5 ms·

What you just asked for is a full-sized SUV that costs $10,000, rides like a Lexus, gets 45mpg city, and never loses the new car smell. If you don't want to co

What you just asked for is a full-sized SUV that costs $10,000, rides like a Lexus, gets 45mpg city, and never loses the new car smell. If you don't want to cook or clean, that means someone has to cook/package for you. If you don't want processed food (and I don't blame you) where this is done by machine, then you have to pay for something done by real people. This will by-definition be not cheap, since labor is relatively expensive in food prep. You could just snack on raw veggies but I'm guessing you wouldn't consider that tasty for long. Much better would be to structure your life in such a way that you can spare the hour. Go read In Defense of Food as to why, then ask yourself about your priorities. To do otherwise is to put work/school above your health which makes no sense at all.

phugoid 17y ago
Amen. Cooking is an investment. The more you cook, the better you get at it; the faster and tastier the results. And the more you cook, the healthier you will eat overall (at least if you're living in North America). As for hacks, here's one. Take semi-prepared food, like macaroni & cheese in-the-box-with-the-faux-cheese-powder-in-the-paper-pouch, and augment it. The basic recipe is written on the box and fool-proof. Add something else to it like chopped-up left-over chicken that you warm up in the oven until sizzling.
- PostOnce 17y ago
  Isn't it strange to talk about cooking being an investment, and healthier eating in one sentence, and then recommend a way to prepare mac & cheese in the next?
  - mattmaroon 17y ago
    Especially the kind made out of cheese-tasting chemicals.
  - phugoid 17y ago
    I'm suggesting to start small. Hello World small. It's easier to build on successes than failures.
garply 17y ago
I don't think what you're saying is correct. Sandwiches can be tasty, healthy, and fast. So can pot roasts (once you get the hang of them). Ditto for baked meats - prepare the marinade, let soak while you work, come back and throw in the oven and set the timer, take out when done. You can then use the left over meat for sandwiches all week. Pasta is pretty easy too - boil, cut tomatoes and veggies and add spices to top it off.
jeroen 17y ago
He said "I don't want to spend an hour every day". That leaves the possibility of finding a few friends to rotate cooking duty with. The added effort of cooking for more people is less than linear with the number of people, so that can save a lot of time.
sabat 17y ago
You're being very hard on someone who merely asked an honest question. Lighten up, particularly if you don't actually have an answer for the guy.
- TheSOB88 17y ago
  Didn't seem too hard to me at all. Maybe I'm just hardhearted, because I often get the same type of reaction as OP did, but to me OP's just explaining why it won't work.
kleevr 17y ago
Healthy, cheap, or tasty: pick two. Right? :)
dkarl 17y ago
I prepared a very long and sarcastic response to you but in the end decided I probably agree with you as much as disagree. However, I adamantly disagree with you on one point: what johnswamps wants is achievable in less than an hour a day. He just needs to learn to cook. Personally, I enjoy cooking and often manage to turn it into a positive, relaxing part of my day: a drink, some music, ideally a friend (though not lately), and results that I'm proud of. Unfortunately, this is the image of cooking that most educated people are confronted with when they first face the task of cooking for themselves: yuppies amusing themselves and/or showing off their uber-conscious, uber-sophisticated lifestyle-fu. (I never reach such heights, but I understand that's what I'm supposed to be, and in some sense really am, aspiring to.) The problem is that you can't really do this every day unless you dedicate a lot of time to it. That's not the only way to do it, though. Sometimes I like to cook something interesting or impressive, but more often than not, my priorities are elsewhere. I only cook because would rather not order in (too unhealthy) or go out (too time-consuming.) I usually manage to spend well under an hour cooking, preparing, and cleaning. Consider some of the slapped-together things I've eaten recently: - Whole-wheat pasta plus lentils plus pasta sauce from a jar plus some broccoli haphazardly chopped up and cooked briefly in the pasta sauce. A nutritional powerhouse of a meal; who cares if it's a bit too unrefined to serve to dinner guests? Who cares if this meal doesn't exemplify any trendy food idea? Who cares if half of it came from a jar, as long as I can recognize the ingredients on the label? - Frozen baby lima beans plus olive oil plus garlic (a few cloves quartered) plus some dried thyme and sage that have been sitting in my pantry for about a year. The recipe calls for kalamata olives, but I didn't want to go to the store. Fuck it, it would have been much better with the olives, but it was perfectly acceptable without. For guests I would have used fresh herbs, but I don't feel like I'm abusing myself by using slightly stale dried herbs. Oh, but it's just a side dish! That doesn't worry me when I'm cooking for myself. Oh, but it's not a whole protein! I had fish yesterday. I'll be fine. Serve it with brown rice if you want. - Doen jang chi gae. A Korean soup or stew made by simmering dried anchovies in water for a few minutes, removing the anchovies, and throwing in a ball of doen jang and a bunch of vegetables and cooking for a while. I'm sure it's a gross simplification of what a more patient or sophisticated cook would do, but I just threw in daikon and collard greens, and later bean sprouts, jalapeno peppers, and tofu. Served with brown rice. Delicious. - Plain brown rice and lentils with some kimchi thrown on top for flavor. No leafy greens? Nothing green at all? Relax; you don't need all the nutrients at every meal. And finally, though it isn't really cooking: - Amy's Brown Rice & Vegetables Bowl. Processed, packaged, frozen, and quite nutritionally respectable. Maybe x% of the nutritional value was lost during freezing and storage. So what? It's not like I have any vitamin deficiencies. I'll use the time I save to flip through my copy of Hungry Planet. There's nothing wrong with cooking like this. As other posters have pointed out, johnswamps simply needs to learn to cook. On an entirely unrelated note, I had an odd realization while writing this post. About my pasta dish above, I wrote: "Pro tip: Cook the lentils, toss the lentils on a plate, and use the same pot for the sauce and broccoli. Voila: two dirty dishes instead of three, which makes a huge difference." Then I thought: I never do that, so why would I write it? Washing one extra pot only takes about a minute. I wrote it because washing pots looms much larger in people's minds than it should. The "huge difference" is 99% psychological. The only practical reason to care about using an extra pot is if you're going to leave it sitting dirty on the stove, depressing you until you finally take care of it. Part of learning to cook is getting over psychological hang-ups like that, embracing the task, and learning to be objective. You can't let your night (or worse, your week) be negatively impacted by a one-minute task.

