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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Learned how to cook easy dishes for my family. My wife and I for years went all out on cooking stovetop dishes that take an hour or more of chopping and other kitchen labor before the meal and another 30-45 minutes of cleanup afterwards.

Exposure to Spanish dining habits on a vacation, use of time-saving tools such as an electronic pressure cooker and rice cooker, and learning how to use an oven for simple dishes really changed things for us.

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Do you have any new favorites? I'd definitely like to move in this direction with my family's cooking.

Last night it was baked chicken drums with simple rubs - one cajun and one provencal. Scored the chicken parts on both sides with ~1/2"/1 cm deep cuts, poured on some olive oil, rubbed in salt and some dried spice mixes we had lying around the cupboard, lay them flat on a baking sheet with aluminum foil, and baked for 1 hour at 425F. Prep <15 minutes.

There are a dozen more ways you could do this dish, including brining, marinade, other types of rub or spice, other parts, or whatever.

Optional: You can pour off some of the liquid (which can make a gravy) and/or flip the chicken near the end.

Thanks for sharing that. I live in Alaska, and we have a lot of salmon and halibut. I'm going to try that approach with halibut. It's similar to what we do, but I'm curious to see what scoring the fish and putting the rub inside the fish will do.

Me too, that sounds great. There are so many results for "quick recipes", many of which are expensive, unhealthy, or require a lot of prep.

Yes, often times it seems "quick" means "I've done this recipe 10 times so it's quick for me, here's how quick I can do it!"

are you following a book or a website for the recipes? I would love to cook more at home but it takes time to find good recipes.

I usually get the technical information (temps, basic ingredients, etc) from the Internet, my wife, or Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I also have a cookbook by America's Test Kitchen about pressure cookers which is a good start. But then I modify based on what I have lying around. At a certain point I just reach a level of comfort with the tools and I can just throw something together without looking at any resources. That's pretty much the way it is with cooking meat in the pressure cooker now.

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