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I’ve been like this for 20 years now.
Just hyperfocus on cooking. Eventually you’ll beat the learning curve and just throw out great dishes by heart
I’ve been focusing on cooking more simply. the goal is fewer ingredients, less time and effort, more appreciation for simple flavor and quality ingredients
Slowcooker, crockpot, or Dutch oven type recipes.
Yes, most of the food I make is either prepared in less than 10 minutes or I know how long I can leave it unsupervised so I can leave and come back later.
I do 1 pan dishes, whether the recipes like it or not.
This seems to be the trick for great food as well. I’m not Italian, but every time I talk about food with an Italian they explain how few ingredients they actually use and how quick they can make dishes. It’s more about qualitative ingredients than anything else.
This is why I have mastered the microwave. Once I get near that thing im basically gordan ramsey, minus the good tasting food. But food is food
Bare minimum: when cooking always make enough for multiple meals (dinner and lunch).
Pro minimum: stay busy the whole time, cleaning and preparing tupper ware.
Goal: make at least 7 portions, fud 4 the week.
In my case they’ll just rot in the fridge.
Yeah its pointless if you don’t like doing it
I have finally rediscovered my love for cooking. Here’s what I do:
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Don’t follow the recipe. The chef can’t write and the writer can’t cook. A lot of it is nonsense. If you think you know better, you do.
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Do whatever you want. Don’t oversalt it or burn it and everything else can be fixed with more cookery.
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Don’t cook for 2 hours unless you are having fun goofing around in the kitchen for 2 hours or are making a holiday dish everyone’s been wanting all year.
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Learn all the shortcuts and try your own.
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Eat while you’re cooking to see if it’s the way you want it and use all those spices and sauces to see what they do.
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Easy mode: To make anything delicious, add salt, oil/fat, and acid. That will make everything but burned or oversalted stuff into edible. Also, pepper is somehow underrated despite being everywhere and in everything.
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Don’t eat it in 10 minutes. You won’t digest it properly and it will add to your stress rather than relieving it. Take your time eating; the people making you rush are the problem not the food.
Don eat burnt food
Addendum to 5. Taste twice, salt once. Especially if its a sauce, since flavors intensify as it simmers.
I usually taste right at the end to avoid having my tastebuds grow numb to flavors. Even then, if I have someone nearby, I’ll give em a taste and ask for notes.
Oh and an addendum to 4. Learn proper techniques and maintenance of cooking equipment. A dull knife is an unsafe knife, especially if you don’t know how to chop.
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I trained myself to wash as I cook because otherwise I’ll get distracted and leave the mess behind for days.
Cleaning as you go is the secret to making cooking fun, more or less.
I’m trying to teach my son this concept. He loves to cook, but he just dumps everything in the sink as he cooks, uses a new utensil for everything, etc. You don’t need a new spoon every time you taste your spaghetti sauce.
It’s even more fun to cook when you know a parent is going to clean up the mess after your Iron Chef fantasy.
If you find a way to teach this lesson let me know.
My wife loves to cook and is very good at it, but she’s purely focused on the food. I try to clean as she goes behind her and she keeps shooing me away because I’m in way. However if I don’t then she’ll start getting annoyed that the sink is full. It’s a delicate balance
I used to despise washing dishes. Then I opened a food biz, and spent many hours washing dishes and listening to audio books.
Now I don’t mind washing dishes. There’s something very satisfying about tackling a pile of dirty dishes and having them all shiny and clean at the end. It’s very Zen.
It helps that with great experience comes great speed. When others look at a destroyed kitchen and see hours of drudgery, I know that it will be beautiful in 15 minutes.
ive worked food service and wish i could say the same. I’d be all over dishes of i had at least a full power overhead sprayer. preferably with a 3 compartment sink but what i really want is the sprayer. the sprayer makes dishes fun.
Yeah, a full three compartment sink set up is great. One of my lottery purchases when I hit the big one, will be a house with a professional kitchen in it, with a serious dishwashing bay in it.
I really love those commercial dishwashers that have a 90-120 second cycle.
dont forget commercial cookware to go along with it.
your mother-in-law’s fine china definitely won’t like a commercial dishwasher that’s for sure
Your new book title is: Zen and the art of dishwashing.
/s
I would buy that.
Podcasts are also marvelous for this. Washing dishes is tedious, until your hands are going on their own in a pleasant way and I’m listening to “Revolutions” or “Mall Brats”.
How do you do this without burning the food?
Better heat and process management. If I have 2 minutes to toast almonds, I won’t be scrubbing a pan. But, if I have to cut veg and then saute, I’ll do all my prep and then start cleaning between stirs/pan heating.
