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.
Cooking for other people can be something of an event. Cooking for yourself after a busy day for yourself can be a chore you're sort of resigned to so that you can get some necessary calories in your body even if, in general, you like cooking. That's where it's nice to be able to mindlessly pop something in the oven or microwave that dish you've previously made or even just bought.
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.
I call this the Reheating Coefficient: how good does something taste when reheated compared to how good it did originally?
Stews can sometimes achieve even >1 RC. I find lasagna is really good as well. And then you have stuff like fries which start out pretty great and lose all appeal the second they hit room temperature, never to recover.
Stews and soups are pretty good in general--although I tend to like reheating stews with big chunks of meat less than something like a chili. I agree on lasagna. I always make one using three bread pans, freeze 2, and eat the third over 2 or 3 days.
I'm annoyed at my local BBQ place. They changed their menu around a couple of months ago and now fries are automatically included as a side which doesn't fit well with bringing the takeout home and eating it in a couple hours.
> And then you have stuff like fries which start out pretty great and lose all appeal the second they hit room temperature
While I agree with the general point, I had to mention that an air fryer can revitalize some things that I used to see as unsalvageable. Fries are surprisingly great after a few minutes at 375.
My personal favorite: chopped leftover fries into roughly equal sized chunks, reheat in the pan until they're back in shape, then use them to make a lazy spanish omelette. Mind you, keep tossing and stirring them to avoid burning and add a small amount of oil if the fries are particularly dry.
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.
You can also buy concentrated stock packages and just bring them to a simmer with however much water you want to use for the consistency. I basically never bother with doing it from scratch these days.
Where are these concentrated stock packages? I've had better than bullion and added gelatin to that, and I think I've seen heinz demi, but what concentrate stock packages to you have available?
Asian food stores have lots of seafood related stock that is difficult to locate elsewhere. For instance, I'll use shrimp paste sourced from Asian food stores when making shrimp étouffée.
I made a batch of this for a tenderloin last year and it’s amazing. I froze it into cubes and have a freezer bag full of them that I use for damn near everything now, including burgers.
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.
When the timer goes off and the cooker switches off, the contents are still under pressure. That pressure shifts the liquid's boiling point, which is why pressure cookers cook hotter. If you vent the pressure vessel, the liquid inside will rapidly boil as it dumps that excess thermal energy to steam and your kitchen. It'll carry bits of liquid and cooked food with it.
Another thing you know but may not have connected: this is exactly the same process that can make water "explode" if you reheat it in a microwave.
I think the microwaving water issue is slightly different. It does indeed become superheated, but not of course from pressure; if the vessel lacks nucleation sites (imperfections) for bubbles to form, the water can heat quite a bit higher than 100C as it’s not losing energy to the steam phase change. Eventually when a bubble does spontaneously form (or the vessel is jolted), a huge amount of water is instantly converted to steam.
Pretty much everything inside the pressure cooker is a nucleation site, so if you could make the lid just disappear, the superheated contents would explode.
Water is only converted to steam while there's energy for it, so only a fraction of the water actually boils*. The risk is that it's a rapid process that propels a lot 100C water outside of the vessel.
*) I haven't done the full calculation, but I'm pretty sure the upper bound is something like 10%, with 2-4% being the best most normal people could accomplish in a microwave.
On a somewhat related note, I actually had this happen recently on the stove. I've done it a few times over the years in the microwave, and I didn't even think it was really possible to have happen on the stove.
Plain stainless steel pot, small, good condition but still a couple years old. You'd think plenty of nucleation sites, right? Filled it with 195F water from the insta-hot tap, and put it on my induction stove and turned it on high to push it up to a roiling boil. But after 30 seconds -- nothing. Not a single bubble in the pan, which is weird all by itself. And at this point the range is pumping a fairly ridiculous amount of energy into what is already hot water.
So I thought "it can't really be superheating, right? on the stove??" and then grabbed the pot and swished it really good while stepping back. Sure enough, it instantly erupted into a furious boil.
I'd guess I'm unlikely to ever run into that situation again. The stars had to align pretty well, I think.
the clausius-clapeyron relation is part of bumping (the water at the bottom of the vessel is under higher pressure than water at the top) but the bigger reason for bumping is, I think, superheating
What's nice is when this happens by itself while it's cooking and it spackles your counters, cabinets, and maybe even ceiling with salsa and food debris while you're away.
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.
The parent post did not make a claim of universality.
I don't really understand this implicit criticism of lack of explicit completeness thing that goes around on Hacker News but I wish people would do it less.
Thank you. To be clear, there was no criticism intended, merely an attempt to open people's eyes to the possibility of alternatives to their way of life. Traveling does that for me, and I'm grateful when it does.
I'm now staying in a condo in Bangkok that is like that. Even if I wanted to cook, it would be extremely inconvenient. There's just enough tabletop area for one of the following: coffee machine, rice cooker, portable stove, dish rack. I keep the coffee maker there permanently.
There is also a huge disconnect between prices in supermarkets and takeaway food. It's cheaper to order food than to try and cook it, at least in my area.
where do the takeaway food places buy their supplies
i have a couple of 1000-watt immersion heaters that can boil water in a coffee mug or, more relevantly, a one-liter thermos. they cost about 30 cents. the thermos doesn't have to be on a tabletop, though it's dangerous to touch it while it's plugged in because the water is electrically connected
i don't want to claim that boil-in-bag cooking isn't 'extremely inconvenient' but it is certainly feasible
also the rice cooker you mention can provide most of your calories for zero hassle
Since the food vendors are buying for a whole week or months worth of them selling only that, they get a bulk discount and have a personal relationship with their supplier, which is to say, fewer middlemen.
If the best food in your life was $3 for a whole meal and available fresh right outside your door step, sure, you could go to the store, buy ingredients, prepare them, cook them, eat them, and then clean up. But at that kind of price point and accessibility, you can see how it would be considered a luxury to be able to do that vs buying street food.
If you've never been so depressed that cleaning the rice cooker bowl is too much work, count yourself lucky.
They buy them from street markets, which are _significantly_ cheaper than supermarkets for some reason.
> also the rice cooker you mention can provide most of your calories for zero hassle
Yes, but there aren't many micronutrients in rice. Sure, I'd probably not die, but it's not a great existence.
Back when I lived in the UK, I just ate Huel everyday, and it made me realize that I was probably malnourished in someway. I had so much more energy and less brain fog (which I wasn't even aware of, since it was just normal). I'm pretty sure if I just ate rice everyday, I'd feel like shit again in a month or two.
To be fair to that point there are maybe a hundred million people around the world living in tiny places without much more than a hotplate or rice cooker, or working in factory dormitories and having no control over the food they eat.
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
> they will, as you seem to have correctly inferred, die without support
Is there ever an instance of this happening?
Seems to me the issue veers into ptsd/trauma territory if one somehow finds themselves incapable of feeding themselves. Anxiety is an almost banal way to describe it, and I've had an anxiety attack.
> your question betrays a level of callousness unworthy of a human being
It's not rhetorical, but your feeble projection onto others tells me a lot about you. Yes, how dare one question a person talking out of their ass, only a monster could do that.
> kurt goedel
Refused to eat food not prepared by his late wife. Obsessive irrational fear is not merely tantamount to "anxiety".
Touch grass and take a break from the internet. You might catch a dose of anxiety.
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.
Some days going outside for shopping groceries is just not "on the menu".
But anyway, if you are eating alone there is generally a real imbalance between the time required for preparing a meal and cleaning up afterwards versus the time required for eating. On low energy days this can be already too much.
Ah, that's a bummer. I found it invaluable in conjunction ordering from a warehouse type store like Costco, followed by batch cooking and refrigerating or freezing things so I have low effort meals throughout the week.
Also, sheet pan meals are an incredibly low effort way to eat pretty healthy.
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.
At the same time, let's not discount the fact that it's made the single-earner family increasingly impossible to sustain for younger families. I'm sure I'm not the only heterosexual man who would be grateful if he could quit his day job and take care of the home while his spouse went out and made the money.
These power structures have existed for millennia, so this abstracted idea that women wanting to step out of their traditional gender roles ONLY in the last century is a bit arbitrary.
