Does it happen to help with the attitude or process of cooking? It's probably the bachelor mentality in me but I honestly just hate cooking. The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. However, I do feel like I could eat a little more natural and better if I did cook more.
As someone who likes to cook but generally doesn't, I feel the problem is how this scales per mouths to feed.
Cooking for 1 or cooking for 5 doesn't involve much increase in the total time (5 sets of eating dishes instead of 1 and slightly larger cookware to clean) and has a slight decrease in price per mouth (buying food items in bulk is cheaper). Now I could cook big meals for just myself to eat 5 times along with buying in bulk, but this means a significant loss in freshness and variety (eating the same meal 5 times a week, 4 of those reheated, and bulk items mean the same core ingredients for multiple weeks). Finally top this off with the notion that more mouths to feed tend to mean more bodies to help cook/clean, and I personally find that this tips the scales to making cooking far less worthwhile when you are doing it by yourself for yourself.
This is how I look at it too. The shopping and transport overhead for ingredients, plus the overhead of time paying bills and stocking a kitchen in the first place is nontrivial also. Basically you need 2 people to make it work nicely, unless you're a foodie or are so used to cooking that you enjoy the shop/cart/unpack/retrieve/prepare/cook/clean cycle as meditation. Three or more is better.
You could freeze part of your leftovers or if you have friends/family/neighbors who cook, you could trade leftovers with them. It's still reheated, but at least you get more variety.
girlfriend and joke how despite being "modern" people we still have pretty traditional division of labor: she cooks, i manage money. it works for us. i agree that it's much better when you have a few people doing the scale-invariant tasks for each other.
Yes, though sometimes in non-obvious ways. For example, cleaning a pan after making pan-sautéed chicken is difficult until you realize you can make a pan sauce and get the pan clean at the same time.
Lessons are broken down into the mise en place steps (which makes preparation simpler). We're working on content now to help with simplifying cleaning, though the general mantra is to clean as you go.
Important metrics for us when creating lessons are number of ingredients required and number of dirty dishes that result. We want you to make things that won't fill a sink with dirty dishes and doesn't require a 30-minute, $100 trip to the grocery store. Satisfying all these requirements are hard and I don't think we've nailed it yet, but it's on our mind constantly.
To anyone that doesn't have a modern dishwasher but has the means to get one, do so!!
Seriously. I spent two years in my current place washing dishes by hand; there was an old dishwasher there that was broken and i thought "ah, don't really need it". When I had some flatmates move in we all chipped in and got a new dishwasher and it's seriously one of the best investments you can ever make.
Cleaning dishes for me now means putting dishes on a shelf, throwing in a tablet, closing a door and pressing a button. An hour later when the wash is done I just open the door and at some point when I feel like it, put the dry and clean dishes away. It does a better job than I ever did at a sink.
I've taken the same approach and recently invested the money in a Botvac to hopefully automate another chore that I just hate doing. So far it's been good too (still in the hand-holding stage, figuring out its trouble spots haha).
EDIT: One more appliance I've grown to not live without is my air-fryer. Think of it as an extremely efficient fan-forced oven that's the perfect size for a meal or two at a time. IMHO it's the perfect oven for a single person or a couple without kids.
It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. Going to the grocery store is then less about "shit, they're out of $ingredient" and more about "wow, the salmon looks really fresh this week". The actual act of cooking is the same--instead of focusing on following and mucking up someone else's recipe, I get to feel creative as I build something based on what sounds interesting. It's kind of like a mini side project.
Alton Brown is probably not an ideal source for recipes for you since he really goes all-out with ingredients and prep, but he's a fun way to learn about the science of cooking. His methods are hacker-ish, and that he doesn't follow same-old-same-old recipes helped me to stop worrying about doing things the "right" way.
Alton Brown is our guiding light for CookAcademy. (Our chef ironically also happened to be on Cutthroat Kitchen!)
Mark Bittman writes about the stages of learning how to cook and you are pretty advanced relative to others. Many of us haven't gotten to the point where we can realistically come up with ideas based on tastes because we don't know how they interact. Generalizing these ideas requires understanding how and why things work, which is exactly why Alton Brown is so useful to so many people. He breaks down the reasoning behind something so that you can generalize it the next time, or in a different dish, or apply a principle to something new altogether.
Exactly! You put that much more eloquently than I could've. I'm glad to hear that you're creating a product that makes that learning philosophy accessible.
That approach sounds like something coming out of experience. I hope to reach that level one day; right now my mind just blocks when it starts thinking about composing ingredients, and I revert back to the two or three recipes I know. I wish I started cooking as a kid, I was less anxious to experiment then.
You can start by putting together a list of ingredients you like. Many of these will be common ingredients for multiple recipes and go together in different ways. Nearly every time I go grocery shopping I get these things because my SO and I like them.
Make sure you have a good stock of different spices, salt, and pepper.
Start with something simple like just chicken pasta and each meal add in something from above suited towards your taste. As you run out of ingredients you'll realize you can still make good dishes. If you run out of pasta you can skip it completely or sub it out with quiona.