Also, I love getting all my prep out of the way and then starting cooking. I immediately have much better process management to clean between cooking activities
I have done this. But when I cook my wife really loves the smell and starts getting hangry. Think it makes me rush it.
Its even worse with a toddler now lol.
I can do what you’re describing but I’ll realize I could have been cooking something for the 20 minutes I was doing prep for the next part. Can’t get the stages down well enough unless it’s something I’ve cooked a lot of times.
I’ve also found rinsing the dish/item if I’m in a rush between steps helps massively when I’m cleaning as I go too.
Ain’t no fixing the rush feeling though lol
Make a week meal (bulk fajita mix is the go to for me) and then you just have something you need to reheat and you’ve only spent 2 hrs one day rather than 2hrs everyday. i usually end up making a couple meals on some of those days but there’s no pressure to it since there’s always something ready.
Freezer bags and Budgetbytes scaling features are your friends. FYI spaghetti sauce can be made in bulk super cheap and will stay in freezer bags for literal years.
Whenever I try meal prep, one of two things will happen:
- I get sick of eating the same thing every day, and the leftovers just sit in the freezer for years.
- I smoke some weed, get the munchies, and eat it all by day two.
I never have room in the fridge/freezer for this anyway. There has to be a better way.
I just rotate stuff around. I like to look online for cheap recipes and scale them up and often mix them up and use them in dumb ways that sometimes turn out as a new thing I like.
that’s why you cook the whole bag of pasta and put the rest in the fridge for the next day, make 1kg of beef for gulash or bolognaise… make at least twice the amount to have something to reheat. You can also put in zip bags and freeze if you want to have more days between eating the same thing
I always do 3 portions, one to eat now, 2 for the fridge. Ingredient volumes are kind of fucked (you get something like 1.5 tomatoes, 3/4 onions etc) but 4 is too much and fridge temps don’t store that long, but cooking every other day is too annoying.
very good, and with potatoes and pasta you can take all the remaining pasta and sauce, throw them into a baking form, add a few vegs if you have, grate cheese on top, and tada, new dish :)
Look at this fancy pants with their high “moderation and future planning” concepts.
I make the whole bag, I EAT THE WHOLE BAG
Nah man. I do this and promptly forget about a Ziploc bag or two in the freezer for a few months. Finding a bag of chili that will be ready to eat in minutes on a day you don’t feel like cooking or ordering out (again), is like Christmas morning.
Lol yeah, putting leftovers in my freezer is a sure fire way to ensure that I will never see that food again.
This is the attitude we need in this thread. I nominate you King of the ADHD cooks for 24 minutes. Long may you reign in funny. ;)
yeah, i used to do that but i’m currently on a diet to lose 60 pounds so i’ve stop refilling my plate
Lost 80 so far, and still dropping. No diet, eating anything I want. 3 suggestions:
- Replace all high calorie drinks. No juices - don’t get your calories from juice. If you have to drink soda drink sugar free. The new “Zero Sugar” drinks are pretty good. So are the sugar free fruit-flavored sparkling waters. I’m addicted to Waterloo. I’d rather drink that than soda or even beer. Also, cultivate a love for ice water. It’s still the most refreshing beverage on the planet.
A pound is about 3500 calories. You can take that in in a week in sugary drinks alone. That’s a pound you have to offset somehow, or it’s an added pound. Stop with the sugary drinks, and that’s a pound you don’t have to deal with. Now your energy is burning your stored calories (fat).
- Only eat when you are hungry, and then only until you aren’t hungry. This also leads to moderation. Only serve up what you can eat, don’t stuff yourself, and quit when you are no longer hungry.
One of the things I’ve done routinely, is eat only a half a sandwich. I find that I am actually no longer hungry after half a sandwich, so why eat the whole thing? I’ll just save it for lunch tomorrow. That cuts the calories in half, as well as my lunch cost.
We also eat far too much out of boredom. If you find yourself staring into the open fridge, wondering what to eat for a snack, you aren’t really hungry, you’re bored. Don’t do that, go do something else.
- Something else is step three. Find something to distract yourself during TV commercials, and other times when you might be tempted to eat out of boredom. I took up the guitar again( during Covid), and whenever I get a craving to eat out of boredom, I pick up my guitar, and I stop thinking about food. It’s helped me lose weight, AND I’ve become a pretty good guitarist. I once knew a serious athlete who lifted weights during every commercial break on TV. Just watching a movie, or a game, or an evening of TV, and he put in a lot of workout time, instead of eating.
