By that logic, you could remove pretty much everything from your home, apart from a bed, bathroom, table and laptop.
But I can also think of two concrete reasons why you would want to cook for yourself (in addition to training a potentially valuable skill or treating it as a leisure activity)
- Cooking for guests: In some situations, you want to treat guests with a restaurant-like experience at home. In such a situation, takeout may be either impractical or inappropriate. For social reasons, it may be important that the food is prepared by yourself and not commissioned to someone else.
- Controlling ingredients: When ordering takeout (or eating at a restaurant), the restaurant is in full control of ingredients and will choose them in a way that is optimal for the restaurant - but not necessarily optimal for you. E.g., they may choose ingredients that taste well but are unhealthy it may choose ingredients produced under problematic conditions.
The third one is cost. You can essentially always beat the restaurant on cost, often by a lot, due to their overhead and desire to yield a profit for the owner. At home you supply the labor and eat the profit (so to speak). Your typical family will find it dramatically less expensive to eat in than to eat out.
Now obviously the number of hours you can bill in a day and be sane has a limit...
Take a break, man.
Also cooking is time intensive only if you do it wrong. And actually a good way to fill some time while too tired from coding ...
Did you brush your teeth this morning? How much did you bill for that eh buddy?
Come on now.
Sizes range between 15 and 30 square meters, and a lot of them have a sink, a small refrigerator, and a microwave. Nothing else. The "kitchen area" is literally a tiny corner, or niche, of the property.
With no oven, no hob, and no real storage space, often just a single cupboard for cups/plates/instant meals.
I cannot imagine living in such a place, because I enjoy baking bread, making my own pizzas, etc. On the other hand they're very cheap to live in and if you're a student I guess you can eat a lot of takeaways, or get your calories in liquid-form..
The problem why home cooking sucks is that people have no idea what good kitchen equipment looks and performs like and buy expensive crap. They also fail to invest the time needed to get the basic techniques right.
I’ve recently contributed to refurbishing the kitchen in my rental (it went from a dump to a pretty nice kitchen with brand new - still consumer-grade - equipment) and would like to know how pro equipment would help and where to start (let’s say I don’t have the budget for a full commercial kitchen - which parts should I prioritise first?).
People don't have good chef knives and don't know how to sharpen them, they also tend to overspend grossly on them and still not get something with good performance. A good knife is thinly ground, with slight convex, tapers towards the tip, have a nice usable flat part and very nice curve towards the tip, made of easy to sharpen stainless steel. Don't obsess over HRC - 59-60 is enough.
If you don't have the budget - victorinox and mora have very nice cheap chef knives that can take a great edge but need some elbow grease to grind them a bit. And they cost like 30 euro.
Also get a beater knife - something cheap that you can use for rougher tasks that won't cry if it chips or breaks.
Consumer grade burners - both gas and electric are underpowered. A pro grade 3.5 Kw induction hob is a beast - I will take one of these vs a whole 60x60 cm with 4 burners the most powerful of which tops at 2kw. For gas - where I live there are some 7kw single burners. Once again beasts. Never used gas, so not sure how low their simmer is, but there should be something decent.
Also consumer grade mixers are rarely good enough, but their top models are probably more expensive than what you can get for commercial use. A professional electrolux be5 planetary is 350 w and still it can outmix something consumer that is 1250 w (it is expensive though, but build like a tank, just example of the wattage wars)
For ovens the only thing you need is raw power and thermal stability - ignore all bells and whistles (except properly executed steam, but those tend to cost as much as a combi oven). There are some self cleaning ovens that can be hacked to bake pizza in them, but it is dangerous and voids the warranty.
In germany there are very popular right now gas infrared top mini broilers 800C that can put insane crust on a steak. And cost 100 eur. This combined with sous vide is amazing meat all the time.
A good thing is that in the last years we actually start to see some good stuff being sized down to consumers, without sacrificing performance.
And so on ...
Cooking for yourself is also cheaper, healthier, and gives you full control over the inputs, the process, and the output.
Maybe it is old-fashioned. Then again, I am slowly acquiring woodworking tools (and leatherworking tools, and book restoration tools, and...) so maybe it's just a matter of personal taste. I've recently realized I'm a craftsman; this has both helped my understand my widely varying hobbies, and guiding me towards new things that interest me.
Sometimes it's written as tblsp, tsp is teaspoon (5g/ml)