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Hacking your food supply
- ph0rque 18y agoNeat... the recipe database sounds like grounds for a quick recipe app.
- icey 18y agoYeah, this whole idea actually sounds like an idea for a website that I would visit regularly.
- atarashi 18y agoCouple thousand creative-commons licensed recipes with a social networking twist: http://www.opensourcefood.com/ http://www.opensourcefood.com/
- shaunxcode 18y agodude that site is sweet - I just wish the recipe ingredients were normalized!
- peregrine 18y agoSeconded!!! Then you could make a nice recipe api....and the world is open.
- streety 18y agoI'm a little unclear on what you do. My understanding with OAMC was that you cooked the meals (once a month, obviously) and then just reheated them on the day. Reading your post it sounds more like you just prep the ingredients once a month and then cook them on the day you eat them. Have I read this wrong? I'm certainly not doing OAMC but I'm moving in this direction. Mainly with ingredients though rather than complete meals. My main limitation is freezer space.
- iamelgringo 18y agoWe actually just do the food prep and then we cook the meal the day we're going to eat it. Meat tends to dry out if they're frozen after they're cooked.
- streety 18y agoIn that case it sounds a lot like what I'm doing but on a bigger scale. I would definitely be interested in seeing your recipes.
- iamelgringo 18y agoThanks, I'll work on posting them after we're done cooking this weekend.
- ssharp 18y agoI've done this on a smaller scale and with fully cooked food. I work full-time and have class 2 or 3 days a week at night. I try my best to avoid fast food, so if often involves cooking double portions for the days that I'm away all day. My wife is starting law school next fall and when that happens, we'll probably switch to a system like this. Fresh ingredients are great but the time saved is generally worth the loss.
- truebosko 18y agoI can't do the whole month thing because I actually enjoy cooking as a side hobby, but I do make one big dish that lasts us (girlfriend/I) for at least 2 days (dinner / lunches for work) It's easy to get a list of recipes you'll enjoy throughout the various seasons. For example, right now it's a mix of Beef Stew, Spaghetti, and Risotto dishes throughout the winter and in-between I cook whatever I bought from the market that weekend
- mattmaroon 18y agoYeah, me too. I'm sure I'd be surprised at how many dishes hold up well in the freezer, but I still couldn't limit myself to that few. I love a good home made Jambalaya every now and then.
- tptacek 18y agoNeat post. Erin and I have the same problem. Question: you're chopping and freezing garlic, onions, fresh green veg --- I get that the protein freezes just fine, but doesn't the rest of the dish suffer? The major timer saver we have is a slow cooker; throw a frozen package of chicken thighs in before we leave for the office, and when we come home we have a better protein than we would if we started from fresh thighs in the evening and an hour to cook them. Thighs, brisket, ribs, chuck, potatoes, all work well. You're a foodie; have you looked into sous vide? You can vacuum-bag a protein and some accompanyments and leave them cooking to a precise temperature for 4, 8, or 30 hours, and you're going to end up with a perfectly cooked protein. No thaw at 5:30PM, just a quick sear and you're off.
- mattmaroon 18y agoI stumbled on that too, but I don't think he meant he froze them individually.
- tptacek 18y agoI didn't think he was freezing packages of minced shallot --- although it would rule if you could do that --- but regardless of how you package it, doesn't it kill the veg to freeze and thaw like that? Freezing creates ice crystals that tear cell walls.
- mattmaroon 18y agoI freeze some stuff in my vacuum saver bags and don't get that sort of thing at all. Plus I buy frozen veggies and they're fine.
- tptacek 18y agoFrozen veg: (1) are flash-frozen instead of slowly frozen in your freezer, (2) are only available for some vegetables (garlic? leeks? green onions?), (3) taste significantly worse than fresh (except for peas).
- tfinniga 18y agoBy far the easiest way to get started is something like Dream Dinners or Dinner A'fare, as mentioned. The price and convenience are both somewhere in between cooking yourself and eating out. They've got a bunch of recipes you can choose from, and they do the shopping for the ingredients, so it saves a lot of time. The one downside - if the one near where you live is like the one near where I live, it might be a bit awkward being the only guy there.
- llimllib 18y agoMy fiancee and I are in a similar situation. We've taken a less radical approach, we simply cook twice a week and make enough to cover the rest of the week with some to spare, which we freeze. It doesn't usually take much extra time to double or triple one recipe at a time. Then, when a week is too busy to get in 2 cooking nights, we just start pulling from the freezer. Meals that work especially well with this approach are soups, chilis, and fish dishes. Frozen salmon + herbs and lemon sauce, wrapped in parchment and frozen by the dozen, is our fast food. Just throw it in the oven for a few minutes and you've got a healthy, decent meal with no cleanup.