It makes much more sense that because the ruling class wanted a bigger work force they sanctioned for (or at the very least turn a blind eye) women’s role in the work force.
Exactly two millennia. The role of housewife didn’t really exist until the 1820s, and even then it was more of an upper-middle class thing and a distinctly American concept. It didn’t even really take off until the industrial revolution when factory jobs became more mainstream.
It was also created by corporations, largely to sell magazines, cookbooks, and home appliances.
Everywhere else in the world, especially outside of cities, the labor of the home was evenly divided because everyone in the family had jobs.
More obvious explanation is that the movement really took off after the World Wars, as there was a huge labor shortage on the market to be covered, in the form of a whole generation of young men who never came back from the meat grinder.
And many women spent WWII in factory jobs or even more directly combat-related roles especially in Europe. (Just finished reading a book that mentioned how Mary Churchill--daughter of that Churchill--ended up commanding an AA battery.)
While, of course, the period after is probably widely seen as classic white picket fence suburbia, the WWII experience couldn't have helped but set some changes, however slow, in motion.
Do we have examples of the 1970s women's lib movement (for one example) receiving broad financial, social, and political support from large corporations across multiple industries?
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.
Regulations around selling food are far more brutal than "ride sharing". It varies by state in the US, but generally speaking unless you keep your income below certain dollar amounts and stick to things like jam and pickles, you need to operate out of a commercially licensed and inspected kitchen.
Far better to do as hoc, personal arrangements than try to scale it into a fully fledged market.
I just got back from a week at a hiking camp that generally changes locations each year. I was talking to the head cook and she was saying some locations are more stringent than others but generally there's at least a cursory inspection required.
This is somewhat of a plot component in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, set in New York in 1790. Ichabod Crane is a schoolteacher, and he is sustained by food and lodging from the villagers.
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.
> 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.
The point is that this didn't change into a choice. It changed into everyone being assigned the role of a laborer at birth - instead of reality where anyone can get a job, we have a reality where everyone has to get a job.
Want to be a homemaker? Well, too bad, that's generally not an available role anymore - unless you find someone with above-average income (or accumulated wealth) to fund your stay-at-home work. Man or woman, gay or straight, your only role is now to make money on the market. All the usual homemaker responsibilities? Why, those are all services now, which you can pay for out of your salary.
House husband households, where the man is the homemaker, and the woman (in the case of a heterosexual relationship) is the high powered lawyer/c-suite exec/other highly paid professional are on the rise. Attitudes that the man in this case is a "drain on society" are slowly changing.
I've known a few couples where that was the case. They had maybe a couple young kids and the wife made very big bucks. You could hire a nanny but, if the husband wasn't especially passionate about his work and was happy to stay home, it's not the worst system one could imagine.
> 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?
The sci-fi story solution I've come up with is we put everyone into a lottery. Everyone draws a number. Evens get their salary doubled, odds are no longer allowed to work. Everyone find a partner.
Evens will pair up with evens to quadruple their unit income (why attach yourself to a deadweight odd?), with odds becoming a shunned caste largely doomed to death.
>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.
I got the actual Instant Pot. This is my second actually, I got the one that also does air frying.
It's a great purchase. Get some cheap protein that needs to cook for long, get some vegetables, brown the protein a bit (can be done in the Instant Pot), add chopped vegetables, salt, spices, and a little water; pressure cook for 1 hour. Shorter version: add meat, add vegs, add water, turn on.
You can get fancier as you learn, but stews are my favourite food because they require cheap ingredients, and with the instant pot I don't even need to take care of it while it cooks. Toss everything together and turn the thing on. It has a timer and a keep warm function, so you can literally fill it in the morning, and come back from work to a warm pot of stew.
My favorite recipe is chilli con carne, which is little more than minced beef with onions peppers and beans in tomato sauce. Stews, chilli and random salads are 90% of my diet.
> You can get fancier as you learn, but stews are my favourite food because they require cheap ingredients, and with the instant pot I don't even need to take care of it while it cooks. Toss everything together and turn the thing on. It has a timer and a keep warm function, so you can literally fill it in the morning, and come back from work to a warm pot of stew.
This is the main issue I have with my model: it won't let you stew for more than 30 minutes at a time. It's a huge PITA to come back to it and start it again, since you can't just go out and about your business and leave it to do its thing.
I don't know what the limit is on pressure-cooking, the 30 minutes is for non-pressured "slow cook" mode. It won't engage the "pressure-cooking" mode if the lid is not secured in place. I never needed to pressure-cook for more than 30 minutes at a time, though. The longest recipe I had was, IIRC, 30 + 15 minutes. The recipe said to put dry beans in, pressure-cook for 30 minutes, release pressure, add sausage, cook for 15 more minutes.
Instant Pot is great while it lasts. I had one die on me (the electronics), and after asking for photo evidence they denied warranty coverage. A year later they went bankrupt.
There are traditional pressure cookers too. I got one as a Christmas present that I use now and then but I admit I probably don't use it as casually as I would an instant pot. (I also have an old slow cooker I use in the same non-casual way.)
It's a Moulinex Cookeo (French brand). They have multiple varieties, I'd skip the ones with a phone connection and pretending to do 500 recipes, and go for the basic one. It's a big bowl that gets hot. That's it. I'm not convinced this is fundamentally better than a random old-school pressure cooker, but in my case, the apartment I was renting at the time had a shitty electrical stove, so it helped a lot. The self-timer is also nice.
I usually save recipes on my phone, editing out the fluff and keeping the ingredients and directions, so I don't have links for them anymore.
The recipe says "serve over rice". In my case, the picadillo tends to have a lot of sauce. What I like doing is cooking the right amount of rice for the whole batch, then dumping it with the rest of the dish. It'll soak up most of the sauce. The rice may not end up what people typically call "well-cooked rice", but I don't care and actually prefer it this way. You can also replace the rice with a quinoa mix. Or do both rice + quinoa, but this is a pain because their cooking times are different. It goes great with pasta, too. Also, as filling for tortillas, but you have to manage the sauce, or it's annoying to eat. In all cases, adding some grated cheese is great, but not necessary.
I've initially found those randomly searching for "instant pot recipe" on google. Some general recommendations: don't be afraid to dump in a lot of vegetables. If the recipe calls for "half an onion" or "small onion" and you only have big ones and nothing to do with the remaining half, put it all in. Same for peppers and tomatos. If it asks for tomato sauce and you only have big containers (they tend to be cheaper), dump it all in and just cook for a bit longer with the top off. Also works if the recipe calls for tomato paste, it's sometimes cheaper to make your own from tomato sauce.
Generally speaking, you don't have to follow recipes to a T. What I like to say is that "given what you put in, it's hard to get something bad out". The worst that happened to me was when I dropped too many peppercorns in. The taste was still great, but it was a PITA to fish them out one by one.
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.
> And I don't do it because I enjoy doing it. I do it, because I'm forced to
You sound like exactly the sort of person I’m talking about. I’d spend a maximum of 2 hours per week grocery shopping, and I can make dinner at a couple of dollars per portion in 15-30 mins with no prep. I’m not sure what anybody could be forcing you to spend 15 hours per week doing.
I think you will find an extreme range in mastery in the kitchen, just like you will find it in programming, blacksmithing, construction, plumbing, or literally anything else.
In most cases, the master craftsman is orders of magnitude more efficient than the apprentice. Solving problems without any tools. Solving two or more problems at the same time (hint, hint). Etc.
The best way to approach this discussion is to respect it as a skill issue and come to terms with that reality. I think we could find a lot of constructive advice to share in this environment.
Attitude also helps. If you have the right mindset, it is a lot easier to overcome these concerns. If I really want to keep eating home-cooked meals and enjoying all of the benefits that go along with it, I would absolutely find a way to optimize these activities. At some level, you have to want it. No one is going to hand you the convenience being advertised throughout this thread. For example, I get my ass out of bed at 530AM and arrive at the grocery store as they are opening so that I can avoid crowds and get in/out in <10 minutes. I can literally go from home->store->home in ~25 minutes, but only if I do it at the right time of day. If I wait to go when everyone else does, it will take at least an hour.
