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Hi. I have the ability to cook now, as much as I want, whenever I want, because I no longer live with slobs. One of the things that makes it hard to cook/plan cooking is that I have to buy a lot of ingredients, all with varying levels of shelf stability, and then it becomes a mental nightmare of trying to only buy enough yams/chicken/peas/fresh basil as to not end up wasting tons of things. With the help of Mark Bittman’s How to Cock Everything, I learned that as much of a dingus as I am, I can actually make acceptable tasting food when its all spelled out for me. The issue is that I have no idea how to handle the food purchasing, ingredients juggling and management side of things. So many recipes, so many different ingredients being called for, it’s mad intimidating. Is there a book/guide/resource out there that starts you off with like, 3-5 main ingredients, and then you can make a whole bunch of different meals out of those, and just slowly work up and out? Im sure this isn’t a common thing people ask for otherwise there’d be more cookbooks dedicated to it, but im being extremely goon brain about it 
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Nov 10, 2023 06:49
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 20:14 |
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Single cooking is hard OP. You're probably gonna throw some fresh food away. Maybe just stress less about having food go to waste. Or just cook frozen chicken nuggets with Franks buffalo sauce and call it a dinner.
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Nov 10, 2023 06:56
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It's super challenging if you're not cooking for a bunch of people, or even one other person. Most spices and poo poo will keep, and if you buy them whole and grind them in pestle they'll last longer and taste better. Vegetables suck, I don't know what to say about that. They're just all going to go bad and you're going to use like 50% of them, I don't have the key to that lock. I have to say since I've got my Instant Pot it just makes everything so easy, especially like a chicken dinner of like umpteen varieties (bacon ranch chicken? salsa chicken? herb chicken?) which you can then combine with an easy side like rice or potatoes. I always buy chicken 1 pound at a time and use math to fix the recipes accordingly because more than that is a challenge for me to eat before it turns or I'll get tired of it. You can buy more and freeze it obviously but I don't see the point unless there is a BOGO or something. Also learn how to make a good breakfast hash. Potatoes, onions and eggs aren't going to give you issues with spoilage with how often you use them. Peppers might, but they're not totally critical to the recipe.
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Nov 10, 2023 07:04
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When I was first learning how to cook for myself, I would shop multiple times a week and just buy some of whatever vegetables looked good, and a couple pounds of whatever meat was on sale. Come home and chop the stuff up. I got a spice rack as a gift and would experiment by just picking 1-2 of them and sprinkle them on what I had bought. Throw it in the oven for a while at 400 or stir fry it. So yeah, go to the store more often but buy less at a time. Going to the grocery store is fun.
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Nov 10, 2023 07:17
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My living alone go-tos are minestone soup (good with most veggies and pastas) and BLTs. Also breakfast casseroles. gently caress yeah, breakfast casseroles. Also good with most veggies.
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Nov 10, 2023 07:20
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the best advice I have is start paying attention to price per pound and shop around. and that's not just all the stores around you, shop around in your own store, you can find weird deals all the time if you look at the per-weight price. aside from that, frozen ahi tuna steaks can be an inexpensive and easy source of high quality protein if you're willing to eat them sashimi style. just defrost, slice and pair with prepared wasabi (cheap powder stuff from the internet) and soy sauce
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Nov 10, 2023 07:21
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that's loving stupid Taco Bell sells food all night long and takes like 1/100th of the effort
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Nov 10, 2023 07:23
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Grem posted:that's loving stupid Taco Bell sells food all night long and takes like 1/100th of the effort Buddy I kid you not, the last place I lived at had disgusting roommates and the entire year and 2 weeks I lived there, I cooked dinner twice. I ate out every day of the year. Taco Bell was good though. e: the month I’ve lived at this new place I’ve only ate out 2 times for dinner buglord fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Nov 10, 2023 |
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Nov 10, 2023 07:24
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Got myself a pumpkin a few weeks ago and made a week's worth of stew with it. Still had to throw a third of it out because it's just too much for one person.
