Ask HN: got any food hacks?

1. Cereal and milk

2. Oatmeal

3. Rice and beans

  - You have to soak the beans overnight before you cook them
  - After that, you cook them with rice in a rice cooker
  - After they're cooked, mix in some frozen vegetables and cook for a while longer to thaw the vegetables
  - Some kind of sweet and sour sauce is good with this

  - You can also cook pasta in a rice cooker
  - Add frozen vegetables to this too
  - And tomato sauce (of course)

  - The baked variety are healthier and taste better (imo)

  - Buy frozen filets, cook in microwave

  - Cut off the rind with a big knife
  - Cut the flesh up into chunks 
  - Stick the chunks in tupperware and refrigerate

9. Whole-grain bread

10. Mixed Nuts

11. Carrots

  - Baby carrots are good snacks

13. Cookies

14. Deli cheese

  - My favorite is gouda

(Also, I'm pescatarian if you couldn't tell.)

If you have a fridge, you probably have a freezer. Invest 20$ in dollar-store tupperware, and freeze your food in single-servings.

Try to keep your food either frozen or at least as hot as boiling.

Breakfast: cook with cinnamon, apples, raisins and honey (and any other dried fruit you care to add). Serve with pecans/walnuts/your favorite nut to add an extra protein boost.

Lunch/dinner: cook and cool, add onions, cilantro, black beans, a little tomato, a bit of crushed garlic. Basically a fresh salsa that is mostly quinoa.

http://www.lovelyrecipes.com/recipe.php?recipeid=3460 - the recipe

Since it is pasta.

They cost a dollar or two each. Poke a couple holes, nuke on high for 8 minutes, slice open and eat.

Lots of calories and vitamins.

Add butter and brown sugar if you want. Or salt.

Cooking is an investment. The more you cook, the better you get at it; the faster and tastier the results. And the more you cook, the healthier you will eat overall (at least if you're living in North America).

As for hacks, here's one. Take semi-prepared food, like macaroni & cheese in-the-box-with-the-faux-cheese-powder-in-the-paper-pouch, and augment it. The basic recipe is written on the box and fool-proof. Add something else to it like chopped-up left-over chicken that you warm up in the oven until sizzling.

Personally, I enjoy cooking and often manage to turn it into a positive, relaxing part of my day: a drink, some music, ideally a friend (though not lately), and results that I'm proud of. Unfortunately, this is the image of cooking that most educated people are confronted with when they first face the task of cooking for themselves: yuppies amusing themselves and/or showing off their uber-conscious, uber-sophisticated lifestyle-fu. (I never reach such heights, but I understand that's what I'm supposed to be, and in some sense really am, aspiring to.) The problem is that you can't really do this every day unless you dedicate a lot of time to it.

That's not the only way to do it, though. Sometimes I like to cook something interesting or impressive, but more often than not, my priorities are elsewhere. I only cook because would rather not order in (too unhealthy) or go out (too time-consuming.) I usually manage to spend well under an hour cooking, preparing, and cleaning. Consider some of the slapped-together things I've eaten recently:

- Whole-wheat pasta plus lentils plus pasta sauce from a jar plus some broccoli haphazardly chopped up and cooked briefly in the pasta sauce. A nutritional powerhouse of a meal; who cares if it's a bit too unrefined to serve to dinner guests? Who cares if this meal doesn't exemplify any trendy food idea? Who cares if half of it came from a jar, as long as I can recognize the ingredients on the label?

- Frozen baby lima beans plus olive oil plus garlic (a few cloves quartered) plus some dried thyme and sage that have been sitting in my pantry for about a year. The recipe calls for kalamata olives, but I didn't want to go to the store. Fuck it, it would have been much better with the olives, but it was perfectly acceptable without. For guests I would have used fresh herbs, but I don't feel like I'm abusing myself by using slightly stale dried herbs. Oh, but it's just a side dish! That doesn't worry me when I'm cooking for myself. Oh, but it's not a whole protein! I had fish yesterday. I'll be fine. Serve it with brown rice if you want.

- Doen jang chi gae. A Korean soup or stew made by simmering dried anchovies in water for a few minutes, removing the anchovies, and throwing in a ball of doen jang and a bunch of vegetables and cooking for a while. I'm sure it's a gross simplification of what a more patient or sophisticated cook would do, but I just threw in daikon and collard greens, and later bean sprouts, jalapeno peppers, and tofu. Served with brown rice. Delicious.

- Plain brown rice and lentils with some kimchi thrown on top for flavor. No leafy greens? Nothing green at all? Relax; you don't need all the nutrients at every meal.

And finally, though it isn't really cooking:

- Amy's Brown Rice & Vegetables Bowl. Processed, packaged, frozen, and quite nutritionally respectable. Maybe x% of the nutritional value was lost during freezing and storage. So what? It's not like I have any vitamin deficiencies. I'll use the time I save to flip through my copy of Hungry Planet.

There's nothing wrong with cooking like this. As other posters have pointed out, johnswamps simply needs to learn to cook.

On an entirely unrelated note, I had an odd realization while writing this post. About my pasta dish above, I wrote: "Pro tip: Cook the lentils, toss the lentils on a plate, and use the same pot for the sauce and broccoli. Voila: two dirty dishes instead of three, which makes a huge difference." Then I thought: I never do that, so why would I write it? Washing one extra pot only takes about a minute. I wrote it because washing pots looms much larger in people's minds than it should. The "huge difference" is 99% psychological. T...