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I’ve been focusing on cooking more simply. the goal is fewer ingredients, less time and effort, more appreciation for simple flavor and quality ingredients
I do 1 pan dishes, whether the recipes like it or not.
Slowcooker, crockpot, or Dutch oven type recipes.
This seems to be the trick for great food as well. I’m not Italian, but every time I talk about food with an Italian they explain how few ingredients they actually use and how quick they can make dishes. It’s more about qualitative ingredients than anything else.
Yes, most of the food I make is either prepared in less than 10 minutes or I know how long I can leave it unsupervised so I can leave and come back later.
OMG yasss
Kids: Can you make pizza. Sure go get one out of the garage. No we want your pizza.
Flattered/exhausted: yeah sure
Bowl to bloom the yeast, mixer bowl, mixer, dough hook, counter, cutting board, cast iron pan, convection oven, grater, stovetop, cooling rack, pizza cutter, other counter. Fridge space for 2 days cold ferment.
It’s fucking good, but OMFG, I die a little every time.
I have finally rediscovered my love for cooking. Here’s what I do:
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Don’t follow the recipe. The chef can’t write and the writer can’t cook. A lot of it is nonsense. If you think you know better, you do.
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Do whatever you want. Don’t oversalt it or burn it and everything else can be fixed with more cookery.
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Don’t cook for 2 hours unless you are having fun goofing around in the kitchen for 2 hours or are making a holiday dish everyone’s been wanting all year.
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Learn all the shortcuts and try your own.
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Eat while you’re cooking to see if it’s the way you want it and use all those spices and sauces to see what they do.
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Easy mode: To make anything delicious, add salt, oil/fat, and acid. That will make everything but burned or oversalted stuff into edible. Also, pepper is somehow underrated despite being everywhere and in everything.
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Don’t eat it in 10 minutes. You won’t digest it properly and it will add to your stress rather than relieving it. Take your time eating; the people making you rush are the problem not the food.
Addendum to 5. Taste twice, salt once. Especially if its a sauce, since flavors intensify as it simmers.
I usually taste right at the end to avoid having my tastebuds grow numb to flavors. Even then, if I have someone nearby, I’ll give em a taste and ask for notes.
Oh and an addendum to 4. Learn proper techniques and maintenance of cooking equipment. A dull knife is an unsafe knife, especially if you don’t know how to chop.
Don eat burnt food
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Bare minimum: when cooking always make enough for multiple meals (dinner and lunch).
Pro minimum: stay busy the whole time, cleaning and preparing tupper ware.
Goal: make at least 7 portions, fud 4 the week.
In my case they’ll just rot in the fridge.
The heads or left overs?
The heads have been taxidermized and arranged in a semi circle so that I can have a conversation with them.
There’s no space for them in the fridge anyway, as it’s indeed full of rotting leftovers. And even raw ingredients!
90% of stuff I cook “from scratch” is made in one skillet or pot for this exact reason. When I was a bachelor, I would just eat out the pot or pan alot too. Fuck them dishes.
Make a week meal (bulk fajita mix is the go to for me) and then you just have something you need to reheat and you’ve only spent 2 hrs one day rather than 2hrs everyday. i usually end up making a couple meals on some of those days but there’s no pressure to it since there’s always something ready.
Freezer bags and Budgetbytes scaling features are your friends. FYI spaghetti sauce can be made in bulk super cheap and will stay in freezer bags for literal years.
Whenever I try meal prep, one of two things will happen:
- I get sick of eating the same thing every day, and the leftovers just sit in the freezer for years.
- I smoke some weed, get the munchies, and eat it all by day two.
I never have room in the fridge/freezer for this anyway. There has to be a better way.
I just rotate stuff around. I like to look online for cheap recipes and scale them up and often mix them up and use them in dumb ways that sometimes turn out as a new thing I like.
The trick to this is you clean as you cook. Like last night. Everything was put in the dishwasher the moment it was done being used or washed by hand.
This is why I have mastered the microwave. Once I get near that thing im basically gordan ramsey, minus the good tasting food. But food is food
I’ve been like this for 20 years now.
This is the most me_irl shit ever
Just hyperfocus on cooking. Eventually you’ll beat the learning curve and just throw out great dishes by heart
Yeah its pointless if you don’t like doing it
if you cook for 2 hours the food ought to be pretty good for the time spent!
It could be the best tasting meal I’ve ever prepared, but it still wouldn’t be worth the lost time.
(Unless I’m doing barbecue, of course, cause that is fun. Cooking is not.)
I trained myself to wash as I cook because otherwise I’ll get distracted and leave the mess behind for days.
How do you do this without burning the food?
Better heat and process management. If I have 2 minutes to toast almonds, I won’t be scrubbing a pan. But, if I have to cut veg and then saute, I’ll do all my prep and then start cleaning between stirs/pan heating.
