Fucking pointless
Fucking pointless
137 comments
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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I’ve been like this for 20 years now.
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This is the most me_irl shit ever
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Just hyperfocus on cooking. Eventually you'll beat the learning curve and just throw out great dishes by heart
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Yeah its pointless if you don't like doing it
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I trained myself to wash as I cook because otherwise I'll get distracted and leave the mess behind for days.
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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.
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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
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How do you do this without burning the food?
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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
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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
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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.
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very good, and with potatoes and pasta you can take all the remaining pasta and sauce, throw them into a baking form, add a few vegs if you have, grate cheese on top, and tada, new dish :)
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Look at this fancy pants with their high "moderation and future planning" concepts.
I make the whole bag, I EAT THE WHOLE BAG
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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.
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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. ;)
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yeah, i used to do that but i'm currently on a diet to lose 60 pounds so i've stop refilling my plate
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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.
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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.
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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
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Maybe try a slow cooker. If you find a few recipes you like and prepare what you can in larger batches and save some for next time (for example if it uses a collection of spices, measure out multiple recipes worth of all of the spices and store them (pre-combined) in spice jars), you can get the prep time down to a few minutes each time you want to cook it. Slow cookers have the added benefit of not having to worry about taking it out of the oven at the right time or whathaveyou - when it finishes cooking, it'll just keep your food warm until you're ready to eat it. This also keeps the washing to a minimum - it's just the slow cooker insert and your bowl + utensils. As an added bonus, you'll get multiple days worth of food out of one time cooking.
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Rant about kitchen appliances:
People should learn to use the things they most probably already have in their kitchen.
- slow cooker is just a tiny pot shaped low temperature oven with a timer
- Air fryer is a tiny oven with a fan
Why do people get so hyped about a smaller and more limited version of the thing they already have? Just use your oven which most likely already has all these features. I haven't seen an electric oven without a fan or without a timer in my lifetime
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While you're kinda right, you're also kinda wrong.
I love "air-fryers" despite their stupid ass marketing buzzword. It's, as you pointed out, a tiny version of my oven-with-a-fan. Yet it saves me a lot of time as there's no need to wait until it's heated, and, due to its tiny size, it's also done more quickly. Besides having two completely separate chambers for two things needing different heat/time. And the added bonus? Cleaned much quicker and easier.
Since we have this thing, the conventional oven wasn't used once.
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I have a full size convection oven. I also have a really fancy countertop convection oven I got last year for like $120. I rarely use the regular oven anymore.
Why?
For one thing my full size oven is gas, and I’d rather use electric. My stove and furnace are the only gas appliances I have, but I try to run them as little as possible. For another, I live alone and often cook smaller portions. I don’t need to heat up that much oven for just a burrito or whatever, that’s wasteful.
And finally, my countertop convection oven has a suite of settings and features my standing oven can’t remotely compete with, and it can still cook something the size of whole chicken/roast and a side dish, just like my big oven. For example it has a meat probe that automatically shuts off the heating element when the internal temp reaches whatever it needs to be for the meat type and cook level you want. Perfect every time, no hassle, no guesswork, no adhd memory wipe leading to overcooked food. It also has a bunch of preset modes, and any changes I make to them get saved in the memory until I change or reset them, so when I find something cooks better at a different temp or time I can just save that on a setting I don’t use, and have to ready for next time.
It’s not that I don’t know how to use my oven. I do. I bought it myself 12 years ago and know exactly what it’s capable of with its luxurious 6 buttons and basic features. That’s why I wanted the countertop model.
My slow cooker is the same sort of thing - it’s an 8-in-1 pressure cooker, rice cooker, slow cooker, yogurt maker, etc. it does a lot of things and I use it frequently. It’s worth the hype.
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Alright, now you tell me how I'm supposed to put a fan of my oven and how I'm supposed to make it preheat 10 times faster.
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I'm not knowledgeable about air fryers, so I can't really comment there, but slow cookers / crock pots are fantastic and in my opinion, should be in everyone's kitchen. Maybe I'm biased, though, because I really like soups and stews and sauces and things, which they're great for. Not things you'd cook in an oven, and my stovetop at least doesn't have any kind of timer mechanism.
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Why do people get so hyped about a smaller and more
limitedspecialized version of the thing they already have?Because they're better and/or easier to do specific things with.
I haven't seen an electric oven without a fan or without a timer in my lifetime
I'm 42 and have never had one WITH a timer, but congratulations, I guess 🤷
Fact is that some of us lack certain resources such as energy, attention stamina, or time to make everything using standard equipment.
I for one know I'd never get my super healthy post-workout smoothie made without my nutribullet, or eat much cauliflower and skinless chicken breast (when I can afford it) without my air fryer.
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I find that my air fryer leaves things much crisper than a regular oven, even one with a fan (which my current one doesn’t have and I’m not replacing right now because I want to redo the entire soviet era kitchen with modern furniture and integrated appliances). It also heats up to 200 degrees in under a minute vs nearly 10 minutes for the big oven.
It was a great convenience buy. I barely use the big oven now, only for things that don’t fit in the air fryer. And for some things I use the wood-powered oven instead.
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I support avoiding redundancy in general, but there are advantages to those that make them worth it if you get enough of a quality of life improvement for them.