Knitting, needlepoint, reading, juggling, petting your cat, even scrolling on your phone, etc. would work. You just need a distraction. My Dad quit smoking back in the 80s, when the Rubik’s Cube became a fad. When he was tempted to smoke, he’d pick up the cube and work on it. It worked, he quit smoking AND learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
Do those things and be patient, and you will steadily lose weight while you eat anything you want. No low carb, high protein, no Keto, no starving, no cravings, no shakes or smoothies, no counting calories or points, etc. Just moderation by eating only when you are hungry.
I’ve been losing weight steadily for almost three years, averaging about 30 pounds per year. It’s not fast, but I am definitely going in the right direction. I have no anxiety about gaining weight, and I no longer ever feel guilty about food or eating.
It’s also super validating to go into the doctor, and have them fumble when they look at your weight, and say “Hey, you’ve lost about 30 pounds since I last saw you, and…you were down 30 last time, too! Nice job!”
That’s a lot better than “Dude, you’re fat. You’ve got to lose a lot of weight or you’re going to die.”
dude that’s awesome! thank you for your detailed explanations, we have a very similar way of approaching things. I also love the idea of keeping your mind busy with something creative, it’s also making your life so much more interesting than being a spectator in front of a TV, a computer or a smartphone screen.
proud of you man :D
I’ve picked up sewing (making a fursuit right now, it’s a project that will take me a full year), it’s very soothing and i can do it while speaking with my friends in voice chat, i even put the camera on so they can see what i do, it’s actually great to upkeep my friendships :D
i lost 20 lbs since the start of the year, and food-wise i did three things:
- no snacking, i stick to 3 meals: a small breakfast (i work at the computer so i don’t need heaps of food in the morning), hot cooked dish for lunch, and small dinner (a few slices of bread with ham/cheese…) and eat SLOWLY, lots of chewing, it helps limiting the intakes.
- no sugary or sugar-free beverages: even with aspartam/acesulfam-K/stevia (etc) your body generates insulin to process what is perceived as sugar, this lowers your blood sugar and induces cravings. I drink water, unsweetened black coffee and unsweetened tea, that’s it, no exceptions.
- i stopped feeling obligated to empty the plate, and never take a refill. whenever i feel full, my leftovers go into the fridge, nothing is thrown away.
Thanks for the kind words. You’ve adopted a very similar program as I did. It’s a LOT easier to train yourself to eat in moderation than stick to some diet, and you get to eat pretty much anything you want.
I forgot to mention unsweetened ice tea, so I’m glad you reminded me. That’s another one of my favorite beverages. I’ve never liked the taste of sweet tea. My family grew up drinking it without sugar, and that’s the way it tastes right to me. Ice water is still me favorite beverage.
Holistic approach, I like your style.
Good on you, props to your will power and your habit forming
tysm! I think you got it right, it’s actually the key, forming a long term habit
slow and steady progress. that makes it also way more probable that i don’t fall back into the old habits of eating junk randomly or increase the portion sizes when reach my target weight!
I made burrito stuff for lunch yesterday and made enough to get 3 meals worth. I pretty much always at least slightly bulk cook my food.
very nice! and you can vary your dishes quite simply, use the burrito filling as a topping on pasta or rice instead of rolling into a tortilla
I’ll make a giant batch of chili or spaghetti sauce, and freeze most of it in individual containers. It’s no more trouble to make a large batch as a small batch, and when I’m done, I’ve got enough for a dozen meals. Do sauce on one Sunday afternoon, chili on another Sunday afternoon, and you’ve covered a couple dozen super easy and fast meals for the month.
if you cook for 2 hours the food ought to be pretty good for the time spent!
It could be the best tasting meal I’ve ever prepared, but it still wouldn’t be worth the lost time.
(Unless I’m doing barbecue, of course, cause that is fun. Cooking is not.)
Maybe try a slow cooker. If you find a few recipes you like and prepare what you can in larger batches and save some for next time (for example if it uses a collection of spices, measure out multiple recipes worth of all of the spices and store them (pre-combined) in spice jars), you can get the prep time down to a few minutes each time you want to cook it. Slow cookers have the added benefit of not having to worry about taking it out of the oven at the right time or whathaveyou - when it finishes cooking, it’ll just keep your food warm until you’re ready to eat it. This also keeps the washing to a minimum - it’s just the slow cooker insert and your bowl + utensils. As an added bonus, you’ll get multiple days worth of food out of one time cooking.
Slow cookers are terrible. The long drawn out cooking process destroys the texture and taste of food and turns everything into a homogeneous slop. So much time and energy usage for such mediocre payoff. And fundamentally not different to just baking stuff in an oven for a long time.
