Ask HN: Do you hate cooking? What's your solution? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you hate cooking? What's your solution?

12 pointscoryl16 comments

Cooking for yourself is a pretty tiring experience. You have to buy the right materials, store them, cook them, then clean up. Its also pretty expensive, the cost of preparing a meal for one is probably close to an actual take out meal.

I would much rather spend my time doing things I want like programming, gaming, going to the gym, etc.

For those of you who have mostly quit cooking, what do you do instead? Microwave frozen meals from the grocery? Batch cooking and storing? Take out/delivery every other night? Soylent?

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This question resonates with me because I used to have a start-up that was a site for people to learn how to cook. A lot of people in the yuppie demographic told me they wanted to learn how to cook, but in practice the only people really interested in the site were parents.

At the end of the day, the start-up did fail because I think we were targeting the wrong demographic.

Now kind of getting back to your question, cooking really is a time consuming experience. But I think cooking goes a little deeper than the actual act. Taking up cooking in your life almost requires a life change as it alters weekly rhythms and habits. For example if you cooked regularly, you would have to think about what to buy, go to the market, prep the food, cook the food, and then clean up. On the other hand, it empowers you with life skills to eventually help cook if you choose to have a family and gives you control of your health.

As for time, what I would advise is to get a pressure cooker and to freeze things. With a pressure cooker, you can cook chicken thighs in about 10 minutes which is pretty amazing. Pressure cookers have evolved to be much better, and they no longer are the scary things your grandmother might have had in her kitchen.

If you plan your meals right, you can probably freeze half of your portions and then carry it on to the next week.

Lastly I recommend visiting the farmer's market as it will be much cheaper for a single person. You can literally buy 3 carrots, 2 potatoes, and a small head of lettuce instead of buying huge bulk in a grocery market. The mark-up might be a tad bit higher, but your food waste will be much more controlled.

I have food allergies which require me to eat mostly home-cooked from-scratch meals, and I have a little system for coping with this:

At any time, I have a menu consisting of meals A, B, ... G (each of which could be anything I like to eat which freezes well -- usually entrees without the carbs). Because carbs are easier to cook on a weekday with almost no trouble.

However the quantities are what I call a triangular queue. This means I have

A + 2B + 3C + ... + 7G

(meaning I have one entree of recipe A, two entrees of recipe B, up to seven entrees of recipe G). At this point you can guess the algorithm for eating -- during any given week, I will eat:

A + B + C + ... + G

(meaning I will eat a different recipe for dinner on each day of the week). At which point I will have a smaller triangular queue of:

B + 2C + ... + 6G

Then at the weekend, I will batch-cook 7 new entrees of a new recipe H (which could be recipe A again if I really like it, or something new). Which brings me "back" to a triangular queue:

B + 2C + 3D + ... + 6G + 7H

It looks too methodical when described in writing, but this allows me to eat a different thing every day of the week, and yet cook only one recipe at the end of the week. For me that is a HUGE winner.

My freezer needs to have space for 28 entrees, which works well for every freezing compartment I have had. It helps to use (almost) square tupperware containers (instead of circular ones) to maximize use of freezer space. Each container is just big enough to contain one meal's entree. And to use postits to label the outside of the container with the date each item was cooked and which recipe it is. And try not to keep anything too long but for me two months (the worst case) has been perfectly fine.

Rather amusing what a programmer will think of in a Kitchen. But hey, it works :-).

The rest of the advice others have given also applies -- using some nice cookbooks, finding a pressure cooker, etc, etc. Also watch youtube cooking videos. There are a gazillion recipes on youtube, and depending on your taste, you will probably discover some cooks whose recipes you like and trust, who make many different recipes under some sort of channel or brand on youtube.

This approach is particularly elegant.

Great idea!

First off, accept that without spending huge amounts of money to solve this problem, you're always going to have to do some cooking.

For context: I like to cook. I just generally have other demands on my time, and I need a solution for the 6 days out of the week where I just need to fuel my body.