I'm still not convinced that parent commenter and I are solving for the same problem, and am not quite ready to chalk it up to differing levels of skill, but it's not really a discussion I particularly want to go into any deeper either.
When I was a student, my skill level was certainly several orders of magnitude below what it is today, and I certainly spent a lot less time on food preparation. The difference is that back then I was filling my body with crap, which my body now no longer takes, approaching 40. I think, that has a lot more to do with it. Also, if, for example, you have children, you wouldn't feed them crap either. It's one thing to decide for yourself that you're going to live off of ramen, when you're a student. It's quite another to decide that you're going to feed your loved ones that way.
I don’t think skill has much to do with it either, but I’d be surprised if we were solving substantially different problems. I’m also approaching 40, and I eat a very healthy diet. Other than the occasional protein bar, yogurt is about the most highly processed food I eat. Most of my diet is fresh vegetables and staples like rice and legumes.
I would guess that the reason that I seem to spend about a third of the time cooking and preparing meals as you do is because I’m taking a more simple approach than you are. Unless you have some especially specific dietary requirements, but then that would hardly be relevant to a general discussion about the cost and time burden of preparing food.
Tooling and space makes a massive difference. While it's true that a master could build/cook something amazing with subpar tooling, efficiency goes down significantly.
I wouldn’t say it’s significant. Good tools can make your life easier, but you reach diminishing returns very quickly. I used rather crappy kitchen tools for probably my first 10 years of home cooking, and didn’t have any big increase in productivity when I started spending more money on them, and wasn’t held back by them at any point prior to that. I got a decent boost from buying a nice stand mixer, but I only use that for cakes and leavened bread, which I don’t cook that much of.
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
"An English medieval proverb said that if the abbot of Glastonbury married the abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would have more land than the king of England."
Not really, quite many monasteries themselves ended up very wealthy. Though they could have acted as proxies by churches. But did not mean they did not hold land what was the wealth back then. And did not have to divide it as inheritance had to.
> You might be confusing "monastery" with "church."
Many religions besides the catholicism have monasteries, and exploit the same social loophole. Countless Buddhist monasteries also operate as a spa hotel of sorts.
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.
With an Instant Pot, an induction burner, and a toaster oven you can make anything that would require a normal kitchen, just in smaller portions (as in, you aren't cooking a whole turkey or a giant casserole).
On that note, I've been wondering about the recent hype about "air fryers", which - best I can tell, after looking into it repeatedly - are basically countertop, underpowered version of fan ovens that have been, in my life, a standard appliance in every kitchen I've ever seen. But maybe it's a sign of worsening economical prospects of the generation - people no longer own, only rent, increasingly worse quality apartments, so a basic kitchen with a fridge, a stove, an oven and maybe dishwasher and microwave, are things people no longer can rely on, or expect to have?
The one advantage that air fryers have over standard convection ovens (IMHO) is that you can make smaller portions, and because these products are designed to cook small portions they can direct a ton of heat at the food, cooking it very quickly. Prepackaged meals' instructions usually mirror my experience as well, saying that cooking in an air fryer will require less cook time compared to an oven, and a drastically lower temperature as the heating element is literally right next to the food as the air circulates the heat.
Otherwise, if you already have a convection oven and don't mind waiting a bit longer, I don't see a good reason for purchasing an air fryer (other than the aforementioned advantage).
I used to dismiss air fryers as just a crappy benchtop oven, but Minute Food did a cool video explaining why that's an overly reductive view and they're actually kind cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AASP4P5vRAA
It really does work better than my conventional oven.
Not so much underpowered, but rather faster heat, higher fan speed and smaller (so proportionally higher powered but only useful for smaller portions). That makes it more convenient for many people than a regular convection oven. Not to say they are not over hyped, but they have their niche.
Maybe having modular devices that can do things as necessary and then be stowed are more practical than having large appliances bolted into counters taking space? I think that it is impractical for everyone in the world to have as much space as we currently think we need. We can get along just fine with smaller living spaces -- it is not a sign of poverty to be efficient.
I have an older "convection" wall oven which I think probably has something like a $10 fan added to a regular oven BOM. From what I can tell if you put the item to be cooked on a cooling rack set in a baking tray, you have something close enough to an air fryer to be no different. Of course, people in small apartments have had toaster ovens forever so maybe an air fryer is just the modern replacement for that.
My stove came with "convection bake" and "convection roast" settings on the oven. Then some time after purchase I was offered to download an "air fryer" mode, but I would have to enable the wifi connection on my stove and use a smartphone app, which I do not want to do. Am I really missing much? Can a full-size home oven also be an effective air-fryer?
My guess is that it's some useless mode like microwave ovens have a zillion of but which are perfectly straightforward to simulate with the right temp/power and time settings.
I own a full modern kitchen (your mid-range appliances; full induction stove and a modern convection oven that even steams). My no-name air fryer makes crunchier fries than my convection oven.
Yeah, my “dream” kitchen that I’ll never have would have those instead of a range. And maybe a big slow cooker that could do a turkey.
Edit: oh yeah, add an air fryer and bread machine. And kettle obvs. Preheats water for a pasta pot faster than the stove. Immersion >> conduction heating.
The amount spent on a range buys a lot of gadgets. Not even wiring one up saves a circuit and dedicated run.
How many people are you cooking for? I find that a dishwasher when only used for one or two people is more of a nuisance than washing dishes as they are used, mostly because you have to basically use all of your dishes before running it.
You cannot achieve a dishwasher quality with your hands only. Partially because of the temperature, partially because of chemicals. I will never even try to wash wine glasses by hands.
If you wash by hand you create a lot of friction so I wouldn't underestimate it. You'll likely also have less detergent residue on your dishes if you wash by hand, which apparently could be good for keeping your gut lining intact.
While all these are valid points, you just have to compare hand- and machine-washed glasses once and will never confuse them again. I believe that standard machine cycle includes enough rinsing to wash off detergent, but you may do another rinse just in case.
If I want squeaky-clean glasses, I clean them by hand so I can't say that I relate to your experience. Perhaps the dishwashing detergent that you use contains different chemicals.
Might also be because people misuse the dishwasher a lot - by overloading the machine past capacity, and then running an underpowered (or "eco") program. All those other programs are on the dishwasher for a reason, and it's not to trick the user into wasting more water.
If you can get one of those countertop convention ovens (typically marketed as an air fryer/toaster oven combo) you can do quite a bit of what an oven/range can do. I use mine more than my actual oven now, and with some creativity I could probably use it almost entirely if I didn't have a range.
Just want to second this. My family of four have been waiting for more than a year for our new kitchen (long and boring story) and we’ve managed fine after buying two of these to get by. And we enjoy cooking.
So if you’re just starting out this is a great buy. A full size stove will have a larger element and better heat control but you won’t notice. And they are way better than a gas camp stove.
If you upgrade to a Breville Control Freak (not cheap, but cheaper than your new kitchen) and you get used to it (it require recalibrating your concept of how to use a stove a bit), you might find that you never use your new stove in your new kitchen.
The Control Freak has:
Better heat control. (That’s the entire point. It smokes essentially everything else in the market.)
Painless preheating. Put on your pan, turn it on and set a temp, and go gather ingredients. Done. (Warning: it can substantially overshoot with cast iron, so be a bit careful.)
Element size: it seems to produce more even heat on a 12” or even 14” pan than most gas ranges, even fancy ones. And you can use it with cheaper pans that have thick bottoms and thin sides without burning everything on the side. Your gas burner won’t be able to do this.
Did I mention the heat control? You can cook pancakes without messing up the first batch (350F). You can do soft scrambled eggs pretty easily (240F or so and turn it off a bit before they look done). You can make chai easily (211F or so, then reduce to 185F before adding milk, then wait at least 20 min if not much longer). Perfect golden onions: 300F or so and stir occasionally — they won’t burn. Perfect chopped garlic: 230F or even cooler and be patient, although this is a matter of taste.
Caution: the numbers are a bit different with different pans.
It even doubles as a pretty good deep fryer if you’re careful.
