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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a decent idea if the thing that's in your fridge is ice cream, but not if it's ingredients for cooking meals. Whoever does the cooking is going to spend a ton of time running up and down while stuff overcooks, and then they'll be even more tired and get more complaints from the rest of the family. So you should be absolutely sure that you have an equitable family dynamic and that everyone agrees that you do, before you try this.

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Yeah, I can certainly appreciate the environmental and cost savings, but this would make me miserable. I could get myself the make the trip for ice cream, but the multiple runs back to the fridge while preparing food has me agitated just thinking about it.

you'll learn to plan your meals better. take everything out that you need before you start...

"Refrigerate X while cooking Y, then remove X from fridge as Y begins to [something]," and variants of that phrase are common scenarios in recipes. Your point is only valid for a portion of recipes, not all.

Let's also take into account how many ingredients you may need from the fridge when you plan ahead. Certain meals may require multiple trips to/from the basement (however far away that may be) depending on how many - and the size of - ingredients involved.

Also, what mjmj said, re:kids.

Very few recipes involve taking stuff from the freezer repeatedly however, most things will need to thaw in advance. Making ice cream in a freezer in the basement would suck, however.

Not having the fridge readily available in the kitchen would suck, though, so that only works if you have a dedicated freezer.

This is almost comedy for those with kids.

i have 3 kids. efficient meal preparation is quite important when your kids are hungry

You know people have limited capacity of hands and not everyone is cooking just for 1-2 people, right?

While this may be OK for single or couple without children, it's hard to imagine it for family with 4+ members.

exactly because of kids i am more frequently distracted, and for example just today i forgot one (optional) ingredient because i didn't collect all the ingredients at the start.

There have already been two replies pointing out why this is a bad idea, but, why is this a good idea? Why is learning to plan your meals better (for... some definition of that term, which doesn't appear to be the usual one) worthwhile?

I cook often and, to OP's point, cooking can go a lot smoother if I spend a few extra minutes up front gathering all of my ingredients and prepping my workstation/workflow. That said, I also recognize that there are practical reasons for not always including every single item during said prep and making a few trips to the fridge during the cook.

thank you. exactly that.

Perhaps a smaller L1 cache in the form of a mini-fridge could hold the prep for a given meal or even day or so in the kitchen, while keeping the cold storage cold storage downstairs.

Most mini fridges as atrociously inefficient, so that would negate a part of the upsides.

Eh, just get all the stuff you need before you start cooking, and bring a bag if necessary.

Planning really isn't that difficult. People do it all the time when they go to the grocery store.

My mother in law has a small freezer in the kitchen, and a bigger freezer in the basement.

That way she can load the cooking ingredients into the smaller kitchen freezer before cooking, can keep most of the stock in the basement.

Best of both world, assuming you're sufficiently organized to actually remember to move the stuff to the kitchen in advance, and not forget half of it :-)

This is how my grandparents did it too. Eastern europeans, so it was more like two basement fridges and a freezer full of frozen meat and herbs.

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