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What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out ev

• woile 7y ago
  For me it's quite similar, in the office they always tell me "Wow! That look amazing, I can't believe you do it everyday". Even when it's a salad with 3 ingredients
  • galacticdessert 7y ago
    Same here. As Italian living in The Netherlands the difference with my everyday meal and the Dutch sandwiches always leaves some awe. Honestly, cooking and eating healthy is not hard, saves money and tastes better.
    • FranzFerdiNaN 7y ago
      As a Dutch person, I find it hard to believe your cooking is cheaper than a piece of bread with some cheese on it. Better tasing, for sure though.
      • galacticdessert 7y ago
        My two sentences were disconnected actually. 1. Cooking causes awe in Dutch people 2. Eating healthy is cheaper that eating out, and easier that many may think. BTW, you Dutch guys should stop putting butter on everything, eating hagelslag by the ton, and drinking yogurt instead of water. It might be cheap, but terribly unhealthy :).
        • jelliclesfarm 7y ago
          Butter and yogurt. That sounds healthy to me! (Don’t know what hagelslag is..)
• astura 7y ago
  > I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. I have friends who do too but it's not because they don't know how to cook, it's because they don't like to and don't wanna bother and can afford the luxury of having someone else to do it for them.
  • jdgiese 7y ago
    I love cooking sometimes, but then again, other-times I would rather spend my time working on a client project. When you add up the time spent: 1. planning meals (may be minimal if you can ad-hoc quickly) 2. walking/driving to the grocery store 3. cooking 4. cleaning It can easily be more expensive for an individual person (or even a couple) to cook than it is to eat out. (I think this makes intuitive sense too, since there are economies of scale and efficiencies with how restaurants are run.) If you love cooking, then you are doing it for fun---thats great! But I think for people who don't like cooking, it can be rational to eat out for most meals. Many people are not paid at an hourly rate, so this analysis may not make sense for them. (Also, where I live, there are plenty of healthy and cheap places to eat out at.)
    • the_gastropod 7y ago
      If you care about it, it's easy to save money by cooking yourself with this one crazy trick: leftovers. It takes very little extra effort to make a much larger batch of whatever you're cooking. It's pretty simple to cook ~10 servings of a solid meal that costs ~$0.25 (e.g., Chana Masala w/ brown rice) each with about ~2 hours of time all in with grocery shopping + cooking + cleaning. Sure, if you're making $200+/hour and would do none of these things, it might be slightly cheaper to get delivery. But... I suspect that scenario is very uncommon.
      • lordCarbonFiber 7y ago
        Sure, but now you're eating the same thing for a week. I lived that way in college, it was great for saving money. Now i can afford to do a combination of delivery and blueapron style box'o'ingredients and enjoy the increased variety with less mental overhead (buying, prepping, and storing multiple servings for one has its own issues).
• cloverich 7y ago
  Some of those weird looks might be that they want your company at lunch occasionally!
• neuroticfish 7y ago
  I've been trying to learn to cook off and on for years now and I get so discouraged all the time because I'm still either overcooking or undercooking something, still not getting the flavors right, not using the right amount of oil despite the recipe's prescription. I can't be alone in feeling that way.
  • msluyter 7y ago
    I've learned the most and gotten the most bang for the buck from using Cook's Illustrated special edition magazines. For example, Skillet Dinners1[1], my copy of which is well worn. The writeups that go with the recipes really help train one's intuition about cooking. Over time, I've gotten much better at knowing when to adjust ingredients or cooking times for a given recipe. https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/special-issues/cook-s-illustrated-skillet-dinners-special-collector-s-edition.html https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/special-issues/cook-s-i...
    • Spellman 7y ago
      The best part of ATK and related Cook's country is they also helpfully go in-depth about the why. This helps you understand why the steps are laid out how they are. Plus it helps they test the crap out of their recipes so even with minor variation you can get a stellar end result. My only complaint is sometimes they are way more steps and more exspensive sets of ingredients than other recipes. But often it's worth it for vastly superior results. That's why I liked Serious Eat's Food Lab where Kenji also breaks stuff down but in an accessible set of recipes. Similar to Alton Brown's Good Eats, also a great resource if you like understanding the chemistry going on in your cooking!
    • mywittyname 7y ago
      ATK is great for beginners because they test their recipes and their recipe amounts are literally the same as they used in the tests. A lot of recipes you find online are really guestimates on the amounts, so you never get the same result as the author. People are very bad about guestimating volumes, like "about 2 tablespoons of oil" when they really used half a cup.