It caused me to change my opinion of cast iron skillets a bit: the high thermal may actually mostly be a crutch that compensates a bit for the lack of closed loop control in most stoves. Once you have closed-loop control, I suspect what you actually want is just enough thermal mass to get good control performance combined with enough thermal conductivity to maintain a decent temperature under inhomogeneous loads (pancakes, onions, etc) while those loads are busily sinking heat from the parts of the pan they’re on. Cast iron has under half the thermal conductivity of aluminum.
It also doubles as a (very silly) rice cooker! Add a program to bring the pan to 230 F on slow intensity followed by a 2 minute timer. This will slowly simmer the water then stop cooking right after the water is all evaporated, which is exactly the process of dedicated rice cookers.
Holy crap. That is an insane price. Seems like it's priced for commercial use.
I've had a thought in the back of my head to use a temperature probe like that in a temperature control loop on my induction cooktop, could probably do it with an arduino but I also don't want to make my kitchen an electronics project.
Is there nothing like this that is priced reasonably?
We are going to buy an induction hob anyway - we haven't cooked with gas for years - but this is certainly very interesting! But you are right, it is super expensive.
IMO it’s super expensive for a standalone unit, and it’s super expensive for what it ought to cost to make (it’s a fairly nice induction hob plus a knob, a so-so display, and a molded silicone skirt around a temperature sensor on a spring — $1500 is absurd given what induction hobs cost).
OTOH an actual built in stove seems to run that much or more, and the ones with fancy names are about that price per element, so if it replaces a built in stove, it’s not so bad.
I had hopes for njori.com, but it’s not clear they know how to make a product. It seems like they overdesigned a product and then tried to get it made by ODMs without having their own in house engineering capabilities.
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.
Doesn't need to be kimchi. The technique described can be used for pretty much any fried rice combo--best to let the rice dry out a bit but not necessary and that's not active time--which, given you have the ingredients (which could mostly be frozen) takes maybe 5 minutes.
I forget which of the cooking sites I got it from but the gist was that spreading out the rice on a baking sheet for a few hours was fine without fussing around with overnights in refrigerators. And, with a rice cooker, it's not a big deal to do the same thing a couple days later if you want to as opposed to saving your rice.
(Leftover fried rice microwaves pretty well too so it's a pretty good candidate for leftovers whether a full meal or a light lunch.)
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.
I've got in the habit of making similar orzo casseroles while oven & casserole hot having baked bread. 150g orzo 400g chopped tomatoes (or less stock), plus whatever else I fancy/have.
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.
You need theml mtsl clips in order to achieve the vaccum. Bormioli Fido and Weck jars have been tested to be effective (YMMV) . What the inventor says is that is not really the metal but also its shape that breaks thwle microwave, after all my own microwave came with a metallic gadget to keep the dish near the grill.
My microwave broke probably for a combination of metal and some food stain on the metal parts of the jar, that is my gut feeling as well.
I am not really advising people to try, but it's a such interesting method that I am finding videos from actual chefs about it.
A similar way of unsupervised but likely slower and less reproducible cooking would be to submerge the jar(s) in a pot full of water and let them sit there for a while. The advantages being able to overcook things (e.g. the meat) if you want to and not risking breaking anything. You would consume more energy though.
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.
Cook a big batch of food with spreadable consistency (e.g. bolognese sauce, hummus, lentil daal, mixed vegetable puree) in an electric pressure cooker. Ideally this should all be done in one pot.
Pour the food into an aluminum roasting pan, greatly increasing its surface area to volume ratio.
Take a plastic storage box of similar shape to the roasting pan but slightly larger, put lots of ice in it, and add just enough water to cover the ice.
Float the roasting pan full of food in the ice bath. Let the food cool to below room temperature, stirring occasionally to speed this up. Keep the storage box lid on while not stirring. This shouldn't take more than about half an hour.
Spoon the food into silicone muffin trays, and put it into the freezer.
Wait for the food to freeze, take it out, transfer it to plastic bags, and return it to the freezer.
This makes convenient blocks of food that can be defrosted by microwaving. I make batches of 24 at a time. One is enough for a snack/side dish, two a small main, three a regular main, and four a large main. They can be mixed for variety. The easiest complete meal is a bowl of rolled oats, water, and frozen blocks of food. The whole thing can be reheated by microwaving (rolled oats are sold already cooked), and because the frozen food was cooled so quickly I'm not worried about food safety if it's not thoroughly reheated. Yogurt/pickles/etc. can be added for more variety. I think the ice bath and aluminum roasting pan are necessary, because it's otherwise difficult to cool large batches of food. The silicone muffin trays double as giant ice cube trays when they're not being used to freeze the food. You could probably use metal muffin trays instead, but silicone makes it easy to remove the frozen stuff.
Grocery bill is almost certainly below average. Rolled oats and pasta are cheap. Dry legumes are cheap, and the electric pressure cooker makes cooking them easy. Minced (ground) beef is cheap too. Canned sardines and salmon are also reasonably priced (I mix these into bechamel sauce before freezing). The main fresh vegetables I eat are onions and carrots, which are cheap all year. Swedes (rutabagas) are cheap when in season (they're expensive now in the UK). Frozen spinach is also reasonably priced, and it goes well in most legume dishes.
Each batch of food weighs about 2kg, so I'm not sure about putting it directly into the freezer without pre-cooling. It might be a good idea to set up some temperature logging to see if I can safely skip the ice bath step.
I just canceled my HelloFresh subscription, because the meals took too long to make, occasionally some ingredients were missing or wrong, I had no space to store all the ingredients that were delivered, and I hated the amount of cleanup I had to do afterwards. This cookbook is exactly what I need.
Protip: you can cook things like pasta, roasted veggies, etc ahead of time, say a weeks worth, and store it in ziploc bags in your fridge. Just head a portion in the microwave to eat. It cuts down on work (including dishes) hughley and tastes just as good, or on the case of the roasted veggies, better.
I wish I could just take one pill a day (or three) for nutrition (and satiating hunger) and not have to eat meals at all. That would be amazing, not to have to deal with food. Buying, preparing, ordering, over eating.
Fasting is actually easier than you think once you get over the initial hunger humps.
Obviously seek proper medical advice first but just to point out that it's possible and I've personally done up to five day fasts while still working and going to gym as normal.
(trigger warning: eating problems) For me, when I have trouble cooking, and especially when I don't cook because of an overwhelming lack of energy, fasting is actually the problem. That's because it's what I do by default, it's the easiest after all. It's forcing yourself to make the effort to eat something that can be difficult.
Hah strange that people are downvoting this answer, I think the parent referred to skipping a meal rather than not eating for the rest of (now short) life.
I’ve been skipping a meal for 5 years now, with just having lunch and dinner, and for the last year have been trying to do only dinner some of the days with relative success. Benefits include staying fit, having more energy, having more time, enjoying the food I actually eat more, and being able to skip any meal any time without feeling too bad about it.
Not sure why this got such a negative reception, intermittent fasting has been shown to have multiple benefits.
Its probably closer to what we spent generations evolving towards than the typical diet of shoving processed meats + Big Gulps in your face hole 19 hours a day.
I'm going to venture a guess is that the reason is it solves nothing, it simply batches the effort.
You cannot fast forever. At some point you need to average your TDEE (lets say 2k calories). Intermittent fasting means you go from eating 2k calories in like 4 meals across ~16hrs to as few as 1 meal in 15 minutes (OMAD). I'd suggest the longest sustainable (ie, doesnt _eventually_ result in starvation) intermittent fast would be a 1:1 fast where you're eating 4k calories on the day you eat.
Saves a lot of ceremony, but you still have to eat the same amount of food.
If you are in an equilibrium and do not want to lose weight that may be true. But I think in many countries that is rather the exception than the norm.
sure, but even at a modest caloric deficit of 10% (~200 calories per day) using my own stats (200lb 25% body fat) I carry only about 175K calories in total (you cant lose all your fat and live to tell th etale). That would bring me down to a hard to sustain 9.9% bodyfat in under 2 yrs (about 615 days by my quick math).
So yeah, even in short order it has to get to equilibrium.