I often play the "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" game :D
That's the way I started when I first moved out of home - very simply. I still remember wondering how I should cook a steak; how would I know when it was cooked? How do I know what to heat the pan to? Etc....
To go a bit philosophical, you have to lose the fear of engaging with your food and the cooking process. Don't be scared to play with your food while it's cooking. Smell it often, listen to the noises it makes, don't be worried about moving it around the pan and even take notice of how it moves - is it sticking to the pan? Does it seem a little dry? Does it smell good? Start doing this with the simplest of things - some oil in a pan and a steak or sausages, for example.
Don't worry about following recipes to the exact letter all the time, unless you're doing something like baking where the chemistry is more important to get accurate. If your time isn't exact or the temperature is a little off or you use more than a tablespoon of oil, see what happens. See what happens if you add salt, or if you don't. Observe it while it's happening. Don't be scared to taste something off the pan. If it doesn't taste good, ask yourself why? Then ask yourself how you might fix it.
Once you're not afraid to do that, cooking becomes a lot more fun and intuitive. Then you can follow recipes while engaging with them and the food.
I feel like this is something that many people who hate cooking or who are scared of cooking miss. Cooking shouldn't be a "follow the instructions to the letter otherwise one wrong step and boom!" process. Instead it's a highly interactive, very sensory thing.
Yeah, you were right in the above comment that that ability does come from having some experience. But the "let's see what's in the fridge" game is a great way to get that experience! You'll undoubtedly mess a few things up, but that's just the process of learning.
It's weird... the more I think about it, the more I ask myself - "it's just like programming, another cool skill to master - why I'm so afraid of experimenting?"...
If I could upvote this a thousand times, I would. The problem, however, is that making a mistake in programming is not so painful. Making a mistake in cooking costs money and is often pretty embarrassing. I can easily see why you'd be more afraid of experimenting here.
Agree strongly RE embarrassing part - for now I just gave up on experimenting while cooking for friends; I tried it once, and they laugh at me ever since. Costs is also a factor, but I notice I'm afraid of experimenting even with small dishes and cheap ingredients the fridge is stocked full of.
I'm starting to realize now that it's just a stupid fear I need to overcome. I'm glad this thread forced me to think more about my attitude towards cooking.
Feel free to write to me privately anytime. I'd love for you to try some of the lessons on CookAcademy and let me know if it helps, too. One thing we're trying to reduce that fear of embarrassment is have a sort of automated helper when you're done. You answer questions about what went wrong and we provide feedback for how to improve it the next time. We also track your progress so you can get a good gauge of where you stand. Are either of those things helpful to you?
I learnt by starting to cook Indian food when I moved here. A lot of Indian food has the same set of spices and similar procedures. Soon I realized that I can experiment with the ingredients and vary the spices to change flavor and it did not have an adverse impact on the final outcome. That caused me to loose the trepidation of experimenting in the kitchen and I do it with all cuisines now. And it has worked out well, cause I generally can manage to put a meal together with whatever is left in the fridge.
Years ago I bought a vegan cookbook, which had week-long recipe plans in it. I'm not vegan, but without the "meat + sauce" or "meat + veg" options the recipes had to be so much more inventive. It gave me some good ideas, a taste for chickpeas, and a willingness to add beans to anything that looks boring.
A flatmate has a book called simply "Saucen" (German for "Sauces") which provides a good basis for many meals.
>> It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available.
I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/
I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to mention the significant amount to time spent in prepping and later, cleaning up.
That said, I agree that (with a bit of experience) this approach to cooking is a lot more fun. As a comment elsewhere on the page says, cooking for yourself could sometimes be a pain (especially after you get home from work) and thinking of it as a side project really helps.
Is it normal in your country/culture/social group not to have much experience cooking? I had a lot of second-hand experience by the time I was 18 from simply watching my parents or other adults, and sometimes being asked to help.
I have some pretty basic recipes I cook if I'm a bit tired from work, I can make them without really thinking (e.g. diced chicken + green beans & cream + pesto.) Fortunately, the nearest shop is about 2 minutes detour from my route home, so I can wander in and buy the things I'm missing.
I think one way to build up intuition is to cook a recipe with a very short list of ingredients multiple times, with small variations (like the size of cutting things up or cooking time or whatever).
One thing Good Eats consistently does is talk about whether an ingredient has a functional purpose in a recipe, and what that purpose is. Other cooking resources do that too, but usually not as well.
This right here is exactly right. If the reasoning is mentioned at all, it's usually incidental and not intentional. When we talk about salt in the seasoning step of our pan-sautéed chicken lesson, we wrote: "Salt "brings out the flavor" in chicken by reducing our perception of bitterness in foods. This, in turn, leads to an increased perception of sweet, sour, and umami (savory) flavors."
This is obviously a rather trivial example, but hopefully you see how generalizing this (and similar nuggets of information) can help.
You can see the link to my site elsewhere, but I'd be happy to help more thoroughly if you're interested. The ability to do this is not a reflection of your ability to think creatively but rather that you need to understand why you're using certain things and what effect they will have on your dish.
> The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous.