The real tip is to get a pressure cooker instead. Almost every slow cooker recipe can be easily adapted to a pressure cooker, for a significant savings in time, energy, and improvement in taste and texture. Even if you get anxious about pressure cookers, most pressure cookers have a slow cook function as well.
I am good at using a slow cooker to make nutritious, tasty meals, because I practiced for a long time and I had people to encourage me to keep going. Lift new cooks up, don’t tear them down.
Rant about kitchen appliances:
People should learn to use the things they most probably already have in their kitchen.
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slow cooker is just a tiny pot shaped low temperature oven with a timer
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Air fryer is a tiny oven with a fan
Why do people get so hyped about a smaller and more limited version of the thing they already have? Just use your oven which most likely already has all these features. I haven’t seen an electric oven without a fan or without a timer in my lifetime
While you’re kinda right, you’re also kinda wrong.
I love “air-fryers” despite their stupid ass marketing buzzword. It’s, as you pointed out, a tiny version of my oven-with-a-fan. Yet it saves me a lot of time as there’s no need to wait until it’s heated, and, due to its tiny size, it’s also done more quickly. Besides having two completely separate chambers for two things needing different heat/time. And the added bonus? Cleaned much quicker and easier.
Since we have this thing, the conventional oven wasn’t used once.
That your oven is heating slow is a flaw of your oven. You can get half height convection ovens who heat up much faster and have all the benefits of a normal oven but the convection works just as well like in an air fryer. some even have microwave functions so you save another device.
I dunno what this oven costs as I just bought the kitchen that looked best. But it sure got all bells and whistles and is a convection one. Still takes time to preheat and all that for our two tiny meals.
i value my time and whatever saves me a minute wins. We still need the big one for cooking in pans and such. So it’s not useless.
If those friers would be totally useless and redundant, they wouldn’t sell that well.
Buying a more expensive oven seems like a bit of overkill, as far as advice about ADHD-friendly cooking goes.
I find that my air fryer leaves things much crisper than a regular oven, even one with a fan (which my current one doesn’t have and I’m not replacing right now because I want to redo the entire soviet era kitchen with modern furniture and integrated appliances). It also heats up to 200 degrees in under a minute vs nearly 10 minutes for the big oven.
It was a great convenience buy. I barely use the big oven now, only for things that don’t fit in the air fryer. And for some things I use the wood-powered oven instead.
I have a full size convection oven. I also have a really fancy countertop convection oven I got last year for like $120. I rarely use the regular oven anymore.
Why?
For one thing my full size oven is gas, and I’d rather use electric. My stove and furnace are the only gas appliances I have, but I try to run them as little as possible. For another, I live alone and often cook smaller portions. I don’t need to heat up that much oven for just a burrito or whatever, that’s wasteful.
And finally, my countertop convection oven has a suite of settings and features my standing oven can’t remotely compete with, and it can still cook something the size of whole chicken/roast and a side dish, just like my big oven. For example it has a meat probe that automatically shuts off the heating element when the internal temp reaches whatever it needs to be for the meat type and cook level you want. Perfect every time, no hassle, no guesswork, no adhd memory wipe leading to overcooked food. It also has a bunch of preset modes, and any changes I make to them get saved in the memory until I change or reset them, so when I find something cooks better at a different temp or time I can just save that on a setting I don’t use, and have to ready for next time.
It’s not that I don’t know how to use my oven. I do. I bought it myself 12 years ago and know exactly what it’s capable of with its luxurious 6 buttons and basic features. That’s why I wanted the countertop model.
My slow cooker is the same sort of thing - it’s an 8-in-1 pressure cooker, rice cooker, slow cooker, yogurt maker, etc. it does a lot of things and I use it frequently. It’s worth the hype.
Alright, now you tell me how I’m supposed to put a fan of my oven and how I’m supposed to make it preheat 10 times faster.
If you don’t have an oven with a fan/convection, then sure, get an additional appliance.
You are completely ignoring the massive energy waste that full sized ovens are. Why should I wait 20 minutes and heat up my entire kitchen, when I could use my air fryer in 7 minutes and use 1/20th the electricity? My AC also doesn’t have to work as hard to cool down the now warmer downstairs.
And the second thing?
In my experience, it is not an issue. I turn the oven on when I want to start cooking and only then start gathering the items. By the time I want to stick something in the oven, it is already hot. Doesn’t work with frozen pizza tho
Why do people get so hyped about a smaller and more
limitedspecialized version of the thing they already have?Because they’re better and/or easier to do specific things with.
I haven’t seen an electric oven without a fan or without a timer in my lifetime
I’m 42 and have never had one WITH a timer, but congratulations, I guess 🤷
Fact is that some of us lack certain resources such as energy, attention stamina, or time to make everything using standard equipment.