The point is that in some countries a high percentage of people are overeating all the time. They can easily do with a caloric deficit, for a long, long time.
This is what I think of every time someone makes an "Americans fat" comment. Sure, that's true, but if you honestly believe a 20-30% obesity rate is good then I don't know what to say. Y'all are headed the same direction pretty fast.
Plus, it varies across the US. In Washington, for example, the rate (while high) is under 30%, while West Virginia is over 40%.
Because for people struggling to prepare meals getting used to fasting can be seriously dangerous. It doesn't take long to learn ignoring hunger, add potential psychosomatic symptoms that mess with your weight and you're in deep shit really fast.
Indeed. As someone who (in the past) struggled a lot with eating, fasting would not have been a solution - it was the entire problem!
This is the first cookbook I've read that seems to get the effort level vaguely right for a meal you still might be able to make after not eating or drinking anything for 40+ hours. In fact, the "literal depression cooking" meal is close to what most of my meals were, but I rarely even had cheese to add.
Its probably closer to what we spent generations evolving towards than the typical diet of shoving processed meats + Big Gulps in your face hole 19 hours a day.
That's kind of two extremes though, isn't it? You fast, or eat crap?
And people get all upset about eating animal fat in quantities equal to protein, but that's what we did until the 70s. Then we stopped, and everyone ended up overweight.
So I agree, traditional diets seem best, and maybe a fast or two. But if we fast, it should be in the late winter, and we should faten up in the late summer/fall too, yes?
That's most inline with humans prior to cities/agriculture.
Then again, we have what... 20,000? 50,000? generations of humanity using animal husbandry, and farming, to change that cycle?
I'd like to see a source for that, my experience is you need to be pushing 4-5 days before it's really risky. Let's assume the individuals are intelligent enough to take in basic electrolytes. eg: There are mixes made for this purpose such as LMNT
There are quite a few companies that deals with this, usually in the form of a shake rather than a pill. I think Soylent was the name of one of the early entrants.
Now I feel old. It feels like yesterday that everyone was talking about Soylent and its eccentric founder who ordered new shirts from China instead of washing the ones he had and tried to find a diet that allows you to not to have to use the bathroom.
I am strangely intrigued by the bathroom avoidance. Did he find much success? Although, I seem to recall a correlation between low fiber/defecation frequency and colon cancer, but not sure how strong the association was supposed to be.
https://www.completefoods.co/ has exactly what you wish for in diy powder form. Or as others have mentioned, there's a lot of products that try to do the same that you can buy directly.
If you’re in Australia then look up Qota. They used to be called Aussielent.
Basically powdered meal - I’ve been eating it for about 8 years now. I get the vanilla and add just a little bit of honey, using warm/hot water. It’s like smooth porridge.
One pill a day perhaps not, but you can definitely sustain yourself on meal replacement products like the ones from Soylent or Huel. I get about 1/3rd my calories from those and it saves a lot of time.
Oh, 100%. I'm happily married with the all usual things that comes with. I do mountain biking, go for walks daily, and remedial massages are 80% covered by my health fund so I go for those occasionally too. I also have two small kids ands do a lot of renovations on our house, so I'm physically active a lot.
A pill alone doesn't work do to well just how much mass is needed for it to contain enough usable calories. You need to eat the same amount of calories to survive and these have non-trivial mass/volume.
Just one thing from Sci-Fa... Still there has been meal replacement products for a long time now. From diets to lifestyle changes.
Here is a great ramen recipe from a classic reddit thread that my glance over the book failed to spot:
>Creamy chicken flavored preferred but regular chicken will do.
>With drained noodles and with the flavor packet add black pepper, garlic, Parmesan cheese, butter and just a bit of milk to make it creamy and sauce like.
Since they didn't include measurements, this is what I ended up using:
1 pack creamy garlic seasoning
1/4th cup water
1/2 tsp garlic grilling salt blend
1 tbsp butter or margarine
2 tbsp parmesan cheese
I laughed at the title before I even read it. Am I going to be disappointed if I read it?
You know back in the day I remember 'the anarchist cookbook' along with all kinds of other somewhat legally dubious online literature, such as phrack magazine, 2600, erowid, thehive.ws;
And bizarre euphemisms such as SWIM (someone who isn't me) peppering the tales of free long distance telephone calls, dumpster diving, and synthesis of (most likely scheduled) hallucinogenic, entheogenic psychoactive chemicals. Hahaha. Those were the days!
These days I'm so leery of ubiquitous surveillance I likely wouldn't even dare search for those things (tor be damned, eyes everywhere, can't trust anything!)...heavy sigh
On a finer point: I really wish they hadn't scheduled Salvia because of the seeming hysteria that resulted from some people who had unfortunate outcomes while apparently using it. Such a powerful spirit plant!
By that logic alcohol should have been Schedule 1 LONG ago. My suspicion is 'the ruling elites' like to schedule anything that can allow people to unlock higher abilities, or bring more power to themselves. So, sadly, beneficial plants and chemicals are thrown in with actually dangerous addictive ones...:( Fucking tragedy.
My hope is one day its glory will be restored in the same way that we're seeing with psychoactive mushrooms happening now to some extent. Good old Salvia--you meet entities on that trip, too! To me they literally seemed like tree/plant/forest spirits, and when on it, like I, oops I mean, like SWIM, was "inside the plant network".
I dunno man, I'm kinda okay with them scheduling salvia and that's an opinion you won't hear often from me. I tried Salvia and it was just singularly extremely uncomfortable. My friends left reality altogether and had experiences ranging from becoming a 2d book who's pages wouldn't stop flipping, to being flayed open and ripped apart for literal eternities. I do agree that that can be avoided by experienced usage but legal means legal. Some guy bought it at a head shop and brought it to the stoner house. I think at least the usage form should be related, there shouldn't have been such high ratio extractions in such brightly printed shiny plastic pouches promising to get you 'fucked up'. I don't think anyone understands what that means until they try it.
I'm also not joking about going to hell for eternities, look it up, those experiences are not as rare as you think. Maybe if we all had shamanism training or if (in America) we had left more of the indigenous people's cultures alive we might know how to use it. But putting safeguards around usage is regulation too.
I'm of the firm opinion that a regular human on the street can take <2g's of mushrooms and find it a pleasant and enlightening experience. I have not experienced a dose of Salvia nor have any of my friends that we would call 'pleasant' or 'enlightening'. I don't miss Salvia at all.
Then there's the problem. That we need to ban it because a few people have bad experiences.
Maybe there's an argument for control, like we don't all crash cars, but we all wear seatbelts in case. I don't think I should not be allowed to drive because other people are not safe drivers.
If you take issue with the analogy then I'll just state it plainly: I don't think I should not have access to it, because other people can't handle it, or had bad experiences or whatever.
But I also think there's danger in selling it in head shops under "get fucked up" or whatever.
I think there should be control of powerful things, but control, not prohibition. So, control the purity, control the quality, I mean we don't know that they weren't smoking a sabotaged batch? Or just plain contamination. Maybe they were getting high on roundup?
So control, yes. If you need to make a policy to make it safe where like I need to get a psychedelic explorer license first, pass a short course (like a driving course), so I acutally understand some things, and I have a framework and some skills. And maybe I've even tested, using pure QC compounds, with vitals being measured (again in the same way analogous to a driving exam, but a "psychedelic driver exam"). I'm totally fine with that, I think that would be cool. I mean, I don't think I need that, but if society needs that, I'm fine with that. And if that increases my access to pure, QC, pesticide free products, then that's fucking fantastic.
But don't prohibit my access to the road because some people crashed their car, could never drive in the first place, bought a lemon that exploded on them, or just had an accident that we don't know if it was caused by their car, or their driving, or the road, or whatever.
So don't prohibit my access. I still want access to pure stuff, and if it needs to be licensed, I'm fine. As long as it's not an impossible license, and it's only as comparably burdensome as say, learning to drive and getting a car license, and not the bs "get a crazy research license to synthesize schedule 1 compounds" type of thing. But a regular "psychedelic explorer" license.