Also, I love getting all my prep out of the way and then starting cooking. I immediately have much better process management to clean between cooking activities
I have done this. But when I cook my wife really loves the smell and starts getting hangry. Think it makes me rush it.
Its even worse with a toddler now lol.
I can do what you’re describing but I’ll realize I could have been cooking something for the 20 minutes I was doing prep for the next part. Can’t get the stages down well enough unless it’s something I’ve cooked a lot of times.
I’ve also found rinsing the dish/item if I’m in a rush between steps helps massively when I’m cleaning as I go too.
Ain’t no fixing the rush feeling though lol
Cleaning as you go is the secret to making cooking fun, more or less.
I’m trying to teach my son this concept. He loves to cook, but he just dumps everything in the sink as he cooks, uses a new utensil for everything, etc. You don’t need a new spoon every time you taste your spaghetti sauce.
It’s even more fun to cook when you know a parent is going to clean up the mess after your Iron Chef fantasy.
If you find a way to teach this lesson let me know.
My wife loves to cook and is very good at it, but she’s purely focused on the food. I try to clean as she goes behind her and she keeps shooing me away because I’m in way. However if I don’t then she’ll start getting annoyed that the sink is full. It’s a delicate balance
I used to despise washing dishes. Then I opened a food biz, and spent many hours washing dishes and listening to audio books.
Now I don’t mind washing dishes. There’s something very satisfying about tackling a pile of dirty dishes and having them all shiny and clean at the end. It’s very Zen.
It helps that with great experience comes great speed. When others look at a destroyed kitchen and see hours of drudgery, I know that it will be beautiful in 15 minutes.
ive worked food service and wish i could say the same. I’d be all over dishes of i had at least a full power overhead sprayer. preferably with a 3 compartment sink but what i really want is the sprayer. the sprayer makes dishes fun.
Yeah, a full three compartment sink set up is great. One of my lottery purchases when I hit the big one, will be a house with a professional kitchen in it, with a serious dishwashing bay in it.
I really love those commercial dishwashers that have a 90-120 second cycle.
dont forget commercial cookware to go along with it.
your mother-in-law’s fine china definitely won’t like a commercial dishwasher that’s for sure
Growing up, the fine China was always hand washed.
Not that we were a China kind of family, but we had a relative that worked in a big China factory, and she would give every new couple a full set of China as a wedding gift. Now they’ve all been passed down, and we’ve got about six full sets of amazing China we don’t know what to do with. We don’t even bother with it on Thanksgiving and Christmas anymore.
Your new book title is: Zen and the art of dishwashing.
/s
I would buy that.
Podcasts are also marvelous for this. Washing dishes is tedious, until your hands are going on their own in a pleasant way and I’m listening to “Revolutions” or “Mall Brats”.
that’s why you cook the whole bag of pasta and put the rest in the fridge for the next day, make 1kg of beef for gulash or bolognaise… make at least twice the amount to have something to reheat. You can also put in zip bags and freeze if you want to have more days between eating the same thing
I always do 3 portions, one to eat now, 2 for the fridge. Ingredient volumes are kind of fucked (you get something like 1.5 tomatoes, 3/4 onions etc) but 4 is too much and fridge temps don’t store that long, but cooking every other day is too annoying.
Look at this fancy pants with their high “moderation and future planning” concepts.
I make the whole bag, I EAT THE WHOLE BAG
Nah man. I do this and promptly forget about a Ziploc bag or two in the freezer for a few months. Finding a bag of chili that will be ready to eat in minutes on a day you don’t feel like cooking or ordering out (again), is like Christmas morning.
Lol yeah, putting leftovers in my freezer is a sure fire way to ensure that I will never see that food again.
This is the attitude we need in this thread. I nominate you King of the ADHD cooks for 24 minutes. Long may you reign in funny. ;)
yeah, i used to do that but i’m currently on a diet to lose 60 pounds so i’ve stop refilling my plate
Lost 80 so far, and still dropping. No diet, eating anything I want. 3 suggestions:
- Replace all high calorie drinks. No juices - don’t get your calories from juice. If you have to drink soda drink sugar free. The new “Zero Sugar” drinks are pretty good. So are the sugar free fruit-flavored sparkling waters. I’m addicted to Waterloo. I’d rather drink that than soda or even beer. Also, cultivate a love for ice water. It’s still the most refreshing beverage on the planet.
A pound is about 3500 calories. You can take that in in a week in sugary drinks alone. That’s a pound you have to offset somehow, or it’s an added pound. Stop with the sugary drinks, and that’s a pound you don’t have to deal with. Now your energy is burning your stored calories (fat).