- KevBurnsJr 18y agoI do this on a less formal scale by always cooking 6-8 servings on each Saturday and Sunday nights, tupperwaring the leftovers. Disposable Tupperware is god's gift to hackers.
- bdotdub 18y agoi feel like use of the word 'hack' has become a little bit too liberal
- diego 18y agoAgree, same as the word 'startup' used to refer to any website or webapp.
- thwarted 18y agoNo more or less liberally used by hackers than the rest of the population uses "hacker" liberally to mean someone who does anything technology related that they don't understand.
- bdotdub 18y agoYou think so? I feel like most non-techie people use hacker to mean someone who breaks into your computer and puts viruses on it...
- thwarted 18y agoAgreed. I mean liberal use of the term hacker to mean using computers for things they don't understand, so they _must_ be illegal or causing someone harm. Liberal use of the term in inappropriate contexts rather than liberal definition of the term.
- iamelgringo 18y agoThis was the spirit in which I used the word: Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick- and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it. From: http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
- bdotdub 18y agoI mean, I agree this idea is great and very helpful. its definitely practical and useful but personally I just don't think its a 'hack'.
- rcoder 18y agoThis strikes me as sort of being the opposite of "hacking" your food: instead of finding a creative, new way to prepare your meals, you build a repertoire of a handful of reproducible dishes, and make them over and over again. I understand that this may be a gain in efficiency, but I can't see how anyone who calls themselves a foodie could enjoy eating the same eight dishes on a slightly-randomized schedule for months at a time. "What's for dinner, hon?" "Oh, we're having #7 tonight." "Hooray! #7 is my favorite." etc.
- tptacek 18y agoFor a lot of people --- maybe most people in America, and almost certainly most hackers, the alternative to a strategy like this is simply eating out every night. There are certainly a lot of ways to engineer variability into planned, pre-prepped meals, but be that as it may, the "hack" here is to allow yourself to cook at all when you have a lifestyle that almost demands nightly Thai takeout.
- tptacek 18y agoFor a lot of people --- maybe most people in America, and almost certainly most hackers, the alternative to a strategy like this is simply eating out every night. There are certainly a lot of ways to engineer variability into planned, pre-prepped meals, but be that as it may, the "hack" here is to allow yourself to cook at all when you have a lifestyle that almost demands nightly Thai takeout.
- iamelgringo 18y agoI understand that this may be a gain in efficiency, but I can't see how anyone who calls themselves a foodie could enjoy eating the same eight dishes on a slightly-randomized schedule for months at a time. We don't do the same 8 meals every month. We've actually grown to having about 30-40 separate recipes that we rotate through. On, any given 4-6 weeks, we have the same meal 4-5 times.
- sidsavara 18y agoReally interesting. I don't like cooking either, and this seems like a good middle ground. The lost freezer space is probably not as big a deal also, since I'm guessing you don't ever need to put frozen chicken etc in there unless it's already prepackaged in a meal. I recently discovered the same thing: that food preparation is a pain and takes too long. My solution (which people also enjoyed on HN) was to avoid cooking altogether and hire someone off craig's list for $60 a week to do it: http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/the-price-of-my-dreams-60-a-week http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/the-price-of-my-d...
- iamelgringo 18y agoI really liked your article, actually. We're getting to the point where we'd like to do all the planning and buying, and then hire someone off of Craigslist to help prep the food. We're not quite at that point yet, but hopefully in a couple of months we'll be able to.
- comatose_kid 18y agoSomewhat related: the best place to buy cheap fruits and veggies is at a Chinese or Indian market. Typically half the cost for most items.
- kaens 18y agoI lived in a communal house with about 15 other people for about a year, and this is more or less exactly what we did. The process works very well for keeping multiple people with possibly different eating schedules fed, and minimizes the amount of crap that people shove down their throats - which in the above situation can lead to not having any food :(.
- jonknee 18y agoCurious, I thought that people who did this cooked the meals prior to freezing. Cooking is usually what takes a while, prep can be done really quickly (especially if you do it often). I guess it all depends on the recipes, but it doesn't seem like a real time saver to me. Either way it's not for me, cooking is my release. I gladly get off the computer and onto the cutting board.