phugoid 17y ago

Amen. Cooking is an investment. The more you cook, the better you get at it; the faster and tastier the results. And the more you cook, the healthier you will eat overall (at least if you're living in North America). As for hacks, here's one. Take semi-prepared food, like macaroni & cheese in-the-box-with-the-faux-cheese-powder-in-the-paper-pouch, and augment it. The basic recipe is written on the box and fool-proof. Add something else to it like chopped-up left-over chicken that you warm up in the oven until sizzling.

PostOnce 17y ago
Isn't it strange to talk about cooking being an investment, and healthier eating in one sentence, and then recommend a way to prepare mac & cheese in the next?
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  Especially the kind made out of cheese-tasting chemicals.
- phugoid 17y ago
  I'm suggesting to start small. Hello World small. It's easier to build on successes than failures.

garply 17y ago

I don't think what you're saying is correct. Sandwiches can be tasty, healthy, and fast. So can pot roasts (once you get the hang of them). Ditto for baked meats - prepare the marinade, let soak while you work, come back and throw in the oven and set the timer, take out when done. You can then use the left over meat for sandwiches all week. Pasta is pretty easy too - boil, cut tomatoes and veggies and add spices to top it off.

jeroen 17y ago

He said "I don't want to spend an hour every day". That leaves the possibility of finding a few friends to rotate cooking duty with. The added effort of cooking for more people is less than linear with the number of people, so that can save a lot of time.

sabat 17y ago

You're being very hard on someone who merely asked an honest question. Lighten up, particularly if you don't actually have an answer for the guy.