• blackkat 7y ago
  Indeed. You can give them the answer used in my family "Planned-overs"; where a sufficient quantity is cooked to plan other meals in advance.
  • gumby 7y ago
    Which works until you have a teenager in the house (and then works again once they move out).
• inkeddeveloper 7y ago
  I feel that's why food trucks became popular. Low barrier to entry (relative) and allows people that know how to cook quickly cook for those that don't.
• geddy 7y ago
  Funny thing about those people is they constantly complain about how expensive everything is, yet they spend frivolous amounts of money on what's probably the highest marked up item: food. Meal prep for a week for ~$75 and you're set. It would cost probably 4 times that (at least, depending on where you eat) to eat out, not to mention you don't know how it was prepared, and it's probably wildly unhealthy compared to if you just cooked it at home. Take 2-3 hours on Sundays and cook some food. It's not hard.
  • smileysteve 7y ago
    $75 is even an exaggeration. It might be more bland, but eggs, chicken breasts, some veggies should get you through a week for < $30.
    • nske 7y ago
      And lentils with bread -most people look down on them for some reason, unless it's a side of some sort, but I find them just beautiful as proper dinner!
      • ohithereyou 7y ago
        People with glucose issues will probably want to avoid the bread and go for something like brown rice (a slower carb) or a veg, but it's a good suggestions nonetheless!
      • jschwartzi 7y ago
        With a little toasted cumin seed, turmeric, onion, garlic, and maybe some fenugreek boiled lentils are heavenly. :)
      • nske 7y ago
        Sorry it just occurred to me that I was using a more specific word to refer to the family of edibles that I meant, the correct one would be "legumes" -I'd never leave things like beans or chickpeas out on purpose!
      • 7y ago
• smileysteve 7y ago
  I also noticed this; my friends would eat out or eat a tv dinner every night; In the meantime, I was eating healthy chicken and veggies.
• oh-4-fucks-sake 7y ago
  I guess I understand how many people dislike cooking, I guess. For me, it's a very creative, relaxing, rewarding, (and necessary) process in my life. For me, it's like coding, but with ingredients. Take a bunch of relatively trivial components, and combine them creatively into something complex, useful, even beautiful--inspiring. You generally follow "industry best practices", but there's plenty of room for interpretation or establishing your own patterns.
  • andrewzah 7y ago
    It’s like coding but with none of the frustrations. You can’t get stuck midway because you have an incompatible version of carrots. All you need is ingredients and a good repertoire of recipes to draw from.
    • exdsq 7y ago
      I love cooking but I’m not very good at it. I can assure you there are ways to get stuck halfway :P
    • kbrackbill 7y ago
      Huh, I feel the exact opposite- it's like coding with a bunch of extra frustrations like shopping and cleaning, and the possibility of messing up in an irreversible way (burning something, for example).
      • jschwartzi 7y ago
        That's all part of the fun of learning to cook. I've burned so many things over the years it's almost like a game. I've made hundreds of ommlettes for breakfast and burned at least 30. Each time it was a learning experience, and it taught me to pay attention to what I'm doing and not get sidetracked trying to pack for the day or take garbage out or clean the refrigerator.
      • sixstringtheory 7y ago
        Software production involves planning, gathering requirements, estimating, testing, refactoring, evaluating acceptance criteria.... not just writing code. Personally, yes, the coding is one of the more fun parts. The others are like cleaning dishes, which I hate to do above all else. But I love to cook (and I love a clean kitchen) so I put up with the rest. But I hear you on the burning. I've burnt plenty of things in my time. I think any cook worth their salt has. Story time: an executive chef I once worked for had a keychain that looked like a pewter ingot. She said one evening as they were finishing their shift, they thought they could leave a 30 gallon pot over very low heat to make a reduction over night. When they arrived in the morning, the pot had mostly melted and the stove was on fire. Her keychain was part of the melted pot, her reminder to never do that again. Live and learn (and hopefully don't burn the house down)!
• clSTophEjUdRanu 7y ago
  Same. Started cooking out of frugality and anything I can order or comes packaged is unhealthy. Cooking feels like the default, what normal people do. I was so wrong. None of my friends can cook even a simple meal without step by step instructions. Some can grill, and that's it. They just order food or eat something from a box every single day.
