each category
* 1/2 LB (225g) veggies
* 1/2 LB or 1 fruit
* 1 protein
* Caloric load if I'm not trying to lose weight
* Condiments / spices to taste
Veggies: Frozen mixed (peas, carrots, corn, green beans, soy beans), pre-roasted costco bags, "california mix" etc. Frozen veggies often are nutritionally superior to fresh due to halting nutritional decay.
Protein: look for 35-70g protein -- 1 skin on chicken breast, 2 boneless skinless chicken thighs, ~150g tilapia, 1 tin of tuna, 1 pork chop/steak, 1 egg + 300g whites, 1 hand size of salmon, 1/2lb shrimp
Calories: 1 slice of bread, 1/2c cooked rice, 1 cup cooked pasta, 1/2 avocado, 1/4c mixed nuts
Sauces / Condiments: Bachan's Japanese BBQ, Kinder Honey Hot BBQ, Kinder Lemon pepper (esp. for tilapia)
Edit: Would love recommendations for other sauces that allow me to squeeze a nationality of cuisine over my template to make it taste like that country's food (kinda).
>Would love recommendations for other sauces that allow me to squeeze a nationality of cuisine over my template to make it taste like that country's food (kinda).
Yeah I got you:
We're going to use two different basic techniques. The first is extremely simple: throw everything into a blender and then blend until your desired consistency (normally smooth).
Mexican: Combine tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, lime juice, and salt for a fresh salsa.
Mediterranean: Blend olives, capers, lemon juice, and olive oil for a tapenade.
South American: Mix parsley, garlic, vinegar, oil, and chili flakes for chimichurri.
Greek: Yogurt, cucumber, garlic, lemon juice, and dill for tzatziki.
Middle Eastern: Blend tahini, garlic, lemon juice, and water for a basic tahini sauce.
Technique 2 is a little more complicated but once you get the hang of it trust me it's worth it. Call it stovetop simmering.
In a saucepan, combine the base ingredients and bring to a simmer. Add primary flavor agents/spices and continue to simmer for the desired time until flavors meld. Adjust consistency if needed (e.g., with a slurry or additional liquid).
Italian: Start with crushed tomatoes, add garlic, basil, and oregano for a marinara sauce.
Chinese: Combine soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, garlic, and ginger; thicken with a cornstarch slurry for a basic stir-fry sauce.
Indian: Start with tomatoes and onions, add garam masala, turmeric, and cumin for a basic curry sauce.
French: Start with a roux (butter + flour), then add broth and reduce; season with herbs for a basic velouté.
Thai: Coconut milk with red curry paste, simmer and season with fish sauce and sugar for a basic Thai curry.
Speaking of pickles, I came across a new one (for me) recently, made mainly of raw turmeric, with oil and some common Indian spices used in pickles and curries.
This is the exact formula i see all hello fresh meals fit. Protein (chicken, or beef/lamb/pork mince) + starch (pasta, noodles, or rice) + sauce (usually soy sauce) + baby spinach. I swear they just spin a bunch of wheels to create the meals.
Recommendation: Gado gado sauce from Indonesian (and some Malaysian) supermarket. Comes as a small square/rectangular brown block. Might be called gado gado salad dressing, bumbu kacang, sometimes sambel pecel. It's a block of pre-cooked peanut/satay style sauce that you add to some hot water, stir, and serve. Fragrant, hints of lime, good for unexpected vegan guests.
Delicious! Well worth having in the cupboard, keeps for a ~year. "Pedas" is spicy (ie. hot chilli), "tidak pedas" is not spicy, and "sedang" is medium (in that context anyway). Common export brands are Karangsari and Enak eco.
> Frozen veggies often are nutritionally superior to fresh due to halting nutritional decay.
Also because freeze/thaw is a form of predigestion, I think I have read -- it's partly breaking down the food (cellulose?) and increasing nutritional availability.
Frozen broccoli is still psychologically unacceptable, mind you. I have some in the freezer that was bought during a broccoli shortage (thank you so much, Brexit); I've used it twice and I cannot imagine I will ever finish it.
The giant bags of 'Normandy vegetables' and 'Stir-fry vegetables' from Costco are an absolute dietary staple for me. Grab a couple of handfuls from each bag, toss 'em with olive oil and sprinkle generously with salt, MSG and some sort of spice mix (or just garlic powder sometimes), then roast at 450 for ~15 minutes.
Fast, minimal prep time, and at least I'm eating vegetables with my probably-unhealthy main dish.
It takes me 1hr 20 mins to debone 6 Costco chickens, portion the meat into 1.5lb bags, throw in the freezer, start the pressure cooker for bones, and clean up (except for the pressure cooker/bone stuff I might do tomorrow)
That’s 66 servings of .25lbs of meat.
Tips: wear gloves, do it while they’re warm, shred by hand. Add salt and lemon juice to taste (and preserve) before freezing.
In a weird way, this also serves as a training manual for becoming a good cook. Take plain ramen and understand its cooking process through different methods. Now build a sense of how to flavor and season food by adding additional ingredients. What is a potato and how do you cook it? Solid, back to basics stuff.
At the other end of the spectrum is an absolute classic of the genre, Slater’s Real Fast Food:
It’s a bit more omnivore forward — lamb chops grilled in yogurt is a favourite — and comes from a time when these books were aimed more at young Islington professionals rather than Amazon drivers.
Concur. This is a great book. I got it after an HN recommendation a while ago and have been using it ever since. I've been cooking for all of my adult life but have picked up a lot of useful basics about underlying cooking processes. The recipes don't start until page 279; the preceding content is cooking basics and processes, structured around the eponymous salt, fat, acid and heat.
Its recipe for granola has become an instant family favourite.
Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather neat solution for this problem: go live together in a big building, work together, pray together, cook together and call it a monastery.
We had other solutions for a while too: get married and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.
