This is generally why I don't cook much and don't really plan to. It shortens my evenings and the tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it.
Not to mention, I assume the one hour doesn't include time to clean up, which for me is one of the biggest drawbacks of cooking.
I only mention this because I only realized this after I purchased the dishwasher. And so I spend time researching and "optimizing" in hopes of finding the next dishwasher in my life, which is how one falls into the trap this article describes.
Cooking up a bowl of pasta is like 10 minutes of actual engaged cooking time. Boil some water, add pasta, meanwhile fry a some sausage and onion (maybe add some broccoli or other vegetable), once pasta and sausage are cooked, drain the pasta water, add pasta sauce from a bottle and the sausage, then put it in a bowl. Boom, there's a good dinner.
Then consider a lesson in putting yourself in the shoes of others. When I make the decision to not cook, I am not you. Capture that, and it will make sense. Unfortunately, more often than not, I found people are just looking for someone to consider below them, rather than understanding that some people just make different choices.
I think cooking takes as much time as it does modulo your skill level. Obviously someone who cooks a lot will have lots of tricks up their sleeve. Their confidence level will be high. They won't make dumb mistakes. It doesn't take them forever to chop an onion. My cooking skill level has never been high. For example: I'm really bad at coordination. If I am doing two things at once (boiling + frying), I tend to mess up timing. Something ends up overdone underdone.
Another: logistics. When did I buy that broccoli? What if I can't find good broccoli? What if it spoils? Now my plan is in ruins. This is probably the hardest part of cooking for me, is deciding on ingredients, buying them at the right time, and not letting them spoil.
Whenever I do make food, say, for potlucks, it's a sufficiently advanced process that I don't really want to repeat it every single day.
Also, I'm used to tasty food. I'm not used to bland food. Boiled pasta with store sauce is just not going to cut it, I tried. I'd need to, at minimum, add cheese to it. And boiling pasta is hardly cooking anyway.
My example was just that, an example. But to elaborate on it, it's not hard to make pasta sauce from scratch.
To add to my recipe, instead of using pasta sauce, add some passata or a tin of chopped tomatoes as well as some garlic to the pan with the sausage and onion, as well as some mixed herbs (or fresh if you're fancy) and some salt & pepper. Maybe add some olives or capers, both of which will last forever in your fridge. Now you have an easy, fresh pasta sauce from scratch (or just as much from scratch as a restaurant).
You can make a curry pretty easy too. Get some good curry powder, chickpeas, canned tomatoes, some diced chicken, onions, and garlic.
Cook the onions and garlic, add the curry powder and chicken, cook the chicken a bit, then add the tomatoes and chickpeas. Serve with a packet of precooked rice to make your life easier.
Steak, green beans, and mashed potatoes is an easy meal to make. You can even buy good frozen mashed potatoes.
Stir fry is like the easiest thing to make, just fry random meat and vegetables, and then add noodles or rice.
Here are some other easy meals to cook, which require minimal effort and ingredients: Salmon, broccoli, and quinoa. Lamb chops with roast pumpkin and parsnips. Haloumi, arugula, tomato, and cucumber salad.
Have a look at the recipes here: https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/collections/midweek-meal-r...
Or here: https://www.greatbritishchefs.com/collections/quick-recipes
They're easy, tasty, and relatively cheap.
Seriously, I'm about the least organised person in the world and I can manage to cook for myself 5 days a week. It's not a difficult undertaking.
No one cooks every night in this world, unless it's their job. Real food lasts a lot longer than you think it does, and that shows your inexperience or lack of trying to even inch near the real thing.
You remind me of a kid that gets a water pistol expecting a bb gun and cries because water doesn't hurt.
Your gripes with cooking:
- I don't understand how long food lasts. Takes one time to learn.
- I don't know how to cut things. Takes one time to learn.
- I am used to tasty food. The cheap food from your restaurant is not from scratch. Restaurants are often less fresh and less diverse than what you make at home.
- I don't want to cook every day. What are you cooking, 2 sausages and an egg? How about cooking 4 sausages and 2 eggs. Use a pot that doesn't feed 1 person like a normal person. Do you cut parts of a tree off as you need them or do you cut the base?
Honestly I don't know how you live by yourself when you can generate these kinds of "blockades". How about before you pin something you can't do down to it's "negatives" you actually start to pin some effort into it.
Do you catch Ubers everywhere because last time you got in a car your feet got tired from grabbing the steering wheel and your back hurt from sitting upside down? No one taught you to drive that way, no one taught you to cook pasta, toss in sauce and a piece of cheese on top...
Just going to keep putting my comment in until it's not censored lol.
> Do you eat lots of prepared foods or restaurant foods, or just lots of raw stuff?
A mix of the three. I'm more likely to eat raw kale than cook it in something. I like things like canned chickpeas. I sometimes boil things or cook simple items like scrambled eggs.