4 ms·

> go out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards Plan food for the whole week. Buy the ingredients in one trip. Clean as you cook. Take o

> go out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards Plan food for the whole week. Buy the ingredients in one trip. Clean as you cook. Take one day a week to pre cook and freeze as much as possible. Cook three or four nights a week and eat leftovers for the remainder. Build a repertoire of around ten meals you train yourself to bang out quickly and without thinking. If you're cooking for your kids, make them help with the cooking and the clean up. (This is how I learned to cook.) It's not rocket science.

ebiester 11y ago
This has always been weird for me. After a few days, the vegetables are not as fresh. Why would you buy Friday's vegetables on Sunday? Then again, I'd say 40% of our grocery budget is vegetables, if not more. Perhaps we're not the average case.
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  There's nothing wrong with making a quick stop in the middle of the week to pick up leafy greens and other perishables. But quick is the key. I also really like frozen vegetables - green beans, broccoli and cauliflower florets, etc. I don't understand the stigma against them, particularly if they're organic.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Vegetables take longer than a week to become inedible. It's the week-and-a-half mark where they start to get limp and questionable. It's the two-week mark where they start to rot completely. If you have a problem with rotting vegetables (bought from the grocery store, fresh out of a garden are much more durable), then you're keeping them longer than you think. Meat goes bad much more quickly. If I'm not eating meat within two--maaaybe three--days of purchasing it, I will freeze it.
  - Symbiote 11y ago
    Just before vegetables are approaching the rotting stage, they're still fine for a hearty soup. Scrub them if they're dirty, chop them into rough 1cm cubes, cook in a litre of stock, and blend (or not) when they're cooked. Since I live alone, I tend to buy vegetables once a week, and meat on my way home if I'm sure I'll use it — I'm prone to wasting it otherwise. I go past at least four small supermarkets on my way home from work (30 minutes by bicycle). I have some frozen fish too, since it's quick to defrost, and bacon, since it keeps for ages. I have no problem making a vegetarian meal (chickpeas, tofu etc -- these keep indefinitely).
whistlerbrk 11y ago
Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this. When I'm done with a meal I have a few plates to clean and maybe one pot. That's it though. Everything goes away when I'm cooking. Scraps constantly thrown in the compost. It makes you much more mentally organized. It's an obvious source of fluster and stress for my friends who don't. They never seem to figure it out either. Even when I do it for them. Plus. Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it. Have a few proteins and a few cheeses and kitchen basics and you can improvise many things.
- cardamomo 11y ago
  I second everything you're saying, but I recognize that cleaning as you cook, composting, stocking your kitchen smartly, and improvising menus are very difficult skills for many people to attain.
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  > Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it. Yes, this. Always have the essentials stocked for your repertoire. I grew up Italian-American, so we always had: onions, garlic, lemon, parsley, green peppers, sausage, tomato paste, anchovies, pasta, a few types of beans, grated cheese, olive oil, balsamic, etc. Add some random meats or fresh vegetables, and you've got like, a hundred different recipes right there. > Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this. So many, many people don't understand this. My mom DRILLED this into my head as a kid. When I'm cooking with a friend who doesn't clean as they cook, I usually just hand them a glass of wine and kick them out of the kitchen.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- mhink 11y ago
  I figure the main difficulty lies in the "economics" part of "home economics". There's a huge efficiency difference between "cooking every day" and "only cooking occasionally". The only way to benefit from cooking at home is if you accept the ongoing cost of keeping essentials stocked. Then, you have to accept that you're going to waste a considerable amount of money and time while you're learning to cook. When I started, it sometimes took an hour or more to get food on the table because I hadn't figured out mise en place. Then, when I did, I ruined more than one dish because I lost track of things and something got overcooked or burnt. Finally, I've had a certain amount of food go to waste because of bad planning- perhaps I bought too much for the week, and then went shopping the next week without keeping the existing "stock" in mind. These are all huge stumbling blocks- especially when it's so easy to just order take-out, which will at least be consistently edible, with the added bonus of not resulting in wasted ingredients. What ultimately turned it around for me was when my girlfriend and I decided to fully commit to cooking at home, and went and spent $150 on groceries- but instead of buying ingredients, we bought pantry essentials. Flour, sugar, baling powder, baking soda, cornmeal, table and kosher salt, seasonings, potatoes, rice, pasta, and so on. Not to mention an initial stock of perishable basics: onions, garlic, lemons, limes, milk, butter, eggs, and cheese. While it left a dent in our wallet at the time, it turned out to be a game-changer. We found that it was immensely easier to plan meals, because we already had half the ingredients of any given recipe. This is a huge societal problem, in my opinion. I'm a pretty privileged dude when it comes down to it, and I was able to absorb the inefficiency of not being able to cook at home while still eating pretty healthy food. Furthermore, I was able to get over the hump of figuring out how to cook on my own, because I had the resources to absorb the inefficiency of learning how to do it. What about the folks that can't?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dingaling 11y ago
We do try to follow the aggregation approach in our household but it still averages out as the same amount of preparation time per meal; time required to prepare ingredients scales linearly with their volume. plus it wipes-out one of our only two days off together. Unless you have huge freezer space that can accommodate multi-week batches there's no real way around that.