If that's what needs to be done, fine. But otherwise, don't prohibit my access to it. I think that's ridiculous, and bad. Because people like me can benefit from these things, and maybe heal ourselves, and prevent harm coming to ourselves. And why should we be denied that because other can't, or don't, or don't have the ability to. I don't care about that. I just want it for me.
And I think there's a way to do it that balances those interests. And I think it's ridiculous that it's banned. And I think the ban has nothing to do with what's good for people. I think it's a mechanism of control to prevent people, to hold them down. To restrict them from accessing things that can empower them. Just like in the past esoteric or even scientific knowledge was kept to the rarified few. Now, it seems like this kind of psychedelic, consciousness knowledge (that may have implications for government corporate UFO secrecy or whatever) is being kept from people, and that's bad.
So, while it's not totally right yet, I am happy for Australia's elevating psilocybin to some form of access. Even tho it's not an explorer access, it's a therapeutic access. But hopefully that's the beginning of an encouraging trend. Where government/corporate doesn't feel the pathetic weak need to mediate the consciousness experiences of its citizens.
To be fair, we did try to outright ban alcohol and make it illegal. It just didn't work. If people in mass acted towards any drug like they did with alcohol, they'd cave. See: Marijuana
According to Wikipedia their ban lasted 7 years before they legalised wine, then another 13 years before they legalised everything except strong beer, and during that period they had substantial smuggling and illegal brewing.
Easy and delicious, and only 3-4 of the ingredients are perishables you need to get. The rest are pantry items:
* ~2lb sirloin (flank if you have money to burn)
* Some soy sauce
* Sesame oil
* Onion powder
* Garlic powder
* 2 white onions
* Peppers of some kind (I like shishito for this, and something really spicy if I’m not cooking it for my family)
* Scallions (if you want, there’s already onions)
* Baking soda
* Corn starch
* Beef bouillon paste
Cut the streak in thin slices across the grain, think stir fry size. Toss in a bowl with onion powder, garlic powder, soy sauce, baking powder, and sesame oil. I don’t measure when I cook, but I’d guess maybe 2 tbsp of onion powder, 3 tsp garlic powder, 3 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp sesame oil, 3 tsp baking powder. Eyeball it and toss well to coat the meat evenly. If it seems like too much, do less. You can always add stuff later.
Let it marinate for a while, 1-4 hours usually. I do it a few hours before I want to cook, it cooks fast. Meanwhile chop the onions and peppers.
Heat some oil in a Dutch oven or other large pot. When it’s hot put the beef in and brown it for a few minutes.
Add the onions and peppers and toss for a few minutes and let them cook.
Next prepare two cups of the beef bouillon paste according to its directions. Add it to the pot and mix everything.
Finally, add about 3 tsp of cornstarch to a small bowl and about an equal amount of water. Mix it until there are no more lumps and before it settles out again add it to the pot and let it simmer a little longer, or until the sauce is almost thick enough. It’ll thicken more as it cools.
Many here will really appreciate the nice recipe, however you're missing the point of the cook book. People who are looking at this cook book are definitely not going to spend 1-4 hours waiting for marinade. They barely have 1-4 minutes of effort in their tank.
* Buy pre-marinated diced beef from the store
* Buy pre-diced frozen veggies
* Buy microwave rice
1. Oil in pan
2. Beef in pan, cook for 1-2 mins
3. Veggies in pan, lower the heat to 75%
4. Cook for 5 mins and optionally add soy sauce and maybe some chicken powder (Knorr's)
5. Add microwave rice to pan, cook for another 5 mins while mixing
6. Serve
Total time: Under 15 mins, one pan used. Prep time: 0 mins, other than shopping.
Well I shared it here because it’s adaptable to whatever your maximum level of effort is. You could not marinate and just coat the meat and let it sit while the pan heats and you chop veg. You could also buy pre-chopped veg, most grocery stores around me sell mixed onion and green bell pepper already chopped, often as a fajita mix. That would work very well for this. And the only perishable ingredients are very common and is otherwise mostly pantry staples that you’ll use for many other recipes. It cooks in large batches easily and keeps well in the fridge.
I figured not everyone is looking for the absolute, bare minimum but still might be interested in a very low effort meal, even if it isn’t quite the lowest effort.
How many commenting / voting actually followed through and downloaded the content? The content itself is a mess (they admit to it) and sensible alternatives are an easy first pass.
The link is worth looking at and the recipes aren't bad. But "so you don't die" is hyperbole and you can survive on less.
I live in a food void and cooking is a passion. The link isn't bad, but it's approach is over the top.
The "so you don't die" is both black humour and a reference to it being things you might be willing/able to both assemble and eat while exhausted, depressed or otherwise impaired.
I've had days when I can't get past the activation energy required to use a frying pan, but a microwaved poached egg on toast is just about within my mental capacity. I've had days when I can't deal with anything with a significant flavour or complicated texture, but I can manage to eat a bowl of ramen over the course of an hour or so.
It's not about what you -can- survive on, the anticipated limiting factor here is the human themselves.
My wife and I both did. I thought the downloaded content is great. It’s a cookbook that I actually find entertaining to read instead of the typical over the top cookbooks out there. I also enjoyed its sense of humor and sarcasm. Perhaps it flies over the head of some people…
I did. It’s good. It’s aimed at people like me whose sole thought is “ugh, cooking? Again?”
Food is nutrients. Cooking is time spent making the nutrients edible. The more I can minimise that wasted time (both cooking and eating) the more time I have to spent on useful things.
Think of how exciting your laundry is to do. Now do it three times a day and listen to people who gush about how much they love it. That’s what it’s like. Sorry, it’s laundry; I hate it.
“So you don’t die” is basically my real thought process - 3pm rolls round and I’m thinking “I should probably eat something.. ugh”
The world would be a boring place if we were all the same. I’m glad there are people like you who care so much, and I’m also glad there are people like me :)
Be glad you have something you can enjoy so much every day!
To be clear this wasn’t meant as a diss: I know a couple of people who are similarly disinterested in food and only eat Huel, and they are absolutely fulfilled people!
My wife and I are both good cooks, but have been pressed for time. However, 3-4 years ago we basically stopped eating out, largely because of just how expensive it is.
I changed my perspective around that time from "food is a chore" to "food is a luxury", and started trying to "go the extra inch" and try to make some nicer meals.
Tonight was extra special, being our 5 year anniversary, so I: Grilled a couple steaks, caramelized 3 onions and used the fond with some wine, tamarind, miso paste and beef stock to make a pan sauce, baked some potatoes and roasted some carrots. The left over onions and pan sauce I turned into a salad dressing for the week.
It takes some work, but once you dial in the basic chemistry of cooking, things start to become second nature.
Moderation, something should really be done to change this culture of these #&%! who pass by and anti-communicate by unclear gestures. It is radically uncivilized, and cannot be encouraged.
Makes you realize that having an electric kettle, a microwave, a turkey-sized oven and a four burner range - all in the same room - is not mandated by the laws of physics.
And now I'll go and buy some frozen spinach. Just like those noodles from instant noodles, should be extremely versatile.
Buy an East Asian style rice cooker and you’ll have hands-off low effort carbs for the rest of your life.
Cook dried pasta in a pot of boiling water. Season it with oil, salt, pepper, and Parmesan or any vegitarian/vegan alternative. That’s two options for your calories in a low-effort hurry.
If you want to cook nice food for yourself, I recommend Marcella Hazan’s “The essentials of classic Italian cooking”. Her recipes can be scaled to 1 or 2 servings quite easily.
Many of her sauces freeze well in silicone ice cube trays for big cocktail ice cubes. This means you can take advantage of an economy of scale by cooking a batch and freezing a lot of it into portions which you can reheat on the hob in a few minutes.
Well… this applies to a lot of homemade sauces but I like hers a lot.
For rice cooking, the following works well for me. Add to a pot 1 cup of rice, 2 cups of water, 1 pinch of salt. Turn on the stove and let it cook with lid on until the water is gone (i.e. soaked into the rice).
If I understand correctly, the only difference with a rice cooker is that it shuts off at the "water is gone" point, right?
