Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

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This is by far the most important thing I can think of, followed shortly by being able to maintain a regular, high-quality exercise regimen.

Meal prep is the key to keeping the discipline in terms of cooking cheap, high-quality meals for yourself. If you understand some fundamentals about how to store food and scaling recipes up, you can leverage your time very well. In a given week, I spend ~2 hours in the kitchen total. Of this, about 1 hour is spent per week doing meal prep. The other hour is time spent re-heating or preparing the final meal for consumption across each day.

The most powerful way to engage this is using simple, predicable, efficient tools & processes. I use very few tools in my kitchen. Iron skillet, 2.5qt iron pot for frying, and an instant pot for pressure cooking. That's about it. I prepare stuff in ~1 week batches, usually on weekends.

I spend ~$150/m on groceries, and maybe $100/year on food that I don't make for myself. Every meal I eat is arguably of very high quality compared to available alternative vendors. Watching others order door dash every single day as their sole source of sustenance has me somewhat disappointed in society. The amount of money most people spend on food is incredible to me, especially considering the quality in most cases.

I am envious of your food budget. A mere pound of chicken breast at my local grocery store costs ~$10/lb, though they range from about ~$5-10lb. However, at the cheaper end, the meat is a demonstrably lower quality, with odd texture issues due to chickens growing so fast (the condition is called 'woody chicken'). Your budget would get me 15 lbs of protein. That's just not enough food for 2 people (my household size). I spend about $400/month grocery shopping (like you, nearly all meals eaten at home).

My grocery expenses are similar to yours for two people, and we do most of our cooking at home as well. I have the same problem with meat that you do. It's hard to buy good meat cheaply.

Vegetarian meals don't have to be sad. Indian cuisine is often veggie and exceptionally good. Meera Sodha's book Fresh India [0] is a goldmine for cheap veggie recipies that you wouldn't miss meat from (I say this as someone who likes meat!)

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fresh-India-Delicious-Vegetarian-Re...

If budget is a pressing concern maybe don't get chicken breast? It's far from the most affordable source of protein.

Depending on where you live, you might be able to buy live chickens and have them butchered for cheaper than $10/lb. If you get really lucky, you might also be able to find a farmer that raises, butchers, packages, and sells chicken directly. We've got a place like that here (Idaho), but it's really out of the way. When we shop there, it's usually 3-4 hours to get out there, buy a bunch of meat, and drive back. Really high quality stuff though -- it's a night and day difference from the stuff you buy at the grocery store. Same applies to beef, especially if you've got freezer space for large quantities. Occasionally, we'll split half a cow with one or two other families. It's a few hundred dollars of expense up front, but in return, you can be really picky about how the cows were raised, know exactly where the meat came from, get specific cuts of meat, etc.

If meat is important to you in your diet, I highly recommend looking around for something like that! It's a bit of work but I've found it to be extremely worthwhile.

Cooking is essential. Jumping into meal prepping for there, is another thing. Meal prepping saves you some time, but if you actually like cooking and enjoy fresh meals, this is not necessarily a good thing.

Meal prepping falls into the productivity porn category for me.

Sort of depends what's meant by it I suppose (unless it's a well-defined term I haven't come across before) - I enjoy cooking, and that includes pickling, canning, other things that aren't meals but might result in a future meal being pretty quick and easy. That's not why I do it, but it is a result.

Best example I can think of is my current addiction (almost every weekday lunch) to chopped courgettes, onions, and whole cherry tomatoes pickled in distilled vinegar & olive oil with (home-grown ;)) rosemary & thyme, on top of thick slices of (home-baked ;)) bread, few spoonfulls of the vinegar & oil for good measure, then topped with slices of decent (but not too expensive, and sadly not home-made!) cheddar and then put under the grill (aka AmE broiler). Served with pickled chillies.

Takes maybe five minutes to make that lunch, given I've already made the bread and pickled the vegetables. But I don't view it as 'productivity porn'. (But then, not 'meal prepping' either.)

Also, if I make say lasagne, there's one of me, so the other 5-7 slices go in the freezer; presumably that's 'meal prepping' too. But I do 'actually like cooking and enjoy fresh meals', so typically what happens is I have to stop cooking and eat the stuff I've frozen because the freezer's full so there's no room for new leftovers!

Now scale this for a family, 3x per day for different tastes. Can be done, but this is where the true skill of cooking and planning shines.

I've been doing Blue Apron and then Sun Basket for years now. Definitely very different than bob1029's plan - I spend 3-4 hours per week cooking, and something like 4x the price. (My main reason is choice / planning fatigue).

In the beginning, 2 serving meals would take me ~hour. Now, 4 serving meals take me ~30m, and I usually end with a clean kitchen.

As bob says, key to that is "very few tools". Generally, cutting board, knife, pan, metal spatula (love it), sometimes mixing bowls.

Another key: Plate (or store) everything immediately, and then rinse it all. Bonus points if the pan's still hot enough that it cleans itself when you rinse. Basically no mess this way, it's amazing.

Do you have this process documented anywhere ? Would like to learn it.

I don't have it written down, but I have been applying things like lean manufacturing principles to the kitchen. I.e. looking at and optimizing various subtasks and figuring out why they take so long or why the cleanup is such a PITA afterwards.

I would say that my process is probably incompatible with the preferences and physical kitchen layout of others, so you need to find something that works for you specifically. If you are having trouble figuring it out, start asking the following:

> What do I like to eat?

> Am I willing to cook it for myself on a weekly basis?

> (presumption) Why not?

> Here is where you start getting recursive with why-why-why.

> In a given week, I spend ~2 hours in the kitchen total.

I have been thinking about it because I spend significant more time than that. Maybe, you make only salads

2 hours in the kitchen for a weeks' worth of meals is ludicrous if you're doing anything that I would call cooking. The cleanup on some days alone takes 1 hour. And if you're using more than a handful of ingredients, how would you even cut and peel and blend.

And definitely no baking or fermenting or any other chemical processes.

Do you have details of your process and recipes put online? Maybe some other useful links?

I didn't know spending this little time on cooking was possible, would love to learn it myself.

One trick these days is to take advantage of semi-prepared food (sliced mushrooms, chopped onions, etc.) in the supermarket. It probably won't be quite as fresh and will end up costing you a bit more--so I don't usually do it--but it's a way to do stir fries, pasta, etc. pretty quickly and easily.

Even before the pandemic, I was mostly working at home when I wasn't traveling. But when I was going into an office regularly I tended to have a list of recipes that I knew I could throw together in 20 minutes or so.

The other way to optimize time is to make stews and casseroles that will often take a bit longer but which you might get 3 or 4 meals out of. (You can freeze some so it doesn't get too monotonous.)

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