But that role disappeared because corporations needed more cheap worker-units and politicians needed more GDP, so they rode each others' coattails to eliminate that role. With each homemaker now a worker-unit, there are twice as many worker-units but employee costs are the same, household income is the same, twice as many taxes, twice as many cars, more spending, more consumption - it's a win-win for the ruling class, while family-units and non-wealthy individuals lose.
You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating and vilifying homemakers by observing how furiously most moderns rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.
>have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.
This was almost always the woman.
>disappeared because corporations needed
Also because women did not like the absolute dedication of their lives to homemaking as a default. They wanted the freedom to join the paying workforce, and wanted equal pay for their work (still waiting on that).
There's some truth in your comment, but it glosses over the very real problems that came with the gender roles and subsequent power structures of that time.
There were more solutions besides monasteries and marriage. My grandparents, living in a small town in a rural area of Austria maybe 50 years ago, had a large family. That town's teacher was single, and it simply wouldn't have been economical for her to do her own cooking, so she had a deal whereby she paid my grandparents so she could come over every day to have dinner with the family. This arrangement was so common that there was even a word for it ("Kostgänger").
I'm surprised that there isn't a sharing economy startup yet, trying to reinvent the concept. -- "Uber for warm meals". Or at least I'm not aware of one. It probably exists.
On another note: The nuclear family household with one dedicated homemaker was historically a relatively short-lived concept. Prior to that, we tended to have extended families sharing a household, and the significant amount of work involved in food preparation was surely one of the drivers of that.
The problem was that which of those two roles you played was assigned at birth, and if you didn’t want the homemaker role, well too bad, you can’t have a bank account and most employers won’t hire you. That didn’t change in the US until the 1960s.
If you were a gay woman, you were forced to be a homemaker for a man you didn’t love because it was the only way to even access an income.
Black women could get jobs… as homemakers for rich white families where the wife either didn’t want to do the work or couldn’t keep up with the mountain of labor dumped on her. But they were paid a fraction what a white man could earn.
If you were a man who wanted to be a homemaker, literally everyone looked down on you and many institutions considered you a drain on society. This attitude still persists to this day.
But sure, corporations are why women now exist in the workforce.
> You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating homemaker by observing how most moderns fruoously rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.
Indeed. Ironically, the effect is to be expected, and in every other situation people would call it obvious. Give everyone $1k in unconditional basic income? Obviously, the market will quickly readjust prices to consume surplus income. But then, get people to run two-income households, and be surprised the prices readjusted so that single-income household is no longer a possibility?
>and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.
After many years of denying this would be better for us, my wife and I have recently decided that one of us (maybe her, probably me) will focus full-time on the kids and house. A big shift after 20 years of working, but we’re looking forward to it.
More than full-time? Ha, I could manage three households and still have time left over compared to a 40h wage job. I doubt the average person spends more than 2h/day on housekeeping. My mother certainly didn't when I was a child.
How so? As a single person, one of my best purchases was an instant-pot type appliance (not the actual one, but one probably inspired by it, with less control over the temperature and especially the pressure release).
In less than one hour from start to finish, I can chop the vegetables, cook, clean the kitchen utensils while cooking, move the finished food into a big container for storage (or one per serving if you have a big fridge and enough containers) and clean the cooker. The longest part of all this is waiting for the food to cool down before putting it in the fridge. With the size of my cooker, I could prepare enough food to eat 5 to 7 times. The longest recipe I know has me cook dry beans for half an hour, and cook rice afterward. This could probably be improved by pre-soaking the beans.
Except when I fail for some reason, which is extremely rare, the food is incomparably better tasting and healthier, and also quite cheaper, than whatever I can get when at work outside of restaurants (which is even pricier, and not necessarily healthier). This allows me to avoid all the mystery sauces they put in, probably laden with vegetable oils and sugar, that make me hungry two hours later.
It’s a culture problem, not an economic one. Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day. We’ve just had a few generations of western parents not teaching their children to cook anything. So when those people realise they have to figure out how to feed themselves, they simply don’t know any reasonable ways to do it, even though plenty exist.
> Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day.
...depends on what you find "unreasonable". The internet is full of delicious "10 minute" recipes or "30 minute" recipes or whatever, but that doesn't count the amount of time you spend at the grocery store, cleaning your kitchen, washing your kitchen towels, (un)loading your dishwasher, etc.
The reality for me is that I spend maybe 10 hours each weekend shopping for groceries and pre-preparing things that I need to have on hand in the freezer/fridge to even be able to cut the workload to only an hour on a weekday. This adds up to 15 hours a week, so it's maybe half the hours I spend each week being truly productive at work. By some measure, that's actually a lot.
And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to. And I don't think my expectations are unreasonably high either: Not living in a major city and spending a ton of money on eating out, and not wanting to fill my body with additives from processed foods is basically what's forcing me.
Sure such systems tend to end up getting corrupt if they amass too much power. That was not my point. I guess my point was that given the bleak state of today's social landscape, I wonder if there's opportunity for some kind of renaissance of communal living, in one form or another. And maybe these monasteries didn't only exist because of fervent religiosity but also as a practical way for single men and women to have a better life.
Funny how "Holy Grail" is woven through with it ... so many scenes of "kissing up and kicking down":
And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'angin on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences... (just as apt / relevant for the above linked scene)
And, as has been proven repeatedly EVERY SINGLE time it is tested, what "trickles down" ain't "wealth".
