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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> Would not be surprised 30y from now most homes won't have kitchen anymore. You'll have an access where a drone can come in an deliver whatever you ordered.

I suspect you vastly underestimate how cheap and time effective cooking at home can be. My girlfriend and I just mealprepped 8 meals for $30. Took 15min of active work.

The whole week we both get a healthy balanced meal that takes 2min to prepare.

No delivery company can compete with that. Drones or no drones.

Edit to answer questions below:

We don’t mind eating 4 identical lunches. Saves you thinking about it. We use dinners and snacks for variety. This week it’s a pork roast with string beans and fingerling potatoes. Put potatoes in a baking pan, stick roast on a rack above the taters, stick in oven for 45min. Cook the beans in water.

About 15min of active prep time, another 5min to portion it out, 5min to stick dishes in dishwasher. Watch netflix or hangout while food cooks itself.

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My interest is piqued. What 8 meals did you make in 15 minutes? Did you purchase already cooked food?

Not OP but baked chicken, slow cooked pork shoulder and rice or another grain probably takes about 15 minutes of active work (cook time obviously is longer). Throw some corn or green with that combo and you've got a pretty healthy and balanced set of meals. Make larger portions, buy some re-usable takeout trays and you're on your meal prep jouney. The biggest annoyance with meal prepping is redundancy in your meals but if you're okay with repetition you'll be fine.

I personally air on the side of making large portion of a meat, say chicken, and just making different variations with that pre-cooked meat through out the week. Shouldn't take more than 10 minutes a night with pre-cooked chicken to do something like chicken and pasta, chicken quesadilla, chicken salad, chicken on top of salad, chicken sandwich etc. Unless you're making a multi dish or complicated meal cooking really doesn't take that long.

Last thing, I love doing sous vide and it takes actual prep time down a lot. I'll throw a steak in when I go to work, turn it on while I'm not home and it will be done when I get back; sear it for a minute and it is good to go.

Get a bag of Atlantic Salmon from Whole Foods, season 6 fillets, wrap them in foil and throw them in an air fryer for 12 minutes. Boom, done!

In the meantime, you can microwave some frozen jasmine rice, veggies, or a mix of both. You can make baked sweet potatoes on the same air fryer though those take ~30 mins until they're nice and soft.

Not OP either, but i make heavy use of my rice cooker. Turns out that puy lentils cook interchangeably with white rice. So, either rice or lentils or a combination, plus water, half a stock cube, olive oil, herbs and spices, maybe some chorizo, maybe some kale or other vegetable, sometimes half a tin of ratatouille, or anything else you fancy which will cook in 15 minutes of simmering. Add, stir, push button, wait, eat.

I could make this in bulk and freeze it, but there's no point, because it's so quick to make.

Meals made this way aren't the most exciting thing, but they're as tasty as you can be bothered to make them, are reasonably healthy, and extremely easy.

Spaghetti carbonara is also very quick to make.

Please reveal your secrets!

Mostly, I suspect, the secret is volume. At small scales like a single household for a handful of meals, prep time scales sublinearly with number of servings, because of setup/teardown time, and if you have some experience that can extend to not-identical meals made from similar components.

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