Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

I cook everyday, often 2 meals, while going to university and working. I used to be a chef, and while it's much different cooking at home, I now feel I have a pretty good handle on it.

My advice:

- Buy a pressure-cooker and learn to use it

- Salads are great - no cooking, healthy, tasty (for dressing use just lemon/balsamic/flavoured vinegar and olive oil)

- Eat more vegetables (healthy, and easier/quicker to cook than meat)

- Eat more fish (fish cooks in less time than meat, is easier to cook, and is healthy)

- Buy seasonal - you can get great quality products for cheap - especially if you go to the farmer's market and buy near the end of the day

What dinner looked like today - grilled halibut, rice, tomato/spinach/goat cheese salad. Total time from start to finish - 20 minutes. Probably only 10 minutes of my actual time, as I sat around watching TV while the rice cooked and the fish was on the grill.

As for the article on meal-kits, while it's an interesting idea, I don't see the 'value' in simply assembling a few raw ingredients in a box. It saves what, 5-10 minutes at most, for a decent mark-up in price. If anything, people just need to practice cooking with raw ingredients (and pay less attention to the food networks).

I like to manage all my computers, configure linux distros, keep them up to date and clean. I use Arch Linux, which is a rather "manual" distro where major packages have major updates on a rolling basis, and I even have a slightly customized kernel because I'm particular about things. Anyway, for my personal machines, it doesn't take much time, amortized over a month, maybe 30 minutes a week.

But I hate cooking, it's just not my thing. I actually wouldn't mind the cooking part, I like following directions and making stuff, even Ikea furniture, it's fun. But going to supermarkets and trying to find the ingredients, and having too much of one ingredient to just start with a few person-meals a week, and cleaning up all the plates and bowls needed to prepare the ingredients, and the result just not being as good as the many Chipotle-like fast-but-real food places here in Manhattan, that all sucks.

It's hard to describe this feeling ... I understand what you're saying, you can do it well yourself, it doesn't really take that much time, just put some effort into it... but when it comes to food, I just don't want to. Food is messy, I hate it.

I used to live in a place in SoCal where there wasn't the easy access to good prepared food like there is in Manhattan, and I just ate yogurt and granola for dinner most days (literally more than half of them).

If a meal kit has good quality parts and clear directions (complex is fine) I'd be up for that.

The thing is that if you keep eating out eventually it will take a toll on your health. And I’m not talking in thirty of forty years down the road. Once you hit your forties various health problems will start to emerge that would originate from a bad diet.

You can start simple. Pastas and a basic tomato sauce. It’s just three ingredients, pasta, tomatoes either fresh or already crushed in a tin and some olive oil. Grilling a stake will only take you ten minutes. Try salads too. You just buy three or four of your favorite vegetables, chop them and mix them. Surely it won’t taste worse than the shit they’re serving out. Recipes like these will cover the basics. From there on you decide whether you want more complicated recipes and how much time you’ll spend daily on cooking. But even if you cut in half the times you’re eating out it would make a huge difference to your well being.

As for cleaning, we all hate it that’s why we buy a dishwasher :)

Agree with this; the reason Chipotle and such taste fantastic is because they're loaded with garbage. There are very, very few places (at least near me) where you can get a healthy, filling meal for a reasonable price, at a reasonable speed.

I tend to be the same; a bit minimalistic about the effort involving my cooking, but research and good tools (steam/pressure cooker) and practice (you can get really good at minimizing time spent on it) pay off.

>Total time from start to finish - 20 minutes. Probably only 10 minutes of my actual time, [...] > It saves what, 5-10 minutes at most,

Well, you are committing the same miscalculation that books and magazine articles about "healthy meals in 30-minutes or less" make. You leave out...

1) meal planning,

2) shopping for fresh vegetables & other ingredients

3) prep work (washing, cutting vegetables, etc),

4) clean up

Healthy meals prepared by someone else saves a huge ton of time -- if one honestly accounts for all the extra time before & after the heating of the food.

My time includes prep work (takes all of 2 minutes) and cleaning (1 pan if I don't grill the fish, 1 bowl - everything can go in the dishwasher).

Meal planning well, that takes experience. If you cook for yourself, it means you buy some vegetables, and pick up whatever looks good at the butcher/fishmonger on the way home. Rice/potatoes are something I always have at home.

Like you, I cook fresh pretty much every day. I find it quite relaxing (but then I find housework quite relaxing, so I may be broken!).

One thing I'd add to the list is a slow cooker. I don't use it very much in summer, but in winter it can be great (the winters here are fairly bleak. Actually, so are the summers - but let's not go there...).

Keep an eye on your local supermarket for special offers on cuts of meat - shove it in the slow cooker in the morning with some tomato/herbs/spices and when you get back in the evening it's done (and your kitchen has that lovely warm home-cooked smell that takes the winter chill off!). You can easily cook enough for several days in one go too.

I love my slow cooker too, but I just want to dispel the myth that a slow cooker saves much time-- it just shifts the prep time from early evening to morning. Often mornings are just as hectic :).

At least, that has been my experience, though I may make more of an effort than most to use fresh ingredients rather than canned/prepared foods (based on the slow cooker recipes online, which seem to disproportionately call for canned ingredients).

That said, I love the output of the slow cooker, and I agree it is a great tool to have. It helps to mix things up and have a different meal this week than last week.

UK: Birmingham food market has a good range and is fairly cheap (not organic stuff, its commercial grower stuff trucked in from Poland/Holand/Warwickshire). Part of the fun is seeing everyone else (real slice of life stuff). I like to support this market and I like cooking, so box of ingredients would not be something I'd pay for.

Some local organic growers have £5 boxes or £10 boxes they deliver to your house each week. These are bulk seasonable veg not prepared ingredients. I used to sort of like the 'ready steady cook' aspect of making meals out of what was in the box, but now I quite like the shopping aspect. Examples below...

http://www.farm-fresh-organics.co.uk/

http://www.morefresh.co.uk/medium-vegetable-box-3-4-people-%...

Pressure cooker: is this for beans? I've always gone for tinned beans on the basis that they are picked fresh in Turkey and industrially pressure-cooked in the tin. Am I wrong?

> is this for beans?

Yes but not necessarily. You can cook a stew in a pressure cooker in under an hour, it's incredibly useful for cooking tough cuts of meat quickly. We make beef stews and curries at home all the time in the pressure cooker, to get the meat tender would normally take 3-4 hours, in the pressure cooker takes about 25 minutes. And we do use it for legumes as well (beans, dal, chickpeas for hummous, etc...).

Pressure cookers are for pretty much anything you want to steam.

Rice, legumes, vegetables, meat (stews, pilafs, biryani, etc). It saves a lot of cooking time.

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