What a racket this whole universe is! This God fella's got some 'splainin to do... XD
monasteries were already at least a millennium old when the middle ages started, maybe several millennia old; a pilgrimage to a monastery is central to the plot of the ramayana, which depicted its events as impossibly ancient when it was written, at least 900 years before the middle ages. in particular, the kingdom where it began did historically exist but was conquered 1000 years before the middle ages; the ramayana doesn't bother to mention the kingdom that conquered it
all of these events predate the wide adoption of writing in the region, which makes it hard to tell how old the traditions described in the oldest sources are, though vedic scholars make arguments from internal features of the text
also it is common into deep prehistory for non-wealthy people to live with their parents as long as they are single; that's what most people do here, for example. no monastery needed
Reminds me of a non satire student cookbook where recipes are sectioned by what utensils and cooking appliances you have at hand. E.g. one pot, frying pan, etc. all the way up to, well a normal kitchen.
As a student myself I’d appreciate all those recipe sites to have a filter by appliances. Seems half of recipes involving meat requires a stove I don’t have.
Chatgpt is REALLY good at coming up with reasonable recipes under arbitrary constraints. You have X ingredients and Y minutes to cook a meal for Z persons, with ABC cookware. It'll do it.
My food for when I can't be bothered is pasta with canned pesto sauce (+optional parmesan). Can eat it every day.
Another a bit more involved option is pasta with checkpeas: https://www.seriouseats.com/pasta-e-ceci-pasta-with-chickpea...
What's yours go-to recipes?
Tray bake: just throw any potatoes, veggies and meat (replacement) in a single layer on a baking sheet with some oil, and spices and put it in the oven until it’s done. Maybe toss it around halfway through.
For meat we use anything from
chopped-up Italian sausage, bacon strips, chick peas, chicken wings to an entire chicken.
Veggie wise anything from classic roasting veggies like carrot, oignon and pumpkin to broccoli, beans, zucchini…
Spice the laziest is just dried rosemary. But I also like some southern spicy bbq rubs, plain garam massala. Or just plenty of garlic.
It has become much easier since we have a “proper” oven instead of a cheap countertop one, as it is much faster and heats up more easily.
Tray bake is a ridiculously easy and healthy way to feed a family. We do one a week and prep time is around 15 mins, cook it for 50 mins in the oven. A real fire and forget meal.
Casserole is another simple one we do, essentially whatever you'd put in a tray bake plus a tin of tomatoes and some stock. A little more prep time and we usually have it with rice, but still relatively quick, simple and healthy.
I like the ones that you can bung in the oven for an hour. With WFH I can do the prep, put in the oven, clean up in less than 30 mins, then finish a few more work issues before we can all eat together at a reasonable time.
If you want to be really lazy, I recommend wrapping all those ingredients in foil so you don't have to clean the pan and can cook at higher temperature. You can use the same method when camping by burying thr foil pack in the coals.
Yeah, this even works well when you cook for a family.
If you have pasta left from the day before and don't mind sweet dishes you can fry the pasta with some butter and eggs (scramble with the pasta) in a pan and add some sugar. Pretty sating meal...
In a late hour after work delirium I like to eat air fried pre-seasoned chicken or turkey breast with toasted gray bread and arugula with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. The latter usually only when I have the energy left or there is some already clean in the fridge... Is of course only for lazy people when you have an air fryer. The 15 min of waiting are enough time to toast the bread and to put the salad into a bowl and season it. In Germany you can buy cheap organic pre-seasoned poultry in most supermarkets...
Washing the vegetables is the most labor-intensive part. Coarsely chop things, stir in your salt and pepper, toss a few bay leaves in, load in the chicken parts, HIGH for 25min, and you're technically good to go. I cook bone-in-skin-on chicken, so I pick the bones and gristle and skin, and stir the chopped/gently pulled meat back in with the rest of the stew.
If I feel like I need more greens in my diet, I'll add a block/half bag of chopped frozen spinach. Chile if I'm feeling spicy.
Do some rice in a rice cooker. When that’s done, slap a good helping of kimchi in a hot frying pan (no need for oil). Let it sizzle for about thirty seconds, then crack an egg in and muddle it up some. When it’s nearly done add the rice. Add a bit of sesame oil at the end if you feel fancy. Eat.
I got through a kilo of kimchi a week this way when I was a depressed 20-something living in a share-house abroad.
We meal plan every week, but when I'm feeling less bothered I lean on a few dishes. They're not quite as simple as pasta plus jarred sauce, but from practice I can go from knife to table in 30 minutes, with basically no dishes.
Turns out you can poach chicken breasts by covering with an inch(ish) of water, bringing them to the boil, popping a lid on, turning the heat off, and letting sit for 30 to 45 minutes (depending on size).
It tastes better than most other methods of cooking chicken breast other than stewing. Optional extras include salt, whole peppercorns, and roughly sliced lemon. If the chicken breasts are freakishly large and weigh more than 350g you might need to halve them. Lasts a couple of days in the fridge but the texture is better fresh.
Aglio e Olio - Literally takes 4 ingredients, and (Italians will hate me for this) can be spruced up easily with other stuff available in your pantry, be it chopped up chinese sausages, peppers, olives, shrimp, or leafy greens.
Moroccan Shakshuka - Eggs, Tomatoes, Peppers, Spices - Slowcook and lap up with a nice piece of bread. What's not to like? Again, very easy to spruce up to ensure you don't feel like you're eating the same meal everyday
Russian pelmeni (e.g. meat dumplings) with sour cream. Meat for protein, dough for carbs, plus milk fat. Tomato and cucumber salad for fiber with olive oil - and I am good for the day.
I often make ~ 3 days worth of noodles for dinners.
Do a night with bottled tomato sauce. I like Classico in Canada (often “diluted” with a can of diced tomatoes). Sometimes I fry some onions first. Top with some red beans.
Another a nights with canned tuna and whatever chopped vegetables I have.
Maybe a night with just butter and cracked pepper and some vegetables as a side. Beans make a good protein.
You can also make cheese pepper pasta easily. Make pasta, leave some pasta water and add pecorino cheese (shredded), then some pepper.
Easy and good so you don't always have to use canned sauce.
Another (easiest) option is to just add cold pesto to the pasta.
