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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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'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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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').
444 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadSome 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.
The Spoon Theory:
https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine...
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.
Perhaps a single burner induction cooktop is in your budget, which you can use to brown/fry meat.
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.
I couldn’t live without a dishwasher though…
When I empty it, I’ll let anything that needs another run in for the next run.
Don’t need to run it every night.
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).
It really does work better than my conventional oven.
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.
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.
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.
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?
A startup called Njori is trying, and mostly failing, to compete.
https://youtu.be/lvVplicKlrc?t=185
Toast bread in toaster first, well toasted. Put cheese slices on toast and nuke until it melts.
The result is not mushy, due to the bread already being warm, and the minimal time in the microwave.
https://archive.org/details/sad-bastard-cookbook
And, as an extension of that: a real, reflowable, searchable, bookmarkable ebook.
(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.
Excellent, with no index you would absolutely need a search function which paper can't provide.
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.
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.
i did and like it. i find it funny light reading.
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”
I don’t have a particularly developed palate or anything, I wonder if this difference in appreciation is physical or psychological
Be glad you have something you can enjoy so much every day!
He also took some antibiotics to minimize poop, which I wouldn’t recommend unless strictly necessary.
It’s all here: https://web.archive.org/web/20200401135943/http://robrhineha...
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.
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.
https://www.outlookindia.com/outlook-spotlight/22-best-elect...
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?
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.
So yeah, even in short order it has to get to equilibrium.
And this is only for obesity. If you would include overweight the percentages would be much higher.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmuheen
It's extremely convenient.
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.
Meal dealt with in ~2mins.
Just one thing from Sci-Fa... Still there has been meal replacement products for a long time now. From diets to lifestyle changes.
I have tried the following (mostly European):
- Soylent: the original (first). Ok, but not my favorite.
- Mana: I like their powder version (more than the drinks). Especially good with some bread sticks.
- Bertrand.bio: tastes very much like cereals. Pretty good.
- Jake food: one of my friend's favorite. I prefer others.
Still, don't forget that chewing is important for your general health
For some people that’s insanity, and for others that’s normal.
I just don’t care about food, I see it as a waste of time and effort. The less time spent preparing, eating and cleaning up the better.
I understand that chewing is good for your health, which is why I eat solid food a fair bit, but otherwise I wouldn’t care, honestly.
No shortage of activity and stimulation!
In a weird way, this also serves as a training manual for becoming a good cook. Take plain ramen and understand its cooking process through different methods. Now build a sense of how to flavor and season food by adding additional ingredients. What is a potato and how do you cook it? Solid, back to basics stuff.
At the other end of the spectrum is an absolute classic of the genre, Slater’s Real Fast Food:
https://www.nigelslater.com/real-fast-food_bk_25
It’s a bit more omnivore forward — lamb chops grilled in yogurt is a favourite — and comes from a time when these books were aimed more at young Islington professionals rather than Amazon drivers.
Its recipe for granola has become an instant family favourite.
And now I'll go and buy some frozen spinach. Just like those noodles from instant noodles, should be extremely versatile.
(I worked on grocery wholesale/distribution and marketing for many years, and can "go down the rabbit hole" on the difference ;-)
Or if you worked at home, take a nice walk and sit down in a nice restaurant along the way?
(And not a highly paid programmer)
2. It's a recipe book
(For cooking by oneself not a self help book for fixing ones sad bastardness)
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".)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
Ramen is maybe 3 to 6 dollars.
One thing that can be tricky is keeping the emulsion smooth and not suddenly have the cheese turn chunky. What I've found very useful there is to put aside some of the pasta cooking water and then blend it up with the cheese on the side using an immersion blender. When you reach a good level of creaminess, you pour it back into the pot with the now drained pasta and use the residual heat of the pot and pasta to slightly reduce it down to the perfect level while constantly stirring.
This should make the whole process a lot more reliable while not changing the flavor by adding more complex ingredients.
If 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...
Do a night with bottled tomato sauce. I like Classico in Canada (often “diluted” with a can of diced tomatoes). Sometimes I fry some onions first. Top with some red beans.
Another a nights with canned tuna and whatever chopped vegetables I have.
Maybe a night with just butter and cracked pepper and some vegetables as a side. Beans make a good protein.
Fast, cheap, easy. Nutritionally complete-ish.
For meat we use anything from chopped-up Italian sausage, bacon strips, chick peas, chicken wings to an entire chicken.
Veggie wise anything from classic roasting veggies like carrot, oignon and pumpkin to broccoli, beans, zucchini…
Spice the laziest is just dried rosemary. But I also like some southern spicy bbq rubs, plain garam massala. Or just plenty of garlic.
It has become much easier since we have a “proper” oven instead of a cheap countertop one, as it is much faster and heats up more easily.
Casserole is another simple one we do, essentially whatever you'd put in a tray bake plus a tin of tomatoes and some stock. A little more prep time and we usually have it with rice, but still relatively quick, simple and healthy.
I like the ones that you can bung in the oven for an hour. With WFH I can do the prep, put in the oven, clean up in less than 30 mins, then finish a few more work issues before we can all eat together at a reasonable time.
[0] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1021485-one-pan-orzo-wit...
[1] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020291-vegetarian-mushr...
For curious folks, the URL says they are one-pan orzo with spinach and feta, and vegetarian mushroom shawarma pitas.
https://jfmccann.com/vegetarian-mushroom-shawarma-pitas/
These are close enough copies.