I use my air fryer basically every day and really appreciate that it can finish cooking some things before my oven would even finish preheating. Cleaning is also much easier, I imagine it uses considerably less energy, and it tends to cook stuff more evenly in my experience. And it isn't some fancy product, just the cheapest one I could find when I decided to try one out years ago. I've used my oven for a couple of things that wouldn't fit in the air fryer over the years, but otherwise it's basically been reduced to a stovetop with a clock.
I also use it for things I would otherwise microwave because it cooks it much better even if i have to deal with a short preheat. So nowadays my microwave is just left unplugged until I need a quick injection of heat, like for freezer-burnt ice cream or melting some butter or cheese.
I don't think I'd get enough use out of a slow cooker to commit to the space, but I imagine it's a similar story for people that would use it often. Same deal for like a rice cooker or ice cream machine. Also, my family was able to get an old toaster oven for cheap after our real oven broke, so these appliances can offer a cheaper alternative too.
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Slow cookers are terrible. The long drawn out cooking process destroys the texture and taste of food and turns everything into a homogeneous slop. So much time and energy usage for such mediocre payoff. And fundamentally not different to just baking stuff in an oven for a long time.
The real tip is to get a pressure cooker instead. Almost every slow cooker recipe can be easily adapted to a pressure cooker, for a significant savings in time, energy, and improvement in taste and texture. Even if you get anxious about pressure cookers, most pressure cookers have a slow cook function as well.
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I am good at using a slow cooker to make nutritious, tasty meals, because I practiced for a long time and I had people to encourage me to keep going. Lift new cooks up, don't tear them down.
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Why are you taking 2 hours to cook every meal? Surely, you don't mean every meal every day, right?
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The trick is to skip meals
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In fact, if you skip enough meals you'll get much quicker to the point where you don't need ANY more meals! #ProDeathTip
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I made Al Pastor, a bean dish, and three salsas yesterday. Four and a half hours (with cleaning as you go method).
Todays cook time will be 10 minutes.
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People ask why I triple every recipe. This is why.
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Dish washer ftw. Such a big investment in your own happiness!
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i kept telling my parents to get one, but they insist on doing it by HAND, but they take forever to clean utensils and eating wares.
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That's if I remember to empty it once it's clean
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Just run it again!
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I have finally rediscovered my love for cooking. Here's what I do:
- 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.
- Do whatever you want. Don't oversalt it or burn it and everything else can be fixed with more cookery.
- 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.
- Learn all the shortcuts and try your own.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Don eat burnt food
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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.
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pro tip: try cooking for 2 days or more at once
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Every time this is posted I am going to point out that if you take 2 hours for cooking every time, you are doing something wrong. 1 hour is maybe more realistic but for a lot of meals I make I don't need more than 30-40 minutes.
Also, if you finish your meal in 10 minutes there is also an opportunity to slow down your eating a bit.
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I don't understand recipes that are like "yo this will take 30 minutes to prepare".
I'm not the Steve mcqueen of chopping things, haha. It might take me 10 minutes just to get all of the stuff I'll need out and ready to begin - pull the onions and potatoes out of the shed, get the meat from the freezer, get the pressure cooker out and plug it in, make sure the workspace and knives are ready to go, grab a bowl for to collect the compost refuse, wash hands, etc.
Then there's all the actual prep. Peel the onions and potatoes, wash the dirt off them, chop them, etc etc, maybe the garlic needs crushing in that little garlic press, maybe the ginger needs grating, maybe the spices need measuring out, etc etc, and while I don't feel slow, my chopping and such isn't at restaurant chef lightning speeds.
I also just generally don't rush - rushing leads to mistakes which, when cooking, can lead to injury or wasted food. I go at a comfortable pace, not slow, but not rushing.
If a recipe says 30 minute prep I'll assume it'll take me more like a hour. If it's a recipe I've made many times and I don't have to check the recipe and try to follow it properly, then yeah, more like 45 minutes.
But I swear, all those recipe times are assuming you've got all your ingredients and tools and everything sat in front of you already washed, maybe even peeled, and ready to go, haha.
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True. Your comment alone made me nervous already 😁 Don't forget all those imprecise steps like "add a bit", "stir a Lil", "cook some minutes" etc. And when i cut stuff, I prefer to cut very thin and equal. Takes some extra time...ugh
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This! Cookbooks used to leave me feeling so guilty about this exact thing. UNTIL I figured this out.
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I wish I had time to slow down my eating. Gotta get to one of my two jobs 🙃
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Today is my first day at work, there's a canteen, I'm PUMPED about not cooking
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Noiice!
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- that's what audiobooks were invented for.
- You are eating too fast. Enjoy the food you made. Chew more.
- If possible cook for someone else, then they can do the dishes.
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- Agree
- I wish I could but there’s the ADHD urge to get everything done as soon as possible
- Also agree but in practice that means both of us want to cook and neither wants to do the dishes.
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Can relate
😌 my girlfriend is not understanding that -
I'm getting ready to make some home made bacon. It will take me the whole week to go from raw meat to the smokey deliciousness that is bacon.
Worth it......
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if you cook for 2 hours the food ought to be pretty good for the time spent!
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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.)
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man pamela got old
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One skillet, one wooden spoon, one bowl, one metal spoon. Double the last two if you’re cooking for a date.
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One point: support local farmers by buying their food.
Another: not supporting businesses who pay overworked people below minimum wage (restaurants) while treating them like shit.
Beyond that: the pride of making something yourself.
A fourth one: usually you save money
And fifth, since we're in a spectrum community: not having to go out and deal with people.
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137 comments
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.