I love cacio e pepe.
It's such an amazing dish for how simple it is.
One thing that can be tricky is keeping the emulsion smooth and not suddenly have the cheese turn chunky.
What I've found very useful there is to put aside some of the pasta cooking water and then blend it up with the cheese on the side using an immersion blender.
When you reach a good level of creaminess, you pour it back into the pot with the now drained pasta and use the residual heat of the pot and pasta to slightly reduce it down to the perfect level while constantly stirring.
This should make the whole process a lot more reliable while not changing the flavor by adding more complex ingredients.
Straight-to-wok noodles with some chopped mushrooms, a standard sauce mix and then stir in a spoonful of Lao Gan Ma at the end. Takes about 10 minutes to prepare and cook.
If I have more time, I'll make my own sauce using stock, curry powder, tomato puree and soy sauce.
Add canned tuna in spring water (drained) and some cheese ... completely delicious (to me). One off guilty treat (for me), turbo carb fatty meal for others.
You can call it whatever you want, if it's the only thing quick and tasty enough to motivate one to eat at all that can be good enough. This linked cookbook is intended for people or in situations when caring about milligrams of nutrients is like polishing the top floor while the basement is flooded.
I say this as an Italian, because legend wants we love pasta and we all eat it every day almost religiously, pasta is the worst way to cook a quick and healthy meal in my opinion.
Sauce must be really good to enjoy pasta, pesto especially should be eaten fresh, it's true that here in Italy you can eat it at a fresh express pasta place for like 5-7 euros (more like 7-9 in a big city), it's not really that expensive, but still not that cheap either considering it's pasta, and cooking it at home requires a lot of preparation and attention IMO. You can't leave pasta unattended.
So here they are my go-to recipes for when I don't wanna be bothered:
- in summer: caprese salad, which is tomatoes + mozzarella + olive oil + basil + origan. you can add olives or capers if you like them, my favourite variant is with anchovies. Or you can have ham and melon. Or you can have mozzarella and ham and all the combinations you can think of: caprese + ham, caprese + melon, melon + mozzarella + ham etc. All of them take 5 minutes top to prepare, they're all delicious.
- fish: swordfish, tuna, mackerel, salmon, sardines etc. you can buy them steamed, grilled, smoked, marinated or in oil, they come in cans, jars or you can buy them at fresh food counters. not all of them come suuuper cheap, but they are usually affordable enough, and most of them are as cheap as pasta, especially the canned versions. you can heat some steamed/grilled mackerel fillet in the oven or in the microwave, add an herb sauce and it's like being at the restaurant.
also buying it fresh at the fish counter is an option, they prepare it for you so you don't have to and most of the time you just cook it in a pan for a few minutes in half a spoon of olive oil.
- everything with beans. I love beans, I could live just by eating beans every day of my life. my favourite kind is borlotti beans, you can eat them straight from the jar, we have a lot of high quality packaged beans which are also very cheap, like less than 1 euro for a 250 grams jar. My go-to recipe with beans is beans and tuna salad. It's simply borlotti beans + canned tuna + olive oil + some vinegar + some raw red onion. You can replace beans with your favourite legumes, for example chick-peas. you can also replace tuna with some other canned fish, like the aforementioned steamed or grilled mackerel.
- chicken: buy chicken breast, pound it a little bit and grill it for a few minutes, add olive oil and you're done. if you feel fancy, marinate it with some lemon juice, herbs and half a glass of white wine, put it in a covered glass bowl and leave it in the fridge over night. grill it at lunch the day after.
- caponata: which for the Italians who might read this, here I use as an umbrella term for a mix of vegetables. Take the vegetables you like, for example peppers, aubergines and zucchini. cut them into sorta like cube shaped pieces. put them in a pan, add olive oil, add some tomato sauce if you like it, cook it as much as the hardest vegetable requires, stir it from time to time.
what's really important in my opinion is cook/prepare your meals at least once a day. At least eat some food straight from the kitchen, if you are not the cook.
Avoid eating delivery/pre-cooked/processed food everyday.
You'll be doing something for yourself and you'll feel much better.
Take your time to cook for yourself but also for other people, it's never time wasted.
I used to cook with a trick invented by an italian woman, called "vasocottura" (then my microwave broke, possibly because of that).
You basically put food in a sealed glass jar, and cook it in the microwave for 6 minutes. The air inside will slip out through the seals, resulting in a near vacuum effect. The food will keep cooking for circa 20 minutes while it cools down. Then you can either warm it up in the microwave until the seal unlocks or put the food in the fridge (depending on the food type it will last from a few days to a few weeks thanks to the vacuuming)
Not every dish comes good (and the vegetables soften considerably), but the flavor is incredible (thanks to the vacuuming) and it takes 20 minutes total without no human handling. You also can batch preparation, while one jar is cooking, you can prepare the following ones, and have up to 10 dishes ready in 1 hour of active work.
The hardest part of cooking is often the mental load of "what am I going to eat?". Infinite choices. To pick one is to deny all the rest. What do I even have? What could I make that's worth eating?
At the start of the pandemic, my wife and I began solving this problem with meal planning.
Every Saturday morning, when we're at a pretty high energy level, we decide on lunch and dinner for the next seven days. Including when leftovers will be eaten. Then I go buy the groceries needed for those meals. We keep the schedule in a shared word doc. The system has evolved over time but the core idea of pre-planning the decisions has always been there.
Now there are no decisions to make. It's Thursday night and you're exhausted? You are having sausage pasta. That's the plan. Get cooking, it's easy and you have everything.
If you read the description of the linked book and feel you relate to it, I cannot recommend this strategy enough.
Readit News
Imagine spending one hour in the kitchen to only feed yourself one time. That would be peak insanity to me today. I used to live it for about a decade myself. Ate out about every other day as a consequence. Ordered in a pizza once a week. Today, I eat out about once a month. I haven't ordered a pizza in 3+ years.