ebiester 11y ago

This has always been weird for me. After a few days, the vegetables are not as fresh. Why would you buy Friday's vegetables on Sunday? Then again, I'd say 40% of our grocery budget is vegetables, if not more. Perhaps we're not the average case.

brandonmenc 11y ago
There's nothing wrong with making a quick stop in the middle of the week to pick up leafy greens and other perishables. But quick is the key. I also really like frozen vegetables - green beans, broccoli and cauliflower florets, etc. I don't understand the stigma against them, particularly if they're organic.
moron4hire 11y ago
Vegetables take longer than a week to become inedible. It's the week-and-a-half mark where they start to get limp and questionable. It's the two-week mark where they start to rot completely. If you have a problem with rotting vegetables (bought from the grocery store, fresh out of a garden are much more durable), then you're keeping them longer than you think. Meat goes bad much more quickly. If I'm not eating meat within two--maaaybe three--days of purchasing it, I will freeze it.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Just before vegetables are approaching the rotting stage, they're still fine for a hearty soup. Scrub them if they're dirty, chop them into rough 1cm cubes, cook in a litre of stock, and blend (or not) when they're cooked. Since I live alone, I tend to buy vegetables once a week, and meat on my way home if I'm sure I'll use it — I'm prone to wasting it otherwise. I go past at least four small supermarkets on my way home from work (30 minutes by bicycle). I have some frozen fish too, since it's quick to defrost, and bacon, since it keeps for ages. I have no problem making a vegetarian meal (chickpeas, tofu etc -- these keep indefinitely).

whistlerbrk 11y ago

Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this. When I'm done with a meal I have a few plates to clean and maybe one pot. That's it though. Everything goes away when I'm cooking. Scraps constantly thrown in the compost. It makes you much more mentally organized. It's an obvious source of fluster and stress for my friends who don't. They never seem to figure it out either. Even when I do it for them. Plus. Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it. Have a few proteins and a few cheeses and kitchen basics and you can improvise many things.

cardamomo 11y ago
I second everything you're saying, but I recognize that cleaning as you cook, composting, stocking your kitchen smartly, and improvising menus are very difficult skills for many people to attain.
brandonmenc 11y ago
> Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it. Yes, this. Always have the essentials stocked for your repertoire. I grew up Italian-American, so we always had: onions, garlic, lemon, parsley, green peppers, sausage, tomato paste, anchovies, pasta, a few types of beans, grated cheese, olive oil, balsamic, etc. Add some random meats or fresh vegetables, and you've got like, a hundred different recipes right there. > Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this. So many, many people don't understand this. My mom DRILLED this into my head as a kid. When I'm cooking with a friend who doesn't clean as they cook, I usually just hand them a glass of wine and kick them out of the kitchen.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mhink 11y ago
I figure the main difficulty lies in the "economics" part of "home economics". There's a huge efficiency difference between "cooking every day" and "only cooking occasionally". The only way to benefit from cooking at home is if you accept the ongoing cost of keeping essentials stocked. Then, you have to accept that you're going to waste a considerable amount of money and time while you're learning to cook. When I started, it sometimes took an hour or more to get food on the table because I hadn't figured out mise en place. Then, when I did, I ruined more than one dish because I lost track of things and something got overcooked or burnt. Finally, I've had a certain amount of food go to waste because of bad planning- perhaps I bought too much for the week, and then went shopping the next week without keeping the existing "stock" in mind. These are all huge stumbling blocks- especially when it's so easy to just order take-out, which will at least be consistently edible, with the added bonus of not resulting in wasted ingredients. What ultimately turned it around for me was when my girlfriend and I decided to fully commit to cooking at home, and went and spent $150 on groceries- but instead of buying ingredients, we bought pantry essentials. Flour, sugar, baling powder, baking soda, cornmeal, table and kosher salt, seasonings, potatoes, rice, pasta, and so on. Not to mention an initial stock of perishable basics: onions, garlic, lemons, limes, milk, butter, eggs, and cheese. While it left a dent in our wallet at the time, it turned out to be a game-changer. We found that it was immensely easier to plan meals, because we already had half the ingredients of any given recipe. This is a huge societal problem, in my opinion. I'm a pretty privileged dude when it comes down to it, and I was able to absorb the inefficiency of not being able to cook at home while still eating pretty healthy food. Furthermore, I was able to get over the hump of figuring out how to cook on my own, because I had the resources to absorb the inefficiency of learning how to do it. What about the folks that can't?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dingaling 11y ago

We do try to follow the aggregation approach in our household but it still averages out as the same amount of preparation time per meal; time required to prepare ingredients scales linearly with their volume. plus it wipes-out one of our only two days off together. Unless you have huge freezer space that can accommodate multi-week batches there's no real way around that.