- Only eat when you are hungry, and then only until you aren’t hungry. This also leads to moderation. Only serve up what you can eat, don’t stuff yourself, and quit when you are no longer hungry.
One of the things I’ve done routinely, is eat only a half a sandwich. I find that I am actually no longer hungry after half a sandwich, so why eat the whole thing? I’ll just save it for lunch tomorrow. That cuts the calories in half, as well as my lunch cost.
We also eat far too much out of boredom. If you find yourself staring into the open fridge, wondering what to eat for a snack, you aren’t really hungry, you’re bored. Don’t do that, go do something else.
- Something else is step three. Find something to distract yourself during TV commercials, and other times when you might be tempted to eat out of boredom. I took up the guitar again( during Covid), and whenever I get a craving to eat out of boredom, I pick up my guitar, and I stop thinking about food. It’s helped me lose weight, AND I’ve become a pretty good guitarist. I once knew a serious athlete who lifted weights during every commercial break on TV. Just watching a movie, or a game, or an evening of TV, and he put in a lot of workout time, instead of eating.
Knitting, needlepoint, reading, juggling, petting your cat, even scrolling on your phone, etc. would work. You just need a distraction. My Dad quit smoking back in the 80s, when the Rubik’s Cube became a fad. When he was tempted to smoke, he’d pick up the cube and work on it. It worked, he quit smoking AND learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
Do those things and be patient, and you will steadily lose weight while you eat anything you want. No low carb, high protein, no Keto, no starving, no cravings, no shakes or smoothies, no counting calories or points, etc. Just moderation by eating only when you are hungry.
I’ve been losing weight steadily for almost three years, averaging about 30 pounds per year. It’s not fast, but I am definitely going in the right direction. I have no anxiety about gaining weight, and I no longer ever feel guilty about food or eating.
It’s also super validating to go into the doctor, and have them fumble when they look at your weight, and say “Hey, you’ve lost about 30 pounds since I last saw you, and…you were down 30 last time, too! Nice job!”
That’s a lot better than “Dude, you’re fat. You’ve got to lose a lot of weight or you’re going to die.”
dude that’s awesome! thank you for your detailed explanations, we have a very similar way of approaching things. I also love the idea of keeping your mind busy with something creative, it’s also making your life so much more interesting than being a spectator in front of a TV, a computer or a smartphone screen.
proud of you man :D
I’ve picked up sewing (making a fursuit right now, it’s a project that will take me a full year), it’s very soothing and i can do it while speaking with my friends in voice chat, i even put the camera on so they can see what i do, it’s actually great to upkeep my friendships :D
i lost 20 lbs since the start of the year, and food-wise i did three things:
- no snacking, i stick to 3 meals: a small breakfast (i work at the computer so i don’t need heaps of food in the morning), hot cooked dish for lunch, and small dinner (a few slices of bread with ham/cheese…) and eat SLOWLY, lots of chewing, it helps limiting the intakes.
- no sugary or sugar-free beverages: even with aspartam/acesulfam-K/stevia (etc) your body generates insulin to process what is perceived as sugar, this lowers your blood sugar and induces cravings. I drink water, unsweetened black coffee and unsweetened tea, that’s it, no exceptions.
- i stopped feeling obligated to empty the plate, and never take a refill. whenever i feel full, my leftovers go into the fridge, nothing is thrown away.
Thanks for the kind words. You’ve adopted a very similar program as I did. It’s a LOT easier to train yourself to eat in moderation than stick to some diet, and you get to eat pretty much anything you want.
I forgot to mention unsweetened ice tea, so I’m glad you reminded me. That’s another one of my favorite beverages. I’ve never liked the taste of sweet tea. My family grew up drinking it without sugar, and that’s the way it tastes right to me. Ice water is still me favorite beverage.
Holistic approach, I like your style.
Good on you, props to your will power and your habit forming
tysm! I think you got it right, it’s actually the key, forming a long term habit
slow and steady progress. that makes it also way more probable that i don’t fall back into the old habits of eating junk randomly or increase the portion sizes when reach my target weight!
Yep, and I also didnt want to say “congrats!” because that would make it into a one act reward thing that your brain might use as currency to fall back into bad habits (I do this)
Constant vigilence!
I made burrito stuff for lunch yesterday and made enough to get 3 meals worth. I pretty much always at least slightly bulk cook my food.
very nice! and you can vary your dishes quite simply, use the burrito filling as a topping on pasta or rice instead of rolling into a tortilla
I’ll make a giant batch of chili or spaghetti sauce, and freeze most of it in individual containers. It’s no more trouble to make a large batch as a small batch, and when I’m done, I’ve got enough for a dozen meals. Do sauce on one Sunday afternoon, chili on another Sunday afternoon, and you’ve covered a couple dozen super easy and fast meals for the month.