This. That's the primary reason I keep eating unhealthy. Since I started working, I naturally gravitated toward few dishes that basically make themselves - e.g. french fries, boiled/fried sausage, etc. - basically anything I can drop on the stove and leave unattended for some time. Maybe if I started to seriously learn how to cook I'd start to like it, but for now it's something that I need to do to keep myself able to do other things.
I would strongly recommend slow cookers. You can leave it in the morning and get it in the evening. The recipes are straightforward and require little actual cooking knowledge.
Even better you can easily cook large quantities so you're not even cooking every day.
My healthy favorite is slow-cooked stew combined with rice-cooker brown rice/quinoa - both are set on timers so they finish just before we get home - so no reheating.
I second this advice. A slow cooker is really ideal for your use case and can have some dramatically amazing results.
Still, you can't slow cook something like a pan-sautéed chicken breast. But many people, particularly single people, simply don't want to expend the effort for the reward. I have no problem with that; been there, done that.
I make a slow-cooker vegetable soup: low-sodium V8 juice with whatever chopped vegetables and beans I feel like / have on hand, typically kidney beans, carrot, onion, mushroom, bok choy, garlic ...
It takes me about a half-hour to chop up the vegetables, but one round makes a lot of soup.
I used to do the same thing. I think the best way to get out of that cycle is to start trying to cook something good just 1 day per week. The rest of the week can be trash, but just plan 1 good recipe.
In the beginning, making a new dish takes forever and feels really stressful because it's all unfamiliar, but if you do it enough, it becomes something you can do on autopilot with very little thought or planning. Even having just 2 or 3 autopilot recipes that you've perfected logged in your brain somewhere makes such a huge difference. That doesn't mean you have to cook them every night, but you can at least break up the monotony and unhealthiness of your current meal options.
Plus, at least for me, having a meal that is healthy and actually tastes really good makes me so much more productive when I get back to work.
That's a really poor excuse. Healthy meals can be just as hands off as TV dinners and french fries.
1. chicken breast
2. broccoli
3. noodles
4. some sort of oil
5. salt
Put all of the above in a pan, stir it around, cook (covered or uncovered, play with it) for about 7-13 minutes.
Try different mixtures. Try different lengths of time. You don't even have to watch it unless you're concerned that your range might explode or something.
There are a few services now that deliver a box of ingredients and recipes for $60 or so a week for three meals. Plated, HelloFresh, BlueApron. They really helped us actually cook more, instead of talking about it. It still takes time (30-40 min per meal) but you do learn cooking techniques and you do eat much healthier. And while it seems expensive, we probably go out one less night a week because of it, saving $60 and coming out even.
The pain of going to buy ingredients is a big one for people. I just can't personally see myself spending that on much ingredient delivery, though my wife does get some things delivered from a CSA.
I think there are two other pains wrapped up in why people buy from these services: meal planning and instruction. Meal planning is hard and it helps to just treat it like picking from a menu than creating a plan out of thin air. To some degree these services provide some instruction, though I've heard people get instructional benefits from these to varying degrees. Would be curious to see how the instruction has helped you.
> Meal planning is hard and it helps to just treat it like picking from a menu than creating a plan out of thin air.
Ding ding ding, this is why I subscribe to emeals, there's so much "science" out there about what a meal should be composed of that I'd much rather not deal with it. It's easier to see 14 dinners and choose 7 rather than scout out recipes on my own (resulting in hours lost per week).
As far as instruction, I prefer having the small set of recipes from the service, because it gives me cooking breadth that I would otherwise have not bothered with. As I start encountering meals with similar preparation again and again, I can afford to see how much I can get away with playing with the recipe.
The main benefit is that we are cooking new things a lot more often. Three times a week, from scratch. You get pretty good at small dicing onions, I'll tell you that. Before, it was maybe cooking one time a week from a real recipe, plus pizza, pasta, leftovers, restaurants, and take-out.
Josh's wife here. We actually don't get the CSA food delivered...I pick it up. But I feel the same way. We eat a lot more vegetables and fresh food and it forces us to come up with new recipes to use up ingredients. A few weeks ago we got some chayote, which I had never seen in my life, but we ended up making a really good stew with it.
Even though we aren't getting a meal plan and instructions with our box of meat and produce, it still feels like part of the work is done. I see it as a good in-between option: not as expensive as the meal delivery services and not as much work as just planning and shopping for meals from scratch. I can see how it could be overwhelming for beginners, though, if they receive a bunch of ingredients they aren't familiar with.
I think that's where building the intuition and creative-thinking part of cooking becomes important. We're working on balancing this with CookAcademy -- trying to walk users through the cooking process in great detail, without letting them rely on that detail too much. We hope that teaching them the concepts behind what they're doing and encouraging experimentation will help them eventually rely on their senses and experience rather than relying on timers and measuring cups. To me, cooking feels like much less of a chore when you can get to that point.
Some of those get easier with practice - after a while you have a fully stocked kitchen, and you will develop a set of favorite recipes that you can just pick up what ingredients you need from memory. In essence, "planning" will become less work.