  • codyb 7y ago
    It’s gotten to the point for me where I look at Seamless (hundreds of options here in NYC) and generally go to the kitchen and make something instead. So much less packaging. I spend less on more food and what I eat is largely organic, pasture raised, grass fed and often from local farms. And I really enjoy cooking, so that probably helps. I love using my hands, and I usually don’t have any music on so I have a lot of nice time to think while I’m cooking. Plus the people around me love eating delicious morsels I produce and I occasionally get a rain of compliments. Sometimes I follow recipes, sometimes I do my own thing, and sometimes it’s a mix. Keeps me on my feet, and dextrous, even going to the store is a bit of exercise since I walk there. All in all, a wonderful part of my average day and week usually.
  • chatmasta 7y ago
    “Normal” people do cook, especially if they have families. You and your friends are in a bubble (nothing wrong with that).
• dfansteel 7y ago
  I cook or eat left overs 6 nights a week at this point. Beyond saving a massive amount of money it's shocking how much better the steak I make myself is than one I can get out. Most cities have kitchen equipment stores (not just Bed Bath) that actually have cooking courses you can take. Now "home made pasta" starts with flour and eggs.
  • Hitton 7y ago
    Saving massive amount of money? Judging just from demographic that uses hackernews (mostly tech workers), I think it's actually cheaper to eat out if you measure price of your time by how much money would you earn in that time while working compared to shopping for the ingredients, cooking and doing dishes.
    • chatmasta 7y ago
      There are also a lot of entrepreneurs and students on here. Not everyone is living the $200k salary life.
    • chrissnell 7y ago
      That's an optimization that looks good in theory but is poor in practice. Evidence has proven that we consume more calories at restaurants than we do when we cook at home. There's a lot more to get out of cooking at home than nutrition, though. As others have alluded to, the experience of cooking and working with your hands is excellent (and cheap) therapy. As for economy, you will find it once you've built up a good stock of spices and non-perishables and begin to optimize things by--for example--making chicken stock from the bones of that bird you roasted for dinner, or freezing the extra tomato paste from the can that you used 1/3 of. This is coming from a guy who spent the first 15 years of his tech career eating out every single meal before meeting a girl, getting married, and then eating 6 of 7 weekly dinners at home.
    • jschwartzi 7y ago
      I've been there, done that. It's not worth the extra $20-30k/year to do nothing but code. Even if I had clients to fill 80 hours a week I would still only work 40. Life is too short to do nothing but earn money.
• m3kw9 7y ago
  Eating left over for lunch at work is usually not a good experience as the only way to heat food is microwave, unless the food you bring is best reheated with one, or just have a cold salad or sandwich. As an aside, learn the best method to reheat food for each type of meal. Steak, spaghetti, fish, bread all have the best way to make it as enjoyable as possible.
• mannykoum 7y ago
  What made my post-college mental state so much better (as well as my friends' quality of life) was that I forced my flatmates to cook with me all the time and we would have people over for lunch/dinner like I used to do back home, in Greece. Our stomachs and wallets are still thanking us to this day. For context, I studied in the US and moved to London for work right after graduation.
  • fargo 7y ago
    US is not a homogeneous set of cities
    • mannykoum 7y ago
      You are right, life in New York isn't exactly close to that in other US cities
• MisterBastahrd 7y ago
  What sucks about people not being able to cook for themselves is that they stop cooking interesting things and thus the supermarket produce section keeps shrinking. Yeah, some places like Whole Foods have large varieties of items, but there isn't one anywhere near my neighborhood. The local grocery store doesn't even sell radishes.
• yibg 7y ago
  I used to eat out almost every meal as well. It wasn't because I didn't know how to cook, and I even like cooking. The economics (monetary and time) just didn't work out for one person. I can't buy in bulk (at least not fresh produce) because there is only one of me, so the cost is about the same as eating out. It also takes me a while to cook, clean etc, which takes more time than just eating out some where or getting takeout. However, when I'm in a relationship, we tend to cook a lot more. The economics works out better, lower incremental cost of 2 vs 1 at home but double the cost (nearly) eating out. Also with 2 people cooking / cleaning, the time it takes for 1 person reduces quite a bit.
  • throwawaypa123 7y ago
    I bought food to cook for 2 days at a time. Requires 3 visits to grocery store per week. Given your shopping list is small doesn't take that much.
