Neat post. Erin and I have the same problem. Question: you're chopping and freezing garlic, onions, fresh green veg --- I get that the protein freezes just fine, but doesn't the rest of the dish suffer?
The major timer saver we have is a slow cooker; throw a frozen package of chicken thighs in before we leave for the office, and when we come home we have a better protein than we would if we started from fresh thighs in the evening and an hour to cook them. Thighs, brisket, ribs, chuck, potatoes, all work well.
You're a foodie; have you looked into sous vide? You can vacuum-bag a protein and some accompanyments and leave them cooking to a precise temperature for 4, 8, or 30 hours, and you're going to end up with a perfectly cooked protein. No thaw at 5:30PM, just a quick sear and you're off.
I didn't think he was freezing packages of minced shallot --- although it would rule if you could do that --- but regardless of how you package it, doesn't it kill the veg to freeze and thaw like that? Freezing creates ice crystals that tear cell walls.
Frozen veg: (1) are flash-frozen instead of slowly frozen in your freezer, (2) are only available for some vegetables (garlic? leeks? green onions?), (3) taste significantly worse than fresh (except for peas).
No, makes sense. I hadn't really thought of it that way. I assume those things must freeze well or he wouldn't do it, but I am curious why.
I guess perhaps the reason you can't find frozen garlic is that refrigerated garlic lasts forever. Other stuff I'm not sure about though. There are definitely some vegetables that perish quickly yet I've never seen frozen, and some not even in a can.
A lot of our recipes tend to involve making marinades for meat, and then the meat in the marinade. Some marinades work better than others; it seems that acidic marinades that have lemon or vinegar in them tend to cook the meat while they're frozen, however.
Other times, we package the sauce, meat and vegetables separately. For instance, one of my wife's recipes is for a stir fry. For that one, we freeze the sauce, meat and frozen vegetables separately. We also buy flash frozen vegetables for that one. We combine them while cooking, and they hold up better.
There's a whole art and science to freezing and preserving food which my wife, my mother and mother-in-law are much better at than I am. There is a orchard in Morgan Hill that has the most amazing heirloom peaches. So, we’ll buy a couple of flats when they are at peak and freeze them. We also do the same for strawberries, blueberries, cherries and raspberries. Peaches need a preservative; strawberries don't do great unless they're sugared. Raspberries, blueberries and cherries do well when frozen whole on a cookie sheet and then vacuum packed after they’re frozen. It’s a couple hours of work a piece, but eating frozen heirloom peaches on Dutch oven pancakes at Christmastime makes it worthwhile.
I can't do the whole month thing because I actually enjoy cooking as a side hobby, but I do make one big dish that lasts us (girlfriend/I) for at least 2 days (dinner / lunches for work)
It's easy to get a list of recipes you'll enjoy throughout the various seasons. For example, right now it's a mix of Beef Stew, Spaghetti, and Risotto dishes throughout the winter and in-between I cook whatever I bought from the market that weekend
Yeah, me too. I'm sure I'd be surprised at how many dishes hold up well in the freezer, but I still couldn't limit myself to that few. I love a good home made Jambalaya every now and then.
Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-
and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.
From: http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
The problem isn't the word "hack", it's the word "food"; he's not "food hacking", he's "meal hacking". In a book of "meal hacks", this would be a keystone chapter.
No more or less liberally used by hackers than the rest of the population uses "hacker" liberally to mean someone who does anything technology related that they don't understand.
Agreed. I mean liberal use of the term hacker to mean using computers for things they don't understand, so they _must_ be illegal or causing someone harm. Liberal use of the term in inappropriate contexts rather than liberal definition of the term.
This strikes me as sort of being the opposite of "hacking" your food: instead of finding a creative, new way to prepare your meals, you build a repertoire of a handful of reproducible dishes, and make them over and over again.
I understand that this may be a gain in efficiency, but I can't see how anyone who calls themselves a foodie could enjoy eating the same eight dishes on a slightly-randomized schedule for months at a time.
For a lot of people --- maybe most people in America, and almost certainly most hackers, the alternative to a strategy like this is simply eating out every night. There are certainly a lot of ways to engineer variability into planned, pre-prepped meals, but be that as it may, the "hack" here is to allow yourself to cook at all when you have a lifestyle that almost demands nightly Thai takeout.