I absolutely hated cooking until I learned about terms like "mise en place" and realized that manufacturing/lean/six sigma principles work just as well in my kitchen as they do on a factory floor. Also, tools like the humble pressure cooker can take your 2 hour process cycle down to 20 minutes. It arguably tastes better in many cases too. Cooking is not a mystical process. Much of it (not all) is science and engineering. You can robotically produce incredible meals. And I argue you should - The food on America's shelves and restaurants is only worsening in my estimation.
YMMV. For me, spending time cooking is a great way to take a break from my computer and spend time away from a screen. And like showering, the process of cooking is now mechanical enough that it allows me to focus on broader tangents in whatever I'm working on and set myself up for the next session of coding/building stuff, and now with a full tummy.
I life in a country where fresh produce is readily (and cheaply) available, so I find things like weeklong mealprep (especially, pre-chopping veggies for the week), and eating microwaved food from the freezer ridiculous, both from a taste as well as a health perspective.
Honestly, I think the trick is to have a set of a 12-15 recipes that you can fall back to, and once you have a hang of it, it's easy to create interesting variations with your food! Of course, YMMV
"Much of it (not all) is science and engineering. You can robotically produce incredible meals. And I argue you should" - This I agree with 100% with you on!
Eating can be close. Eat because my body makes complaints, otherwise would not even bother. Not even restaurants. More time, and food is often not very satisfying. The actual food made, whether its fresh, microwaved, ect.. does not matter, because my body has decided it no longer wants to enjoy food. I used to think the variation experimentation part was nice, until my body decided it was a mini game to eliminate that. I almost question the "Food you can make so you don't die."
Cooking a company meal can be an all-day affair but, especially when I was commuting into an office every day, I had a fairly standard set of recipes that I could whip up in very little time and with very little effort. It really wasn't worth preparing a larger quantity that I would have to reheat for a less good result.
[1] https://www.cookingforengineers.com
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79856
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745687
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30797907
[5] https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/268/Buffalo-Chick...
So, now I give myself a budget of one or two “difficult/time consuming” ingredients. This can be Demi-glacé or some other homemade reduction, soy-marinated eggs, slow-cooked brisket, etc. And I make more of it than I need to.
Then I make and eat the meal I was planning on, but I now have a leftover ingredient. Then for my next meal, I can re-use that ingredient and choose another difficult one. It helps with inspiration and effort level.
An example would be: make homemade tomato sauce then make Spaghetti. Next make dough and reuse the sauce into some homemade pizza. Then use the rest of the dough for garlic bread next to a salad (and maybe there’s a little red sauce left for dipping). Etc.
Of course, I’m not doing this for individual meals, I’m batching it up into 3-4 servings each.
It's about 80% as good as the real thing but that's pretty useful to have.
Even building a pizza up from a prepared crust is way better than frozen. My mother needs gluten-free, and there was a GF frozen pizza we liked that a local store carried. But then it disappeared, and I decided to try building my own from a GF crust. The home-built pizza was so much better that there's no going back - not to mention the opportunity to try different toppings.
Cooking at home in a way that allowed me to cut down on my bread consumption, manage lactose intolerance without entirely losing cheese from my life, battle ARFID into insignificance and eat from fresh is a habit that has taken me well into mid-life to develop, but the benefits are obvious, because I am no longer skinny-and-fat-at-the-same-time.
Now if I only had a repertoire of more than about nine dishes. Going to have to read this book.
The balance for us is to make only 2-3 separate dinner meals per week and have leftovers. That way we have some variety but don't have to cook every night (plus when we do cook, we don't mind spending the extra time for a delicious meal. If you're cooking on a time constraint you want a super-fast one-off).
Breakfast for me is a solved problem, I just have overnight oats with fixings. Lunch is whatever, usually eggs, legumes, sardines, tofu.
But cooking is all process, with the best possible outcome being not durability but an immediate destruction of the results -- I made a dish, and my family ate it all!
And then the real challenge reveals itself: they loved the dish, but can I make it again the exact same way next week?
There are several kinds of anxiety/phobia/disorder that leave people unable to cook, and I am sure their anxiety at some level encompasses exactly the thing you think they haven't noticed.
fortunately most of us live in a society, so we don't have to be robinson crusoe or the man of the hole to survive
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but a lot of foods taste terrible defrosted. Freezing can really dry up ingredients, or render them soggy.
that said, I buy pre chopped frozen ginger and garlic, I can't really tell the difference between that and cooked fresh. Jury's still out on frozen chopped onion.
> the humble pressure cooker
Pressure Cooking can easily turn the stuff you put into it into bland mush, where all the flavours meld together too much, so it's good for one aspect of your meal (maybe the base soup / mush) but not all.
My "I cant be bothered" template is the following. is essentially pick one from each category
Veggies: Frozen mixed (peas, carrots, corn, green beans, soy beans), pre-roasted costco bags, "california mix" etc. Frozen veggies often are nutritionally superior to fresh due to halting nutritional decay.Fruit: Apple, orange, banana, Water/other melons, Straw/other berries
Protein: look for 35-70g protein -- 1 skin on chicken breast, 2 boneless skinless chicken thighs, ~150g tilapia, 1 tin of tuna, 1 pork chop/steak, 1 egg + 300g whites, 1 hand size of salmon, 1/2lb shrimp
Calories: 1 slice of bread, 1/2c cooked rice, 1 cup cooked pasta, 1/2 avocado, 1/4c mixed nuts
Sauces / Condiments: Bachan's Japanese BBQ, Kinder Honey Hot BBQ, Kinder Lemon pepper (esp. for tilapia)
Edit: Would love recommendations for other sauces that allow me to squeeze a nationality of cuisine over my template to make it taste like that country's food (kinda).