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
I got through a kilo of kimchi a week this way when I was a depressed 20-something living in a share-house abroad.
RIP roommate noses.
(Leftover fried rice microwaves pretty well too so it's a pretty good candidate for leftovers whether a full meal or a light lunch.)
It’s simple, quick and oh so good. Enough time to make a really quick salad in between too.
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.
If I have more time, I'll make my own sauce using stock, curry powder, tomato puree and soy sauce.
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.
Washing the vegetables is the most labor-intensive part. Coarsely chop things, stir in your salt and pepper, toss a few bay leaves in, load in the chicken parts, HIGH for 25min, and you're technically good to go. I cook bone-in-skin-on chicken, so I pick the bones and gristle and skin, and stir the chopped/gently pulled meat back in with the rest of the stew.
If I feel like I need more greens in my diet, I'll add a block/half bag of chopped frozen spinach. Chile if I'm feeling spicy.
Serve with lime. It's so much better with lime.
And because of forced eating during childhood, this just brings back trauma masquerading as food dislikes.
3 square meals can be bad for your health.
Surely you know this?
Which is exactly why this book exists.
roughly chopping random vegetables and throwing them in a pot is hard?
>too much time
using a pressure cooker for 45 minutes while you watch youtube videos is too much time?
Also, who is buying the veggies, who is cleaning up after your 5 minutes of eating?
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.
I'd immediately buy pre-diced items and would have to find a recipe that could be made in less than 15 minutes, and even then that's pushing it.
My solution was soylent/equivalent. 8 years on I'm still drinking it.
By the way, asking someone whether they're mentally unwell because they think differently from you is generally considered impolite.
I can cook, I just loathe it.
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.
I'm sorry, but stuff like this doesn't excite me.
Maybe that's true for you and that's great, but you are wrong if you think that applies to everyone.
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.
I suggest getting some therapy or something, it's really not healthy to be personally offended this way by something so benign.
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.
Kinda weird end result... Who did profit anyway, apart from upper management.
Sure and it is happening since a while, take a look here for example:
https://www.ic.org/
So far most of the projects are rather in dreamland than in reality, but some are well established and working.
edit: you will also find actual monasterys there if that is your thing
EDIT: damn, I stand corrected!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
Many religions besides the catholicism have monasteries, and exploit the same social loophole. Countless Buddhist monasteries also operate as a spa hotel of sorts.
https://youtu.be/z-iWe4qXUD8?t=7s
Funny how "Holy Grail" is woven through with it ... so many scenes of "kissing up and kicking down":
And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By 'angin on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences... (just as apt / relevant for the above linked scene)
And, as has been proven repeatedly EVERY SINGLE time it is tested, what "trickles down" ain't "wealth".
What a racket this whole universe is! This God fella's got some 'splainin to do... XD
In less than one hour from start to finish, I can chop the vegetables, cook, clean the kitchen utensils while cooking, move the finished food into a big container for storage (or one per serving if you have a big fridge and enough containers) and clean the cooker. The longest part of all this is waiting for the food to cool down before putting it in the fridge. With the size of my cooker, I could prepare enough food to eat 5 to 7 times. The longest recipe I know has me cook dry beans for half an hour, and cook rice afterward. This could probably be improved by pre-soaking the beans.
Except when I fail for some reason, which is extremely rare, the food is incomparably better tasting and healthier, and also quite cheaper, than whatever I can get when at work outside of restaurants (which is even pricier, and not necessarily healthier). This allows me to avoid all the mystery sauces they put in, probably laden with vegetable oils and sugar, that make me hungry two hours later.
It's a 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.
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.
Cook a stew for 2 hours in a pressure cooker and even the toughest meat will melt like butter in your mouth.
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.
My favorite recipe is the "picadillo", and this is the actual recipe: https://www.skinnytaste.com/instant-pot-picadillo/
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 also do a pasta one. I think this is the recipe: https://eatinginaninstant.com/instant-pot-ground-beef-pasta/ Bonus points for not requiring to cook the pasta separately.
Can't find the link to the one with the beans, but here's one which looks so good I might give it a try: https://www.simplyhappyfoodie.com/instant-pot-red-beans-rice...
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.
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.
Indeed. Ironically, the effect is to be expected, and in every other situation people would call it obvious. Give everyone $1k in unconditional basic income? Obviously, the market will quickly readjust prices to consume surplus income. But then, get people to run two-income households, and be surprised the prices readjusted so that single-income household is no longer a possibility?
After many years of denying this would be better for us, my wife and I have recently decided that one of us (maybe her, probably me) will focus full-time on the kids and house. A big shift after 20 years of working, but we’re looking forward to it.
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.
Far better to do as hoc, personal arrangements than try to scale it into a fully fledged market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Not that I'm an expert either, but from what little I gathered monks were relatively privileged people.
What, kinda like this?
https://youtu.be/EqTyZoupc1w
... monastery.
Ooh. Very nice, eh? Do I get to take a turn as a "sort of executive officer for the week"?
https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng?t=41s
More seriously, where do I sign up? ... The older I get, the more I think those monks were / are onto something...
all of these events predate the wide adoption of writing in the region, which makes it hard to tell how old the traditions described in the oldest sources are, though vedic scholars make arguments from internal features of the text
also it is common into deep prehistory for non-wealthy people to live with their parents as long as they are single; that's what most people do here, for example. no monastery needed
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.
Speaking of nasi goreng, the one from the Aceh region of Indonesia is my favorite.
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_
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.
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').