Seeing a few canned tuna comments here. I love it as much as the next guy but PSA: it has more mercury than you would imagine -- in the range of ~60mcg per tin in some cases. Nobody needs that, and I've personally banned it from my diet.
One of the things I absolutely love about the country I live in is the culture of the daily menu. Every day you get a different, grandma-like soup, main course, fresh juice, and small desert. Nearly every restaurant does this for the equivalent of 4 - 6 dollars (I'm in LATAM). Eating that well would be otherwise impossible for me as I don't enjoy cooking at all.
Quick, easy, cheap cooking becomes a luxury in and of itself when you have GI issues that limit what you can eat. Putting together balanced meals on a very restrictive diet becomes an exhausting chore, almost exacerbated if you once enjoyed a broad diet and good home cooking. There have been many times in my life when I wished I could eat like this! Never take food for granted, not even your sad bastard dinner.
That said, if you live alone, you might as well go for my old favorite: the sardine melt. Toast some whole wheat bread, gently smash sardines into the toast, sprinkle with salt, put a slice of cheddar cheese on top, put back in toaster oven to melt the cheddar. Your apartment will smell like fish, but it actually tastes really good and is very nutrient dense. Get the sardines packed in olive oil for a little extra fat and flavor. A side of boiled peas or broccoli and carrots makes it a complete weeknight meal.
I've already spent too much time in this thread and commented too much, but given some of the other comments and the relative rarity of the opportunity:
"Sad Bastard"? Why would I listen to that guy?
No, give me "The Fat Bastard Cookbook". He knew about the very finest of meats, "human veal" (aka, "baby").
Yes sir, give me some of them baby back ribs, them trotters unsullied and uncalloused by the cruelties of gravity and vicissitudes of time, the "filet mignon" of "suckling human", or the "cuisses de bébé" (served similarly to the more well-known "cuisses de grenouille").
As another great "chef de l'humanité" once observed, "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled..."
Great resource. For stuff in a similar vein, check out the YouSuckAtCooking Youtube channel[1]. Absolutely hilarious, while still being helpful to get better at cooking! :-)
I have two dishes which I mastered to make during our stand up call.
1) deal chawal(North Indian dish).
2) Vegetable biriyani.
Frozen veggies are easily available in West that a rice cooker and remote controlled induction stove means I set it up in 5 mins during our stand up, it makes itself and remains hot till 12.30 when I have lunch.
Campbell’s Cream of Chicken and Mushroom soup (that’s a type, although you can double the recipe with one can of Cream of Chicken and one of Cream of Mushroom)
Can of water
Add to saucepan
Stir and bring to a boil
Fill can with Minute Rice
Stir instant into soup, remove from heat, cover
Wait 8-10 minutes
This was a go-to college meal. It’s great on a cold day, very filling.
One day, I made mushroom risotto. I used the right kind of rice. I ladled the made-from-scratch stock over the rice one ladle at a time, stirring slowly. I added the mushrooms and kept stocking and stirring. Finished with some fresh Parmesan. Took about 40 minutes of near constant attention and it was absolutely delicious.
Pareto Analysis:
The Campbell’s soup and Minute Rice is about 80% the same with minimal effort.
This is actually amazing. I’m not a person who loves food: I’ve lived or stayed in two dozen countries and I just eat whatever seems simple, mostly chicken, eggs and salads.
Although initially I was curious and adventurous with food, I realized I just don’t care much, with very few notable exceptions, like Pad Thai (which I’m pleased is in this cookbook!).
I’d love to see a variation of this cookbook that isn’t 90% carbs. Doesn’t have to be Keto, just not pasta-pasta-ramen-ramen-rice-rice.
A lot more boiled/fried egg-based recipes would be great, or something with canned Tuna / canned Chicken, I guess, if we’re aiming for no-planning recipes that use practically imperishable ingredients.
You can make omelets (most simply--there are also frittatas and the like) with just eggs plus whatever cut up. Normally I wouldn't used canned goods--though I suppose I could use canned sardines/small shrimp/etc. or various canned mexican and asian vegetables. Both bacon and grated cheese keep a long time in the fridge and there are various things you could freeze in small batches including vegetables out of the supermarket freezer section. An omelet is one of my lazy go tos when I don't have anything else really ready to go.
Just get an instant pot, it's an incredibly versatile kitchen gadget, even without the pressure cooking. You can make all sort of bean, rice, wheat etc. dishes. Add whatever condiments and frozen veggies you can find and leave it alone for half an hour. Do it once for the whole week.
Once you master the stews and want to get fancy, you can make stock from meat and vegetable left overs, it beats the store bought flavor enhancers by a mile.
Frying rice with canned tuna and black pepper has been my life saver as a student.
If you have a rice cooker, you can use the rice from it. If not and you don't want to clean two pots, just boil the rice in a saucepan and once ready, get it out and fry the canned tuna with some chopped onion and black pepper.
Going to Indonesia, you can find out that's a variety of their national dish (nasi goreng). A sunny side up egg on top of that is an extra bonus.
Fried rice (literally “nasi goreng”) is common across east Asia and varies by local taste. I agree it’s easy to make, I just add whatever sauce, veggies and meat I have and it’s great every time.
Speaking of nasi goreng, the one from the Aceh region of Indonesia is my favorite.
Making your life more miserable by giving you instructions on how to eat an apple or store-bought Mac & Cheese.
If it at least had some high quality photographs of the end result maybe it could push you towards saying "Ok, I'll eat". Because if you're really hungry, you're going to eat anyway, even if it's just an apple. But one does not need such a book for that.
If you look at my history I've been recently told this a couple of times. Which is starting to concern me, because I may have lost the ability to recognize humor.
When I posted it, the following post `Fantastic, I adore it! In a weird way, this also serves as a training manual for becoming a good cook. [...]` was at the top. Given your reply, now I don't understand if this post is also meant to be humor. But if it were, then I would ask myself why this and the post itself is on HN.
Sure, humor is great, but if you now look at the front page of HN, you won't see a single post which is to be consumed for the giggles. I go to HN because it focuses on interesting topics, and if there is some humor, it is more in the style of XKCD, which is welcome.
The cookbook could have been something interesting if it had really valuable recipes, because "Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge." hits close to home. I thought, that in HN fashion, I would get something helpful to read. But if the intent of the book is meant to belittle people like me, because apparently it is a joke, then I'd rather not like to see this stuff on HN.
The intent of the book is meant to provide recipes that meet the need of the quote you shared—it just utilizes a form of black humor to share those recipes. It is genuinely something that can be helpful (I plan on using some of the recipes in the text) but the delivery of the recipes is interlaced with jokes about struggling with depression or a lack of motivation.
Just wanted to let you know that it's definitely not there to make fun of or belittle people like us who struggle—though it does utilize self-deprecating humor to give some flavor to the writing.
My wife and I agree that eating well is one of the most affordable luxuries. Eating in ordinary restaurants and ordering takeout becomes less attractive once you hit a threshold of kitchen competence. Our experience is home prepared meals costs 1/3 as much as purchased meals, and rarely results in a disappointing experience.
That's interesting because I find home cooking to be very expensive, if you value your time. Cooking for one, the marginal difference between the price of groceries vs eating out is easily outweighed by the time cost of shopping, food preparation and cleanup. Of course if you enjoy cooking it's a different story.
When I was saving for the down payment of my condo, one of the biggest changes I made was making my own lunch, rather than eating out every day.
There are going to be regional differences of course, but here in SF, a modest lunch costs at least $20. My average was around $25, or about $6500/year.
I adopted "meal prep Sundays" where I make all of my lunches for the week ahead, and the average cost is consistently around $5, making my annual weekday lunch cost about $1300. +$5200/year post tax to be used on other things.
Applying the same general idea to dinner unlocks further savings.
The funny thing is - I don't know that I'm even sacrificing time with this approach either. It takes me maybe 1.5 hours on Sunday for the lunch prep thing, but I'm saving a bunch of time by not physically going to restaurants, ordering, taking deliveries, etc. The variety is lacking with this approach, but the tradeoff is well worth it in my book.
I'm going to make some assumptions, so please forgive me if this is not accurate. You said you were in San Francisco and looking to buy property, so I'll guess you were probably a Senior Software Engineer at the time, based on presumed age and Hacker News demographic/location.