Yeah I got you:
We're going to use two different basic techniques. The first is extremely simple: throw everything into a blender and then blend until your desired consistency (normally smooth).
Mexican: Combine tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, lime juice, and salt for a fresh salsa.
Mediterranean: Blend olives, capers, lemon juice, and olive oil for a tapenade.
South American: Mix parsley, garlic, vinegar, oil, and chili flakes for chimichurri.
Greek: Yogurt, cucumber, garlic, lemon juice, and dill for tzatziki.
Middle Eastern: Blend tahini, garlic, lemon juice, and water for a basic tahini sauce.
Technique 2 is a little more complicated but once you get the hang of it trust me it's worth it. Call it stovetop simmering.
In a saucepan, combine the base ingredients and bring to a simmer. Add primary flavor agents/spices and continue to simmer for the desired time until flavors meld. Adjust consistency if needed (e.g., with a slurry or additional liquid).
Italian: Start with crushed tomatoes, add garlic, basil, and oregano for a marinara sauce.
Chinese: Combine soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, garlic, and ginger; thicken with a cornstarch slurry for a basic stir-fry sauce.
Indian: Start with tomatoes and onions, add garam masala, turmeric, and cumin for a basic curry sauce.
French: Start with a roux (butter + flour), then add broth and reduce; season with herbs for a basic velouté.
Thai: Coconut milk with red curry paste, simmer and season with fish sauce and sugar for a basic Thai curry.
Here's another simmer sauce that I came up with (I'm not sure this one could really have a nationality):
(American customary measurements)
* 1.5 oz. honey [44 ml]
* 1.5 oz. lemon juice
* 5 oz. white wine (pinot grigio is a good choice) [148 ml]
* 2 tsp. powdered ginger [10 ml]
Mix until the honey dissolves, and use it in the simmering.
It took me entirely too much of my life wasted before I experienced chimichurri for the first time. If I could only have one sauce...
And if you like Indian-ish flavors, a few different jars of chutney/pickle go a long way towards un-blanding that kind of food.
Not vouching for these per se but for example:
https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/tamarind-sauce-...
https://www.pataks.co.uk/products/chutneys-and-pickles/mango...
It had an unusual taste but was quite good.
Delicious! Well worth having in the cupboard, keeps for a ~year. "Pedas" is spicy (ie. hot chilli), "tidak pedas" is not spicy, and "sedang" is medium (in that context anyway). Common export brands are Karangsari and Enak eco.
Also because freeze/thaw is a form of predigestion, I think I have read -- it's partly breaking down the food (cellulose?) and increasing nutritional availability.
Frozen broccoli is still psychologically unacceptable, mind you. I have some in the freezer that was bought during a broccoli shortage (thank you so much, Brexit); I've used it twice and I cannot imagine I will ever finish it.
The giant bags of 'Normandy vegetables' and 'Stir-fry vegetables' from Costco are an absolute dietary staple for me. Grab a couple of handfuls from each bag, toss 'em with olive oil and sprinkle generously with salt, MSG and some sort of spice mix (or just garlic powder sometimes), then roast at 450 for ~15 minutes.
Fast, minimal prep time, and at least I'm eating vegetables with my probably-unhealthy main dish.
That’s 66 servings of .25lbs of meat.
Tips: wear gloves, do it while they’re warm, shred by hand. Add salt and lemon juice to taste (and preserve) before freezing.
> I just buy multiple costco rotisserie chickens, some frozen veggies, put food on plate, microwave, cover in sauce, eat.
In a weird way, this also serves as a training manual for becoming a good cook. Take plain ramen and understand its cooking process through different methods. Now build a sense of how to flavor and season food by adding additional ingredients. What is a potato and how do you cook it? Solid, back to basics stuff.
At the other end of the spectrum is an absolute classic of the genre, Slater’s Real Fast Food:
https://www.nigelslater.com/real-fast-food_bk_25
It’s a bit more omnivore forward — lamb chops grilled in yogurt is a favourite — and comes from a time when these books were aimed more at young Islington professionals rather than Amazon drivers.
Its recipe for granola has become an instant family favourite.
But that role disappeared because corporations needed more cheap worker-units and politicians needed more GDP, so they rode each others' coattails to eliminate that role. With each homemaker now a worker-unit, there are twice as many worker-units but employee costs are the same, household income is the same, twice as many taxes, twice as many cars, more spending, more consumption - it's a win-win for the ruling class, while family-units and non-wealthy individuals lose.
You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating and vilifying homemakers by observing how furiously most moderns rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.
This was almost always the woman.
>disappeared because corporations needed
Also because women did not like the absolute dedication of their lives to homemaking as a default. They wanted the freedom to join the paying workforce, and wanted equal pay for their work (still waiting on that).
There's some truth in your comment, but it glosses over the very real problems that came with the gender roles and subsequent power structures of that time.
There were more solutions besides monasteries and marriage. My grandparents, living in a small town in a rural area of Austria maybe 50 years ago, had a large family. That town's teacher was single, and it simply wouldn't have been economical for her to do her own cooking, so she had a deal whereby she paid my grandparents so she could come over every day to have dinner with the family. This arrangement was so common that there was even a word for it ("Kostgänger").
I'm surprised that there isn't a sharing economy startup yet, trying to reinvent the concept. -- "Uber for warm meals". Or at least I'm not aware of one. It probably exists.
On another note: The nuclear family household with one dedicated homemaker was historically a relatively short-lived concept. Prior to that, we tended to have extended families sharing a household, and the significant amount of work involved in food preparation was surely one of the drivers of that.
If you were a gay woman, you were forced to be a homemaker for a man you didn’t love because it was the only way to even access an income.
Black women could get jobs… as homemakers for rich white families where the wife either didn’t want to do the work or couldn’t keep up with the mountain of labor dumped on her. But they were paid a fraction what a white man could earn.
