Being an adult is so fun

https://reddthat.com/post/19616519

Cook 4 portions.

1 for now

1 for lunch

2 to freeze

You are both cooking too slowly and eating too fast
Yeah, honestly. It’s a crap meme. Maybe it feels like 2 hours because its boring for you. If you cook for 2 hours likely one part of it is putting something into the oven for 1 1/2 hours.

Not everyday can be a Rachael Ray 30 minute meal.

I make chicken pot pie weekly. Mirepoix, peel dice potatoes, constantly stir so roux doesn’t clump. It’s 90 minutes of non stop cooking and 30 minutes of oven.

Do you divide it up into seven meals and eat chicken pot pie everyday?
It feeds 4 and I have one jar of leftovers to freeze. Once a month I have 4 jars and don’t have to cook chicken pot pie that week.
Try cooking a whole chicken a 700°C for 30 minutes and see what happens.
Is that the only option everyday? A whole fucking chicken? People are ridiculous.

No but you commented that they were cooking for too long with no idea of what was being cooked.

I have an example of what needs a longer cooking time.

The ridiculousness comes from you commenting without having any idea what OP was cooking and not providing advice of things that can be cooked quickly.

OP just said cooking, not cooking (x). I am also no one’s mother and thus reserve the right to make comments without fixing one’s entirely life for them.
Stop boggis-shaming me
Take 10 minutes to spatchcock your bird and it will cook in 40 minutes
Or just use a convection oven. They’re super fast. 6 drumsticks or 4 thighs in 20 minutes.
Microwaves are faster, eight minutes and you’re done.
Well you’re not really supposed to use a pottery kiln.
I tried this recipe and it was awesome. The charring made the chicken absolute 10/10, would bang.
so maybe don’t cook a whole chicken?
What are you cooking that takes 2 hours every day? I cook most of my own meals and i don’t often go over an hour of cooking and most of that is just waiting.
What meals do you cook?
With leftovers most meals take a couple minutes!
Even if it does take 2 hours start to finish, I have to imagine there’s at least SOME part of the recipe that involves waiting for something to cook. That’s dishwashing time right there.
Yup, and unless you let it dry in for a few hours after eating, then final cleanup should be done in a jiffy.
Not everyday, but some dishes take time
I once made Coq au Vin, it took around 2 hours, and I never felt like cooking that again.
and that’s why proper coq au vin is a fancy schmancy dish, not something you cook every day.

I mean… just yesterday I slow cooked something for 8 hours and ate in 30 minutes with some left over. That doesn’t mean I have to treat it all as “cooking time”.

If I am cooking something more labor intensive then I may just simultaneously cook something else for the week/meal prep/clean used dishes in the gaps in time.

Still It does feel like that sometimes. The only other thing you can really do is cook enough portions for a few meals so that you can reheat for later meals.

When you put it like that, being an adult is so fun!
I think it’s the exclamation points! For example: I’m constipated!
Yeah, slow cooking, especially in sous vide, is the best! Especially with 24 hour recipes. You just put stuff in a bag for tomorrow!
Ieveryone is focused on the cooking time and not the punchline, which is still needing to do the dishes.

Well yeah. Unless you’re using disposable plates, you’re going to still have to do dishes. Fewer, but still.

But you can reduce that with things like a slow cooker, and one pot meals.

  • Dump ingredients straight on the countertop.
  • Use a Boring Company™ Not A Flamethrower™ to roast/flambe.
  • Lick the finished meal off the countertop.
  • No dishes!
  • Using a Musk flamethrower is so uncivilized!
    I absolutely went through a phase (6-8 years) of just using paper plates and paper cups, and just tossing it.

    The only time I need to do dishes after cooking is when I am cooking something that needs constant attention, too many things at once, orI’m just lazy

    Usually I just have the skillet I cooked in and the plate/silverware I used

    Making a meal falls into three parts: prep, cook, and clean. I used to hate the 'boring, standing on my aching feet' prep bit, so I'd try to fit the prep into the little gaps in cooking. Of course, 8 couldn't do it and I had to keep adjusting things - taking something off heat/down heat, whatever - to finish the prep for the next stage. The constant adjustments made the food not as good, the cooking unnecessarily stressful, and left me exhausted with a sink full of dishes at the end.

    Nowadays, I sit in front of the tv. I do my prep there, all the peeling and chopping and slicing and dicing. When I cook, everything is ready for me to add to the dish, so the food tastes better and cooking itself is much less stressful. And I use the little bits of spare time during cooking to rinse the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. When I'm done cooking, I only have the last handful of things to put in the dishwasher, plus whatever plates from the meal itself.

    My life is much easier, all because I now watch TV.

    You also forgot about planning and shopping.
    Honestly, meal kits are clutch for this since they provide everything and the most effort needed by me is putting them away. 2 nights a week it makes my job of figuring out what to eat and how to make it a lot easier.
    Are meal kits cost effective?

    The cheapest meal kits are only slightly more expensive than the equivalent grocery store order. However, you will be limited in options for price points on the items. For instance, if the meal kit only uses products with labels that don’t really mean a whole lot, but are charged a premium for, you often don’t have the option to select the less expensive option. So someone who is a little adept at getting the most for their money from a grocery store will end up with a significantly better price. This is all before you consider that these services, as a whole industry, are plagued with late deliveries, spoiled food, incorrect ingredients, and damaged goods (though this one is more on the side of the delivery service).