The median wage for that position and region is $295,000/year according to levels.fyi [1]. I happen to also live in the same city with the same job title, so I can confirm anecdotally this feels about right. It might have been lower back when you were saving though. Not sure how long ago this was, but let's roll with it.
5200 / 295000 = ~%1.8 of your gross income.
I'm a bit doubtful that you were able to prepare a week's worth of food in just 1.5 hours, including shopping and cleaning, but if so, that's incredibly efficient. Let's assume 16 waking hours per weekend day.
1.5 / (16 + 16) = ~4.7% of your weekend.
So very roughly speaking, we're looking at a marginal difference of saving around 1/50th of your income at the expense of around 1/20th of your free time. Personally I feel that's not worthwhile, and in my case the numbers are actually more stark.
This of course does not factor in the non-zero time to go out for lunch. This could significantly change the calculus. We're also not including non-financial factors which might play in.
My favourite cooking youtuber made a very information-dense video about exactly this. Things like microwaved potatoes are simple but save my ass. https://youtu.be/TCM6WXyBOCo
I got myself a cooking robot (Bosch Cookit). All I have to do is buy ingredients, follow the instructions on the display, and put it to the dishwasher after cooking.
The recipes are easy to follow, very tasty and most of them are healthy.
That looks cool. Cost more than my induction cooktop did, though, and in any case they don't seem to market in the US. I'd like to see it in action. But I'm not spending $2700 to import one just to find out ;-). I guess it's a direct competitor to the Thermomix TM6, which is available in the US and quite a bit cheaper.
Just drink huel, mana, soylent or one of the other 10 meal replacement options. On some days I drink 100%. I am thin, muscular and don‘t feel worse on it than how I feel on any solid food.
Christ, this is supposed to be for people with no spoons, and yet one of the recipes is: "Peanut Butter On A Spoon". Could they not be bothered to get someone to proof read it?
If you don’t have a spoon you probably should get one. I don’t think you can cook without at least 1 utensil, unless you want to stir with your fingers.
sometimes id just stare at ingredients unable to cook: those days id try to get to a soup kitchen, temple/gurdwara/church/mosque kitchen. these were life savers.
Ah. I'm very familiar with a lot of recipes here. Even have a few of my own (inventions? hacks?) which I guess would make a good good addition to this cookbook.
neat concept. the constant '<---' footnotes all over the place make it hard to read because they pull focus from the statement at hand for me visually.
Early stopper. Since you are there, you could make the contents into a reorganized sqlite file for queries such as "Which dishes contain pasta or broccoli".
(For only tentative searches, you know you have Transformers.)
Edit:
myself, I would also reorganize the contents in a multipanel demoscene interface such as Crusaders' "Bass-o-matic" ( https://media.demozoo.org/screens/s/f4/b1/d9ee.107542.png ), but with queries, selectors and hyperlinks, but that may just be me.
Don't forget you also have to wash, peel, top and tail, clean, sharpen knives, etc..
A full dinner from when you get up to make it to when you sit down with everything washed/put away is more like 60 minutes in a best-case scenario. 7 hours a week. 364 hours a year. Feels like a crime to use so much time on basic survival needs that have been solved.
Soups, stews, pasta, chili, all freeze very well. All doable in about an hour start to finish including cleanup, if you're efficient. You cook the largest batch possible and freeze it in meal sized portions. I can get 4-6 portions out of a single stock pot - that's 10-15 minutes of work per meal. Well worth the time invested to have meals which are prepared exactly the way I like them sitting in my freezer, ready to nuke and eat. It's also a cheap way to eat healthy.
For me it's not about survival, that part's easy - I like variety and I like having control over my macros (or at least knowing what they are). I also order delivery and eat out regularly but I can't imagine not having this extra tool in my toolbox.
Do you have a diagnosed cognitive condition? This absolute rejection of even the most basic and easy form of food preparation is concerning. Drinking that slop without a decent complementary diet is not healthy for your gut.
"The most basic and easy form of food preparation" is still food preparation; declaring that something is the simplest thing in its category does not actually make anything in that category bearable. Look through the thread, there are many people like this who are perhaps capable of cooking but who loathe it or otherwise can't make themselves do it. I for one am perfectly capable of cooking complex meals for twelve people, but good god the only reason I ever arrange to put food into my face just so that my meat continues to function is because I would die if I didn't. The time pressure on it is especially loathsome (if I don't eat in a certain window, I no longer have the energy it would take to force myself to eat); you can lie there and just feel the window of opportunity for this annoying task slipping away.
By the way, asking someone whether they're mentally unwell because they think differently from you is generally considered impolite.
The funny thing is, I’m not even sure if you mean that this is ridiculous because it’s so simple or because it’s so complicated. I say this, because, when I was at the worst of my depressive state, and still occasionally every now and then, I get to the point where I just can’t do anything at all and if there’s more than one or two steps between me and eating, I’ll just go days without eating at all, this kind of depression menu is the exact kind of menu that I was looking for that period of time. Something simple, something fast, something easy. I didn’t even have clean dishes available because I was too depressed to do anything, so if it required any level of cooking more than what the microwave and a paper bowl could handle, then I just wouldn’t eat. I literally would go days without eating because the mental energy to even chew and swallow wasn’t there. I’m glad there are people making cookbooks like this.
I believe the point is “… for the zero spoons crowd.”
Some days there are just not drive or energy (“spoons”) enough to think about what to eat, and much less to prepare it. This booklet could be of some help here.
It exists because some people barely have enough money to get by.
It exists because there are people who weren't fortunate enough to have parents that taught how to cook.
It can be a challenge to get a varied diet, when you only have spare change and lack the skills & knowledge that many take for granted.
You sound like you lack some ability to empathize with other people's struggles in life - and that you are blind to the privileges you've had in your own life.
Not everyone has access to the same resources & knowledge that you have.
I know how to cook, but have been dirt-poor in periods of my life. A book like this one (with 50 recipes that cost less than $10) helped me get through those times without having to eat the same 2-3 dishes for months.
There was a 6 month period in my life where 3 slices a bread per day and cup of tea per day were all I could afford. When that ran out it was cornflakes and tea. Last week in the month was just tea. I had this novel idea of crumbling some bread, mixing it up with water to create a paste and then applying the paste to the 2 remaining slices. That was my Sad Bastard Menu.
Healthy meals take 2 hours to cook but can be consumed during multiple days
As a starter, one must at least eliminate all candy, sugary products, and bad oils. I look around and see no hope for society. Even "healthy meals" are just a substitute for rich, once-a-week-at-most recipes
In Spanish, the centuries-old idiom says it best: mesa pobre, mesa sana (a poor table is a healthy table). But people find that too _boring_
Just dropping sugars and bad oils I lost 15kg in a few months, now I have a healthy BMI, and I can still enjoy bread, pasta, meat etc. just in reasonable quantities. I even have one or two desserts per week, the main point is try to control those pesky sugars.
It's super easy to lose control, I can't believe it but what a major difference dropping that daily piece of chocolate, the sugar in the coffee and the soft drinks made.
2 hours? It takes a few minutes to bake most lean meats and eggs. Potatoes aren't too difficult to cut and cook. Same for rice. Many vegetables can be eaten raw. All of it can be done in parallel. Who are you talking about in this, a family of 5 using blunt knives?
Even many confection recipes don't take more than 90 minutes, and those are known to take ages (and aren't in any way 'healthy').
There are many places in the world and levels of income where sitting down at a restaurant after a long day is simply not an option.
Then there are different personalities: depending on the nature of that hypothetical 16-hour workday, I might not want to deal with people and would much prefer to fix something up on my own.
Then there's time: a meal at a nice restaurant will likely take some time. If I've really just worked 16 hours straight, I'd likely be wanting to hit the sack asap rather than waiting around to be served. (I'm excluding fast food both for nutritional reasons and since we're specifically taking about "nice restaurants".)
Even without considering money, I'm not really aware of a restaurant which is compatible with the mental state that's physically expressed as "lying in bed without moving"; this book is for people in that mental state.
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.