If you were a man who wanted to be a homemaker, literally everyone looked down on you and many institutions considered you a drain on society. This attitude still persists to this day.
But sure, corporations are why women now exist in the workforce.
Indeed. Ironically, the effect is to be expected, and in every other situation people would call it obvious. Give everyone $1k in unconditional basic income? Obviously, the market will quickly readjust prices to consume surplus income. But then, get people to run two-income households, and be surprised the prices readjusted so that single-income household is no longer a possibility?
After many years of denying this would be better for us, my wife and I have recently decided that one of us (maybe her, probably me) will focus full-time on the kids and house. A big shift after 20 years of working, but we’re looking forward to it.
In less than one hour from start to finish, I can chop the vegetables, cook, clean the kitchen utensils while cooking, move the finished food into a big container for storage (or one per serving if you have a big fridge and enough containers) and clean the cooker. The longest part of all this is waiting for the food to cool down before putting it in the fridge. With the size of my cooker, I could prepare enough food to eat 5 to 7 times. The longest recipe I know has me cook dry beans for half an hour, and cook rice afterward. This could probably be improved by pre-soaking the beans.
Except when I fail for some reason, which is extremely rare, the food is incomparably better tasting and healthier, and also quite cheaper, than whatever I can get when at work outside of restaurants (which is even pricier, and not necessarily healthier). This allows me to avoid all the mystery sauces they put in, probably laden with vegetable oils and sugar, that make me hungry two hours later.
...depends on what you find "unreasonable". The internet is full of delicious "10 minute" recipes or "30 minute" recipes or whatever, but that doesn't count the amount of time you spend at the grocery store, cleaning your kitchen, washing your kitchen towels, (un)loading your dishwasher, etc.
The reality for me is that I spend maybe 10 hours each weekend shopping for groceries and pre-preparing things that I need to have on hand in the freezer/fridge to even be able to cut the workload to only an hour on a weekday. This adds up to 15 hours a week, so it's maybe half the hours I spend each week being truly productive at work. By some measure, that's actually a lot.
And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to. And I don't think my expectations are unreasonably high either: Not living in a major city and spending a ton of money on eating out, and not wanting to fill my body with additives from processed foods is basically what's forcing me.
Kinda weird end result... Who did profit anyway, apart from upper management.
https://youtu.be/z-iWe4qXUD8?t=7s
Funny how "Holy Grail" is woven through with it ... so many scenes of "kissing up and kicking down":
And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'angin on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences... (just as apt / relevant for the above linked scene)
And, as has been proven repeatedly EVERY SINGLE time it is tested, what "trickles down" ain't "wealth".
What a racket this whole universe is! This God fella's got some 'splainin to do... XD
EDIT: damn, I stand corrected!
Not that I'm an expert either, but from what little I gathered monks were relatively privileged people.
What, kinda like this?
https://youtu.be/EqTyZoupc1w
... monastery.
Ooh. Very nice, eh? Do I get to take a turn as a "sort of executive officer for the week"?
https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?t=41s
More seriously, where do I sign up? ... The older I get, the more I think those monks were / are onto something...
all of these events predate the wide adoption of writing in the region, which makes it hard to tell how old the traditions described in the oldest sources are, though vedic scholars make arguments from internal features of the text
also it is common into deep prehistory for non-wealthy people to live with their parents as long as they are single; that's what most people do here, for example. no monastery needed
Perhaps a single burner induction cooktop is in your budget, which you can use to brown/fry meat.
Toast bread in toaster first, well toasted. Put cheese slices on toast and nuke until it melts.
The result is not mushy, due to the bread already being warm, and the minimal time in the microwave.
https://youtu.be/lvVplicKlrc?t=185
For meat we use anything from chopped-up Italian sausage, bacon strips, chick peas, chicken wings to an entire chicken.
Veggie wise anything from classic roasting veggies like carrot, oignon and pumpkin to broccoli, beans, zucchini…
Spice the laziest is just dried rosemary. But I also like some southern spicy bbq rubs, plain garam massala. Or just plenty of garlic.
It has become much easier since we have a “proper” oven instead of a cheap countertop one, as it is much faster and heats up more easily.
Casserole is another simple one we do, essentially whatever you'd put in a tray bake plus a tin of tomatoes and some stock. A little more prep time and we usually have it with rice, but still relatively quick, simple and healthy.
I like the ones that you can bung in the oven for an hour. With WFH I can do the prep, put in the oven, clean up in less than 30 mins, then finish a few more work issues before we can all eat together at a reasonable time.
If you have pasta left from the day before and don't mind sweet dishes you can fry the pasta with some butter and eggs (scramble with the pasta) in a pan and add some sugar. Pretty sating meal...
In a late hour after work delirium I like to eat air fried pre-seasoned chicken or turkey breast with toasted gray bread and arugula with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil. The latter usually only when I have the energy left or there is some already clean in the fridge... Is of course only for lazy people when you have an air fryer. The 15 min of waiting are enough time to toast the bread and to put the salad into a bowl and season it. In Germany you can buy cheap organic pre-seasoned poultry in most supermarkets...
Washing the vegetables is the most labor-intensive part. Coarsely chop things, stir in your salt and pepper, toss a few bay leaves in, load in the chicken parts, HIGH for 25min, and you're technically good to go. I cook bone-in-skin-on chicken, so I pick the bones and gristle and skin, and stir the chopped/gently pulled meat back in with the rest of the stew.
If I feel like I need more greens in my diet, I'll add a block/half bag of chopped frozen spinach. Chile if I'm feeling spicy.
Serve with lime. It's so much better with lime.
I got through a kilo of kimchi a week this way when I was a depressed 20-something living in a share-house abroad.
RIP roommate noses.
[0] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1021485-one-pan-orzo-wit...
[1] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020291-vegetarian-mushr...
For curious folks, the URL says they are one-pan orzo with spinach and feta, and vegetarian mushroom shawarma pitas.