    So you will be limiting yourself in these ways for the trade-off of not having to go out and shop, and shopping by selecting meals, rather than ingredients. However, grocery stores, at least in even semi-urban areas, are already likely to delivery grocery orders, eliminating the the expense, and time, of brick and mortar shopping.

    Ah. So, I get a farm share every week. 'Planning' is looking at the list of what I'm getting and figuring out what I can make from it - although I've been doing this long enough that I actually have a selection of recipes that I re-use year to year, so I spend more time digging the recipe out then I do actually 'planning'.

    The weekly shopping is usually about 5 'missing' ingredients that I need for my chosen dishes, plus whatever staples I've run out of. I usually go shortly before the store closes for the night, and it takes about 15 minutes.

    How does one sign up for a farm share?

    Search for CSAs near you. A CSA is Community Supported Agriculture. Usually a farmer has to borrow money from the bank at the start of the season to buy seeds, service the machines, hire the hands, etc, and hope to have a good enough crop to pay back at the end of the year. In a CSA, the farmer figures out his much they need to make all that happen, plus insurance, living expenses, some money for improvements and retirement, etc, etc. They figure out how much did they think they'll produce that year and how many people it would feed, then sell the shares at a price that brings in the money they need to keep the farm running: they're no longer dependent on the bank.

    They're also no longer dependent on the big agriculture practice of having your crops harvested early, sent to a middleman for sorting and packaging, sent to a distributor, sent to a warehouse, before finally sitting in the back of a grocery store before it gets put out, where the under-ripe produce is sold to you and you have like a week to eat it before it goes bad.

    Instead the produce is brought in the day before distribution, so it's at or close to the peak of ripeness and has more flavor. Since it's not spending time traveling between middlemen, it lasts longer in your fridge. Since it's not being bounced around lots of places, you get access to a wider range of things than normally show up: my CSA plants several types of regular tomatoes, but also a bunch of heirloom tomatoes as well. We get regular basil, yes, but also twelve other types of basil - lemon, Thai, red rubin, lime, holy, etc. My CSA also grows some fruit: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, figs, watermelon, paw-paws and pumpkins.

    Each week, I get a large box of pre-picked food, plus I can pick some more in the fields if I want. Thursday night, I sit in front of the tv and cut everything up, Friday I go grocery shopping, Saturday I cook 2-3 large meals then stick half the servings in the fridge and the other half in the freezer. Odds and ends will get tossed into a salad for the week; larger amounts may get frozen, or pickled or canned or dried for later on. I get enough each year that I can eat most of my meals from farm produce, and it's all made specifically to my taste and without a ton of chemicals in it.

    I should note that I also assume some risk with my share: if it's a great harvest year, I'll get extra, but if it's a bad harvest -- well, prices would've increased at the store as well, so I figure it works out. I think mine was like $700 for a full share for 26 weeks which, like I said, it feeds me for an entire year, so the rest of my weekly grocery budget is like $20-25 (and I could get by on a lot less if I needed to). That said, I get an awful lot of food for the money - you can usually sign up for smaller/partial shares (or split it with a friend), and some places have shares available on an alternate-week schedule or let you choose which weeks you want to get it (which is useful for avoiding lettuce month, lol).

    Some places will deliver to your door, some you pick up at various drop-off locations or farmers markets, some you have to pick up at the farm - when you look into it, don't just look at the farm location, look into where you can get your food from, which may be closer to you. Oh, and some include or have add-ons for other things like honey or eggs. And there are also CSA's for things beyond veggies: there are CSAs for meat, dairy, grains, mushrooms, etc.

    Anyway - search for CSAs near you, check them out for drop-off/delivery options even if the farm isn't in your immediate area, and see what turns up!

    +1 for farm shares, except they’ve mostly closed and sold off their land to developers in my neck of the woods. Getting into the remaining ones has proved difficult.

    Also we have a nutty growing season that means it’s mostly root veggies for 8months of the year.

    We still want to support local ag, but it ain’t easy in a cold state with aging population.

    I can see where that's gonna be hard. You might try local harvest.org , though that's less helpful than it used to be - I think something happened during the pandemic and they stopped double-checking the listings were still good each year, but it's the last site I had for finding good CSAs.

    pasta, protein, some vegetable, fat to fry the protein in, cream boiullon and some spice for the sauce.

    oh the horrors

    Do some dishes while you’re cooking.
    And that’s where the dishwasher comes in. Toss things in the sink as you go and no longer need them, eat, load the dishwasher with the sink things + the final dishes to wash, wipe things down and done.

    My flat doesn't really have space for a dishwasher :(

    When I move out I'm for sure gonna bump it up the priority list, but that won't be anytime soon

    They make small countertop versions if that’s an option for you. Many are designed specifically for small apartments so they have non-permanent connections and stuff, mostly using your existing sinks faucet and drain
    I've looked into those a little but they seem to be priced similar to larger models. And with the smaller size it won't fit pots, oven dishes etc anyway. Just my plates and some cutlery which is the easiest part, especially as I live alone.
    There exist another simplification then. A lot of meals can be cooked once and freezed after. It could be stored for months and warmed in a microwave in 6 minutes. However some products like potatoes should be mashed as otherwise it looses taste
    I’ve found that if you empty it immediately and then put the dirty dishes directly into the dishwasher it’s a lot easier to clean up and gets them out of the way.
    LOL, no. I make eggs Benedict every morning, sauce and all, 15-minutes start to finish.
    That’s a lot of hollandaise sauce, boss.
    Please share ingredients and recipe you use, if you would be so kind
    Big batch of pasta gang represent.
    Big batch of meal soup chiming in.