For a lot of people --- maybe most people in America, and almost certainly most hackers, the alternative to a strategy like this is simply eating out every night. There are certainly a lot of ways to engineer variability into planned, pre-prepped meals, but be that as it may, the "hack" here is to allow yourself to cook at all when you have a lifestyle that almost demands nightly Thai takeout.
I understand that this may be a gain in efficiency, but I can't see how anyone who calls themselves a foodie could enjoy eating the same eight dishes on a slightly-randomized schedule for months at a time.
We don't do the same 8 meals every month. We've actually grown to having about 30-40 separate recipes that we rotate through. On, any given 4-6 weeks, we have the same meal 4-5 times.
Really interesting. I don't like cooking either, and this seems like a good middle ground. The lost freezer space is probably not as big a deal also, since I'm guessing you don't ever need to put frozen chicken etc in there unless it's already prepackaged in a meal.
I recently discovered the same thing: that food preparation is a pain and takes too long. My solution (which people also enjoyed on HN) was to avoid cooking altogether and hire someone off craig's list for $60 a week to do it:
I really liked your article, actually. We're getting to the point where we'd like to do all the planning and buying, and then hire someone off of Craigslist to help prep the food. We're not quite at that point yet, but hopefully in a couple of months we'll be able to.
I'm a little unclear on what you do. My understanding with OAMC was that you cooked the meals (once a month, obviously) and then just reheated them on the day. Reading your post it sounds more like you just prep the ingredients once a month and then cook them on the day you eat them. Have I read this wrong?
I'm certainly not doing OAMC but I'm moving in this direction. Mainly with ingredients though rather than complete meals. My main limitation is freezer space.
We actually just do the food prep and then we cook the meal the day we're going to eat it. Meat tends to dry out if they're frozen after they're cooked.
We've taken a less radical approach, we simply cook twice a week and make enough to cover the rest of the week with some to spare, which we freeze. It doesn't usually take much extra time to double or triple one recipe at a time.
Then, when a week is too busy to get in 2 cooking nights, we just start pulling from the freezer.
Meals that work especially well with this approach are soups, chilis, and fish dishes. Frozen salmon + herbs and lemon sauce, wrapped in parchment and frozen by the dozen, is our fast food. Just throw it in the oven for a few minutes and you've got a healthy, decent meal with no cleanup.
By far the easiest way to get started is something like Dream Dinners or Dinner A'fare, as mentioned. The price and convenience are both somewhere in between cooking yourself and eating out.
They've got a bunch of recipes you can choose from, and they do the shopping for the ingredients, so it saves a lot of time.
The one downside - if the one near where you live is like the one near where I live, it might be a bit awkward being the only guy there.
I've done this on a smaller scale and with fully cooked food. I work full-time and have class 2 or 3 days a week at night. I try my best to avoid fast food, so if often involves cooking double portions for the days that I'm away all day. My wife is starting law school next fall and when that happens, we'll probably switch to a system like this.
Fresh ingredients are great but the time saved is generally worth the loss.
Curious, I thought that people who did this cooked the meals prior to freezing. Cooking is usually what takes a while, prep can be done really quickly (especially if you do it often). I guess it all depends on the recipes, but it doesn't seem like a real time saver to me.
Either way it's not for me, cooking is my release. I gladly get off the computer and onto the cutting board.
I lived in a communal house with about 15 other people for about a year, and this is more or less exactly what we did.
The process works very well for keeping multiple people with possibly different eating schedules fed, and minimizes the amount of crap that people shove down their throats - which in the above situation can lead to not having any food :(.
The major timer saver we have is a slow cooker; throw a frozen package of chicken thighs in before we leave for the office, and when we come home we have a better protein than we would if we started from fresh thighs in the evening and an hour to cook them. Thighs, brisket, ribs, chuck, potatoes, all work well.
You're a foodie; have you looked into sous vide? You can vacuum-bag a protein and some accompanyments and leave them cooking to a precise temperature for 4, 8, or 30 hours, and you're going to end up with a perfectly cooked protein. No thaw at 5:30PM, just a quick sear and you're off.