It tastes better than most other methods of cooking chicken breast other than stewing. Optional extras include salt, whole peppercorns, and roughly sliced lemon. If the chicken breasts are freakishly large and weigh more than 350g you might need to halve them. Lasts a couple of days in the fridge but the texture is better fresh.
Moroccan Shakshuka - Eggs, Tomatoes, Peppers, Spices - Slowcook and lap up with a nice piece of bread. What's not to like? Again, very easy to spruce up to ensure you don't feel like you're eating the same meal everyday
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It’s simple, quick and oh so good. Enough time to make a really quick salad in between too.
Do a night with bottled tomato sauce. I like Classico in Canada (often “diluted” with a can of diced tomatoes). Sometimes I fry some onions first. Top with some red beans.
Another a nights with canned tuna and whatever chopped vegetables I have.
Maybe a night with just butter and cracked pepper and some vegetables as a side. Beans make a good protein.
Fast, cheap, easy. Nutritionally complete-ish.
One thing that can be tricky is keeping the emulsion smooth and not suddenly have the cheese turn chunky. What I've found very useful there is to put aside some of the pasta cooking water and then blend it up with the cheese on the side using an immersion blender. When you reach a good level of creaminess, you pour it back into the pot with the now drained pasta and use the residual heat of the pot and pasta to slightly reduce it down to the perfect level while constantly stirring.
This should make the whole process a lot more reliable while not changing the flavor by adding more complex ingredients.
If I have more time, I'll make my own sauce using stock, curry powder, tomato puree and soy sauce.
Sauce must be really good to enjoy pasta, pesto especially should be eaten fresh, it's true that here in Italy you can eat it at a fresh express pasta place for like 5-7 euros (more like 7-9 in a big city), it's not really that expensive, but still not that cheap either considering it's pasta, and cooking it at home requires a lot of preparation and attention IMO. You can't leave pasta unattended.
So here they are my go-to recipes for when I don't wanna be bothered:
- in summer: caprese salad, which is tomatoes + mozzarella + olive oil + basil + origan. you can add olives or capers if you like them, my favourite variant is with anchovies. Or you can have ham and melon. Or you can have mozzarella and ham and all the combinations you can think of: caprese + ham, caprese + melon, melon + mozzarella + ham etc. All of them take 5 minutes top to prepare, they're all delicious.
- fish: swordfish, tuna, mackerel, salmon, sardines etc. you can buy them steamed, grilled, smoked, marinated or in oil, they come in cans, jars or you can buy them at fresh food counters. not all of them come suuuper cheap, but they are usually affordable enough, and most of them are as cheap as pasta, especially the canned versions. you can heat some steamed/grilled mackerel fillet in the oven or in the microwave, add an herb sauce and it's like being at the restaurant. also buying it fresh at the fish counter is an option, they prepare it for you so you don't have to and most of the time you just cook it in a pan for a few minutes in half a spoon of olive oil.
- everything with beans. I love beans, I could live just by eating beans every day of my life. my favourite kind is borlotti beans, you can eat them straight from the jar, we have a lot of high quality packaged beans which are also very cheap, like less than 1 euro for a 250 grams jar. My go-to recipe with beans is beans and tuna salad. It's simply borlotti beans + canned tuna + olive oil + some vinegar + some raw red onion. You can replace beans with your favourite legumes, for example chick-peas. you can also replace tuna with some other canned fish, like the aforementioned steamed or grilled mackerel.
- chicken: buy chicken breast, pound it a little bit and grill it for a few minutes, add olive oil and you're done. if you feel fancy, marinate it with some lemon juice, herbs and half a glass of white wine, put it in a covered glass bowl and leave it in the fridge over night. grill it at lunch the day after.
- caponata: which for the Italians who might read this, here I use as an umbrella term for a mix of vegetables. Take the vegetables you like, for example peppers, aubergines and zucchini. cut them into sorta like cube shaped pieces. put them in a pan, add olive oil, add some tomato sauce if you like it, cook it as much as the hardest vegetable requires, stir it from time to time.
what's really important in my opinion is cook/prepare your meals at least once a day. At least eat some food straight from the kitchen, if you are not the cook. Avoid eating delivery/pre-cooked/processed food everyday.
You'll be doing something for yourself and you'll feel much better.
Take your time to cook for yourself but also for other people, it's never time wasted.
You basically put food in a sealed glass jar, and cook it in the microwave for 6 minutes. The air inside will slip out through the seals, resulting in a near vacuum effect. The food will keep cooking for circa 20 minutes while it cools down. Then you can either warm it up in the microwave until the seal unlocks or put the food in the fridge (depending on the food type it will last from a few days to a few weeks thanks to the vacuuming)
Not every dish comes good (and the vegetables soften considerably), but the flavor is incredible (thanks to the vacuuming) and it takes 20 minutes total without no human handling. You also can batch preparation, while one jar is cooking, you can prepare the following ones, and have up to 10 dishes ready in 1 hour of active work.
Here is a video: https://youtube.com/shorts/ccyOSIvqtgQ?feature=share
Don't try it without further investigation, since not every jar will work without breaking itself or the microwave.
The metal clips in the pictures are just to hold the lid on in a water bath. In a microwave you could probably skip them.
At the start of the pandemic, my wife and I began solving this problem with meal planning.
Every Saturday morning, when we're at a pretty high energy level, we decide on lunch and dinner for the next seven days. Including when leftovers will be eaten. Then I go buy the groceries needed for those meals. We keep the schedule in a shared word doc. The system has evolved over time but the core idea of pre-planning the decisions has always been there.
Now there are no decisions to make. It's Thursday night and you're exhausted? You are having sausage pasta. That's the plan. Get cooking, it's easy and you have everything.
If you read the description of the linked book and feel you relate to it, I cannot recommend this strategy enough.