    • yibg 7y ago
      Yes but then you loose the bulk discounts. Getting 2 days (for one person) worth of veggies, meat etc isn't much cheaper than eating out. Plus the time spent doing the grocery shopping 3 times a week, with the time to cook the individual portion, then cleaning up for me just wasn't worth it. Individual preference obviously, but just didn't make sense for me most of the time.
      • jeromegv 7y ago
        You can definitely argue on the time aspect, it is definitely much longer, but if you actually start adding tax and tip and really look at transactions, there's no way that eating out is anywhere close than food cost.
  • Jtsummers 7y ago
    Cooking for myself became easier when I started using rice/quinoa/beans + meat with vegetables. The first part is a single pot, and can usually be made in large enough quantity to last most of the week (via reheating or reuse, like old rice into fried rice). The second part can also be done in a single pot. And I have found that vegetables last far enough into the week that usually one trip covers me. To handle running out, make stews and other freezable things for the end of the week (or to mix things up earlier in the week) and store in single-serving portions.
• thrwaway69 7y ago
  I don't eat much when I cook for myself though. Not because I dislike the food, I don't have much of an appetite by the time it finishes cooking. I do love cooking for others and experimenting the hell out of weird cooking combos because why not. That's the most fun part, you pick a recipe and then you try to substitute ingredients but maintain the taste more or less the same. Eventually, you will understand flavors more and can create new recipes because you can learn about various ways in which you can cook the ingredient for using it as a different part in a dish. Cooking edible food is easy for most people, they are either lazy or like me sometimes where their appetite is gone. Following recipes is more bothersome than you think for a lot of folks, programmers don't find it that bad given they are used to reading monotone instructions. I was actually thinking about opening an online food service for people with diabetes/weight problems/specific goals where you can get good food delivered to your home. The recipes aren't that different for someone doing keto and suffering with diabetes type 2. They can generally be combined for example. Finding ingredients for a keto low carb diet is hard if you are vegetarian/vegan and there is ton of problematic information out there. Recipes are not clear, it won't taste good and frankly speaking, it is expensive if you get the ingredients in low quantity due to the demand. People need a dietician + food without jumping through many hoops. That way, More people can be healthy.
• asiachick 7y ago
  I tried to save money once by making lunch and bringing it to work. My SO at the time who was much more frugal than me pointed out that eating lunch out (socializing) was much more important to them than the savings which over the course of a month was not that much, especially if you factor in the cost of time and that there were way more effective ways of saving money than giving up socializing time. It was also boring (for me) in that in order to save time and money I'd end up having to make a larger portion of one thing and then eat the same thing all week.
  • dnautics 7y ago
    In many cities in the us eating out is as cheap as cooking. I'm not 100% certain but someone told me it's because you have to consider economies of scale for an eatery and real estate prices and commodity level revenue streams for the supermarket.
    • asdff 7y ago
      Provided the workers scoop deep, a chipotle bowl is generally two meals for me, especially if I get a tortilla on the side to build a burrito with the remnants later. Lunch and dinner for ~$7, breakfast can be a cliff bar for another buck. So ~$56 a week to eat out every day, not too bad if a $50 weekly grocery bill is the rule of thumb.
      • bashwizard 7y ago
        You barely get two dinners for $50 here in Sweden unless you go for fast food which isn't an option if you're going to be eating out every day. A typical lunch is at least $10. If I'd eat out every day both lunch and dinner I'm going to pay roughly $800/month compared to my usual $300/month for groceries.
• asdff 7y ago
  I rarely have time to cook which sucks, but I make the effort when I can and I've just bought fresh ingredients. I get home around 6:30 and go to the gym in my apt until around 7:30, then after I've showered and had my protein shake it's now 8:00 and I'm tired. Prep to eating to cleaning up can take an hour or more for me, and I try to go to bed around 10 if I can to wake up for the next day at 6. If I have to go to the grocery store that can take another hour out of my free time after work. Morale is low, freetime for hobbies are low, and the only way to maximize this time without cutting into fitness or sleep is to go with a premade meal from trader joes and be done with it. Homecooked meals made a lot of sense when you showed up at home at 5:30 with that pot roast your wife started at 2:30 steaming and plated for you on the table, but that's not the world we live in anymore.
  • notyourwork 7y ago
    You don’t need to shop or cook daily. I do all of the above and have time to cook my family homemade dinners and breakfasts.
• jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  Instant Pot. Game changer.