I for one know I’d never get my super healthy post-workout smoothie made without my nutribullet, or eat much cauliflower and skinless chicken breast (when I can afford it) without my air fryer.
I’m not knowledgeable about air fryers, so I can’t really comment there, but slow cookers / crock pots are fantastic and in my opinion, should be in everyone’s kitchen. Maybe I’m biased, though, because I really like soups and stews and sauces and things, which they’re great for. Not things you’d cook in an oven, and my stovetop at least doesn’t have any kind of timer mechanism.
You can make stews, soups and other things one would use a slow cooker for by taking a stainless steel or some other not-made-of-plastic pot and sticking it in the oven
I support avoiding redundancy in general, but there are advantages to those that make them worth it if you get enough of a quality of life improvement for them.
I use my air fryer basically every day and really appreciate that it can finish cooking some things before my oven would even finish preheating. Cleaning is also much easier, I imagine it uses considerably less energy, and it tends to cook stuff more evenly in my experience. And it isn’t some fancy product, just the cheapest one I could find when I decided to try one out years ago. I’ve used my oven for a couple of things that wouldn’t fit in the air fryer over the years, but otherwise it’s basically been reduced to a stovetop with a clock.
I also use it for things I would otherwise microwave because it cooks it much better even if i have to deal with a short preheat. So nowadays my microwave is just left unplugged until I need a quick injection of heat, like for freezer-burnt ice cream or melting some butter or cheese.
I don’t think I’d get enough use out of a slow cooker to commit to the space, but I imagine it’s a similar story for people that would use it often. Same deal for like a rice cooker or ice cream machine. Also, my family was able to get an old toaster oven for cheap after our real oven broke, so these appliances can offer a cheaper alternative too.
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Why are you taking 2 hours to cook every meal? Surely, you don’t mean every meal every day, right?
Good food takes time.
I’d just eat that good food for several days
Not necessarily 2h every damn day though…there’s plenty of really good food that takes 30min to make from scratch.
I have ADHD. 30 minutes IS 2 hours.
whoa, you have 96 hour days?
No, 6 hour days and I have 96 hours worth of things I need to get done.
Can you imagine how nice the world would be if it rotated just a bit slower?
No difference at all. We’d just be forced to work harder and burn out quicker.
I take solace that the 24 hour clock is somewhat immutable to the slave drivers that run our soceity
The 8-hour workday is something the labor movement fought and bled for. “Immutable” my ass.
I have 96 one-hour-long days, yes. That plus a handful of hundred-hour-long days is a full year for me.
Basically any recipe I tried that states the time:
Either it only calculates only cooking time and never considers prep or I am really inefficient.
The trick is to skip meals
In fact, if you skip enough meals you’ll get much quicker to the point where you don’t need ANY more meals! #ProDeathTip
I made Al Pastor, a bean dish, and three salsas yesterday. Four and a half hours (with cleaning as you go method).
Todays cook time will be 10 minutes.
pro tip: try cooking for 2 days or more at once
Dish washer ftw. Such a big investment in your own happiness!
i kept telling my parents to get one, but they insist on doing it by HAND, but they take forever to clean utensils and eating wares.
First I’ve got to buy a house.
Well, I hope you get an awesome house. Hey, I just noticed you’ve already got a hammer, you’re doing great!
You can have dish washer in an apartment too? Why would you need a house for that?
Because they dont come with one and there isnt space?
Countertop ones exist
Yes they do. I have a dish washer in my apartment. I think most do here. And there’s countertop ones. Had one for years, worked great!
Countertop dishwashers exist, they’re great! Just got to run a hose for water and either hook up the drainage to your U-Bend or dangle it into the sink. Ezpz! :-D
my bro got one of those ones for small kitchenware, it saves time.
Again, if there isnt space… every apartment I’ve lived in has had less than 4ft of countertop.
Where do you live that they don’t?
Here nearly every single apartment comes with a dishwasher. About the only ones that don’t are student apartments or maaybe the cheapest ones, but even then when I was looking for an apartment pretty much all of them had one
Housing over 50 years old
I mean a lot of houses here are over a century old. They get renovated of course
most cheap apartments don’t, and “portable” dishwashers aren’t very good
Still beats doing the dishes by hand. I had a countertop one for many years, worked great. A Bosch. Now that I’ve got a “big” dish washer in my apartment, my brother got it, it’s still going strong, like 15 years later 😃
if only you could convince my stubborn family members, who only does it by hand, because they think installing a dishwasher is too much of a hassle.
That’s if I remember to empty it once it’s clean
Just run it again!