Being a pragmatic sort of person, I understand the importance of health, so I have a few go-to meals that are delicious (so I'm never "not in the mood" for them), which meet my health needs, and are fast to prepare. The less of a picky eater you are, the better off you are. If you take this mindset far enough, you can dump a can of beans into a sauce and have a healthy-ish meal in 5 minutes.

The other thing I do is pre-cooking and storing. I seem to have a talent for making soup (it's like a really mundane superpower), and it's easy to make a ton of soup at once. I'll eat some of it for a meal on the spot, and then store the rest in the freezer. Google around for instructions on this, there are a few surprise gotchas in the process, but all easy stuff.

> you can dump a can of beans into a sauce and have a healthy-ish meal in 5 minutes.

I sometimes eat beans with salsa mixed in them. I find it delicious. I'm clearly not picky.

> Its also pretty expensive, the cost of preparing a meal for one is probably close to an actual take out meal.

This may be true if you are both paying for but not accounting for quality in what you are cooking yourself, and/or if you are having lots of waste in trying to cook for one.

> Cooking for yourself is a pretty tiring experience. You have to buy the right materials, store them, cook them, then clean up. Its also pretty expensive, the cost of preparing a meal for one is probably close to an actual take out meal.

(1) Batch cooking and storing is a good solution, (2) Having friends, and alternating cooking with them for shared meals (probably not for every meal, but as part of a mix with other things, inclding #1) is a good approach.

Batch cooking and storing was a big thing for me when I was living on my own. Make a big portion of fried rice, and then eat it for the next four days. Make a big portion of ragu and eat it for a week. Some things, like red beans and rice, could last even longer.

It does sort of require being willing to eat the same thing over and over and over again; I'm totally fine with that, but I know that other people (notably my wife) are not.

The other advantage to cooking and storing, for me, is that you can set aside a big block of time on the weekend, for example, and get all the cooking out of the way for the week. And if you're doing large batches, it turns out that you can actually multitask pretty well; when something needs to simmer on the stove for two hours, it's pretty easy to sit down and play a computer game and just get up every 20 minutes or so to stir the pot and then sit back down.

I like cooking, but I rarely have time so I basically settled on a little system that works for me.

I have a large chest freezer, and it's split roughly 50/50 between assorted bags of premixed snap-frozen vegetables, and freezer bags of 2-servings of meat (for me + wife). The meat bags might be 2 steaks, or 2 fillets of marinated chicken, or 2 fillets of fish.

Each morning before work, grab a random (literally, reach in and grab without really looking) meat bag, stick it on sink to thaw throughout day. In evening, pan-fry or oven-bake the meat, and microwave 2 cups of frozen vegetables for each person.

At most we have 1 frying pan or baking tray to clean, and the 2 plates we microwaved the veges on then ate off.

The only real preperation needed is on shopping day to split the meats into separate bags for the freezer, and because of the chest freezer we only shop once a month or so.

Since I'm on a low carb diet it can be a pain trying to eat out so I just make all my own food. I really love cooking, but it can get old having to do it every day when you have lots of other things to do.

The two things I do to combat this is to either do batch cooking. I'll make a weeks worth of food sunday evening and put it in the freezer.

Another is I usually just eat one big meal a day. Bulletproof coffee for breakfast, then I'll eat around a 1300 calorie dinner around 5-7pm. The days I eat a smaller dinner I just drink a protein shake to fill up my macros.

Maybe you could find some like-minded friends and cook for each other a few nights a week. I did this a lot in college. We'd go grocery shopping together, then either cook together or take turns cooking for each other. I find that it's far more fulfilling to cook for someone else than to cook for just yourself, and it helps to spread the costs (and the leftovers).

It happened by accident. After long coding sessions, time would fly by and instead of cooking, I would just go to sleep. Now I could pretty much eat intermittently and still perform flawlessly. I lived off of canned soup (Progresso).

Slowly eat less and less each day for a week and you'll see.

This can't possibly be healthy for you. Do you know what your daily protein/carb/calorie intake is? You must be losing weight?

beans and rice. easy, cheap, edible.

The pg recipe: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html#f1n

in chicago: factor75

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