TheSOB88 17y ago
Didn't seem too hard to me at all. Maybe I'm just hardhearted, because I often get the same type of reaction as OP did, but to me OP's just explaining why it won't work.

kleevr 17y ago

Healthy, cheap, or tasty: pick two. Right? :)

dkarl 17y ago

I prepared a very long and sarcastic response to you but in the end decided I probably agree with you as much as disagree. However, I adamantly disagree with you on one point: what johnswamps wants is achievable in less than an hour a day. He just needs to learn to cook. Personally, I enjoy cooking and often manage to turn it into a positive, relaxing part of my day: a drink, some music, ideally a friend (though not lately), and results that I'm proud of. Unfortunately, this is the image of cooking that most educated people are confronted with when they first face the task of cooking for themselves: yuppies amusing themselves and/or showing off their uber-conscious, uber-sophisticated lifestyle-fu. (I never reach such heights, but I understand that's what I'm supposed to be, and in some sense really am, aspiring to.) The problem is that you can't really do this every day unless you dedicate a lot of time to it. That's not the only way to do it, though. Sometimes I like to cook something interesting or impressive, but more often than not, my priorities are elsewhere. I only cook because would rather not order in (too unhealthy) or go out (too time-consuming.) I usually manage to spend well under an hour cooking, preparing, and cleaning. Consider some of the slapped-together things I've eaten recently: - Whole-wheat pasta plus lentils plus pasta sauce from a jar plus some broccoli haphazardly chopped up and cooked briefly in the pasta sauce. A nutritional powerhouse of a meal; who cares if it's a bit too unrefined to serve to dinner guests? Who cares if this meal doesn't exemplify any trendy food idea? Who cares if half of it came from a jar, as long as I can recognize the ingredients on the label? - Frozen baby lima beans plus olive oil plus garlic (a few cloves quartered) plus some dried thyme and sage that have been sitting in my pantry for about a year. The recipe calls for kalamata olives, but I didn't want to go to the store. Fuck it, it would have been much better with the olives, but it was perfectly acceptable without. For guests I would have used fresh herbs, but I don't feel like I'm abusing myself by using slightly stale dried herbs. Oh, but it's just a side dish! That doesn't worry me when I'm cooking for myself. Oh, but it's not a whole protein! I had fish yesterday. I'll be fine. Serve it with brown rice if you want. - Doen jang chi gae. A Korean soup or stew made by simmering dried anchovies in water for a few minutes, removing the anchovies, and throwing in a ball of doen jang and a bunch of vegetables and cooking for a while. I'm sure it's a gross simplification of what a more patient or sophisticated cook would do, but I just threw in daikon and collard greens, and later bean sprouts, jalapeno peppers, and tofu. Served with brown rice. Delicious. - Plain brown rice and lentils with some kimchi thrown on top for flavor. No leafy greens? Nothing green at all? Relax; you don't need all the nutrients at every meal. And finally, though it isn't really cooking: - Amy's Brown Rice & Vegetables Bowl. Processed, packaged, frozen, and quite nutritionally respectable. Maybe x% of the nutritional value was lost during freezing and storage. So what? It's not like I have any vitamin deficiencies. I'll use the time I save to flip through my copy of Hungry Planet. There's nothing wrong with cooking like this. As other posters have pointed out, johnswamps simply needs to learn to cook. On an entirely unrelated note, I had an odd realization while writing this post. About my pasta dish above, I wrote: "Pro tip: Cook the lentils, toss the lentils on a plate, and use the same pot for the sauce and broccoli. Voila: two dirty dishes instead of three, which makes a huge difference." Then I thought: I never do that, so why would I write it? Washing one extra pot only takes about a minute. I wrote it because washing pots looms much larger in people's minds than it should. The "huge difference" is 99% psychological. The only practical reason to care about using an extra pot is if you're going to leave it sitting dirty on the stove, depressing you until you finally take care of it. Part of learning to cook is getting over psychological hang-ups like that, embracing the task, and learning to be objective. You can't let your night (or worse, your week) be negatively impacted by a one-minute task.