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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

     It would be nicer to see people purchasing raw 
     ingredients and cooking food at home

I'm trying to do that, but it's pretty hard and time consuming.

I don't know how people do it -- I mean, I can cook and sometimes it is delicious, but it's nothing worst than waisting 2 hours on something and then at the end to find out that I blew the dish for some reason.

I also cannot eat the same food for more than 2 days in a row.

So if anybody knows some book on food recipes that are easy to cook, I'd be grateful -- keep in mind though that I'm a carnivore that hates pizza/pasta (love grilled stuff :)).

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There's no limit to food "hacks", easy, general combinations that generally work. They're usually filling and healthy, but also boring and unsatisfactory.

My "recipe", YMMV:

1: Get someone to eat with. It an anti-climax to think "I really nailed this dish" and then eat it alone in front of the TV. Do a "food-club" with a friend or something, it doesn't have to be every day.

2: Make room in your freezer/get a freezer/get a larger freezer. A LOT of very nice food freezes brilliantly. Full freezer = zero effort fast food.

3: Figure out what you want to cook and then go for it. It might be childhood comfort foods, it might be a killer burger, it might be something you got at a restaurant. Research. Google for recipes and read different variations, try to get a feel for where they differ. Be vary of user generated contents. A "great" recipe can be anything from "OMG I can make (something that vaguely resembles) Burritos in my own kitchen" to "give my first-born". Read different variations, try to get a feel for where they differ. Finally, remember, a recipe is only half way there (if even that far), which brings us to:

4: Iterate. Taste, critique, try again with something a little different. Obviously not every day, but keep coming back to it. Explore the differences in recipes from step three. Randomly switch out ingredients, get a feeling for what can substitute for what. Your goal is not to cook a dish so it comes out exactly as the person who wrote the recipe imagined (because that's really hard to find out), it's to cook a dish you really like. Ask. You probably have someone who's a food-geek around who'll be happy to help you figure out why something doesn't come out as you wanted.

I find it quite easy, but my requirements are vastly different than yours. I don't eat meat, so that takes out a huge array of easy meals (burgers, kielbasa, beef stew, etc. [for tips on this stuff, I suggest on-line recipe sites. search for a dish you know you like {"beef stew" or "chili"} and pick the highest rated one. the comments are almost always useful in improving the dish])

Things that I can prepare and then forget about free me up for other tasks. Stews, chili and baked goods are great options here.

Things that take <30min (cooking pasta, chopping vegetables, stir-frying meat in your case) are also awesome when you're strapped for time. My TexMex dishes are also generally quick and take this form: fill tortilla with stuff, include some sort of sauce from a can or home-made, bake; fry; or broil tortilla, eat.

For lunch, I just cut up this week's random assortment of vegetables (cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, sprouts, etc.), layer some hummus on some sort of bread (pita, sliced, bagel, tortilla, etc.), and place vegetable mix on bread.

Breakfast is oatmeal, preferably with blueberries.

I'd say my daily home made meals are pretty average tasting, but, having never really frequented fast food, my stereotype of delicious food is a 20$ or more plate in the North End. Imagining that cost makes my pasta with sauce and cheese acceptable.

I also cannot eat the same food for more than 2 days in a row.

I'm a carnivore

You "cannot" eat the same food for more than 2 days in a row? Sorry to say it, but there's your problem. Treat meat like a side dish instead of the main course, make legumes in big batches, and you can do most of your cooking on the weekend. I can feed myself for less than $100 a month.

I hardly ever spend more than 20 minutes, and of that most of it is waiting for things to bake/cook. Take piece of meat (selection of about 20-30 at my supermarket), some vegetable (about 15-20 to choose from); come home, put on pan and pot with water; heat oil/butter and boil water (5 mins); put in meat, bake for 10-20 minutes (depending on type), meanwhile boil vegetable (6-15 minutes) and you're done. Every couple of minutes, turn meat around and stir vegetables. Meanwhile, read mail or magazine, unload dishwasher, set table, make phone calls, do online banking, etc.

I mean there's cooking and cooking - one is 'prepare great dish to delight taste buds', other is 'transform ingredients with sufficient nutrients to make it through the next couple of hours into a form that is easily digestible, sanitary and doesn't make you vomit when eating it'. Doesn't sound very romantic when I put it like that, but that second form is by far the most common way of 'cooking'.

Don't you ever spend a couple of hours trying out an idea in code only to find out later that it's a complete wash? Making mistakes in cooking is no different from any other activity - it can be a valuable learning experience if you recognize it. Plus, in cooking, you can usually still eat your mistakes.

I think many people don't find cooking fun, it's like laundry or doing the dishes: it's a chore. I wonder if this is due more to cultural influences than anything. It seems there are plenty of other cultures (mostly European) that seem to really enjoy cooking, and so you find it more often in those places.

Yeah, that's a good point. I suppose I figured that, at least in this community, people would tend to view cooking as a creative endeavor not unlike hacking, rather than some menial repetitive task. Different strokes.

I also cannot eat the same food for more than 2 days in a row.

I used to do it when I was younger and didn't make very much, by sticking to a few well-known recipes. Making rice is easy, heating up some protein is straight-forward (bake some chicken, or put something on a stove-top pan), and boiling vegetables is simple too.

I'm no culinary master, but if you keep it simple there's no reason why you should be spending 2 hours to feed yourself. I could make my dinner in about 30 minutes, and that's including a lot of standing-around time where you could do something else.

Save the 2-hour cooking for the weekend when you have the time to try something new. Otherwise, keep the cooking times short and find something you like that is easy.

Look into Sous Vide cooking. There was a big meme about it here on HN last year. It's vacuum cooking and let's you prep a ton of food passively to save you lots of time when getting it ready to eat. And it tastes better too. You could avoid flavor stagnation that way by having a variety of prepped things to choose from.

Rice + any meat + whatever sauce you want. Can't go wrong there. Very cheap, too...

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