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Nov 10, 2023 07:25
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Hey I've been pretty hardcore into cooking recently. It's not just me though, but I have three picky as gently caress kids and a wife that can't eat anything due to AIP (she desperately wants the food I make that the kids won't touch but she can't do beans, dairy, soy, wheat, rice (seriously going on the restriction sucks balls but it super works)). (also my mother in law lives with us and often she eats vile prepackaged poo poo but sometimes I'll see she's eaten my pizza with my deranged and weirdly specific toppings and I'm so loving happy when she does. Sometimes her poor as balls brother shows up and he eats the poo poo out of my food and it makes my god drat day.) So I tend to have a lot of ingredients and have to balance making stuff before it goes and also that my wife can eat. Maybe there'll be some things that help you reconceptualize how you're going about food. Seasonings and flavors that last: * Kosher salt * Whole Pepper corns (best deal is at Costco) * Chinese wine from the Asian store * Soy sauce * Jarred garlic (gently caress chefs who say its garbage, it lasts forever) * Mustard * Curry mix from Asian store * Yeast, I want you to get into bread okay and you can just put a jar of it in the fridge. I got a brick that I'm working through over the course of a year and the kids love pizza * Sesame seeds, crunchy onions and dry stuff you can sprinkle over food to spruce it up * Vinegar - Probably get something awesome at an Asian store, but I use white vinegar because we get one giant rear end bottle to make cleaning products from and I take a bit at the start for cooking Seasonings - Garlic powder, onion powder, cinnamon, basil is probably the only other stuff you'll need Stuff that doesn't last forever but is fine seriously * Olive oil (I get a big jug, sits on my counter for a month, so a smaller one should be fine) * Salted Butter (salted butter lasts longer and the only difference is you tone down on salt) * Boxed Whole Milk from the dollar store if you want to get fancy in a recipe and then make some pudding * Flour * Sugar Hardy vegs * Canned tomatoes * Frozen Vegetables * One or two onions in your pantry, they're fine for a week and spruce up a meal or stirfry * Cabbage. This stuff rocks! gently caress LETTUCE! I chop this stuff up for coleslaw, stirfry and soup, even chopped up lasts two weeks and is fine, obviously do coleslaw first and use it for cooking after those first few days (coleslaw lasts tho if you use a bit of vinegar) * Carrots - I think these are good too, they last more than a week. Bake them if you don't like them raw, little olive oil and salt 425 for 25-30 minutes mwah Proteins * Bacon can sit for a bit * Frozen meat like thighs, I don't know I mostly do fresh and I'll cook it and consider the cooked stuff to last another week or so * Eggs last too, 2-3 weeks I think? These can go in anything besides being great as scrambled eggs * Cheese, I find that totally sealed good mozz lasts like a month and after opening at least 2 weeks. Hard cheese lasts a good long time naturally. Cheddar is like 2-3 weeks? Just for everything look at it, smell just a bit, all good? Then don't worry. My cast iron does everything and one of the things that helped me in the last year was getting a metal turner/spatula. The iron is pretty seasoned now but the metal turner does not scratch it, never did. The cast iron takes less care than you might be imagining. Scrape poo poo out, use soap to clean it and just dry it. Add a little bit of oil after washing if you need to, I usually do not. 1) Bread, use Babish's basic rear end pizza dough recipe of 500g flour, 16g salt, 375ml water, like 1-2 tsp yeast, mix it and once you can get it into a whole piece let it ferment overnight in the fridge. Bread is actually amazingly easy once you get the hang of it. Pizza dough should be roughly dry enough that after you've worked it you can pull it into a tight ball and its smooth and not sticky. Dough with more water gets the holes in it though like french bread. So if you make dough that holds together but you can slap it on a cast iron in a 450-500 degree oven it'll back into something great in a 10-12 minutes (keep an eye on it near the end!). You can take the above and make like 6 or 8 small pizzas (or four if you want those calories!). Why I bring it up is that you can put it into containers and freeze it or just put it in the fridge. The yeast works and the bread dough gets tastier over time, a week is a great amount of time! Take it out of the fridge, squish a bit and just slap in oven. Once you get used to it bread like this is very forgiving. >>> Pizza sauce, crack a can of tomatoes and puree with some salt, garlic powder, onion powder and basil. If you spoon this on the sauce as is it is New York style just don't put much and if you reduce it to like half its volume its every other style. >>> Cheese for pizza, if you can't get whole milk low moisture mozzarella just get whatever and add some onion powder, garlic powder and basil. I did this and the kids thought I'd baked the best Red Baron pizza ever. 2) Get good at make rouxs (flour and butter) and bechemels (add creme to the first), once you get the hang of this you can make meat and then use this concept to make a gravy and keep that flavor going. Put it over rice, put over the meat, dip the bread in it. Take leftover cheese and add it to the sauce 3) Make pudding. Adam Ragusea has this awesome instant pudding recipe where you take 2 cups milk (so if you want to use up that box) 4-5 teaspoons of corn starch and 2-3 tablespoons of sugar and dash salt (then cocoa powder or vanilla or whatever the hell you want to flavor it). Mix the starch and sugar together (then no clumps!) and add it to milk that's been heated up before boiling. Stir until it gets firm and put it in a bowl it's pudding. 4) Rice and Pasta are bases to put things on and in the cupboard they last forever. I like to cook the pasta, drain nearly all the water then add some salt, olive oil and butter to make an instant creamy sauce. I did this and used up some leftover pizza sauce last night and then some parmesan and I ate the whole thing while watching anime with my son. gently caress rice cookers, rinse the rice a little bit and its almost always 1 part rice to 2 parts water, put together heat to boil and then when it bubbles down to low for 15 minutes and it should be great (take the top off and stir it with a wooden spoon a few times, Gordon Ramsay won't catch you I swear) 5) Get good at stir fry. You get the stuff prepped, put stuff in first that needs to be warmed up or get toasty, then the cool thing to do is in the cast iron make a hole in the middle of the food and pour the soy sauce (and hot sauce and garlic) onto the pan and let it sizzle to get more flavor out of it. Push the food around, add a little bit of the Chinese wine to marry it all together and then make another oil, add oil and cook the eggs in there with some salt and pepper, stir them up a bit and then mix it together. If you get the ingredients too wet from the eggs its a mess. 6) Quick pickles. Use these in two weeks, but if you take cucumbers or red onions (or peppers or whatever bliss you want to follow) and you put in like 1:1 ratio of vinegar and water with some salt and a bit of sugar you get something really tasty that you can put on top of a lot of stuff to make it more exciting. That vinegar keeps things safe, but apparently vinegar is less acidic now because of ~~Capitalism~~ The overall goal is to like making food and eating it and then not wasting anything. If you get better at making food then you'll avoid wasting because you'll have more templates in mind on how to use ingredients. Tonight it took me 1 hour to make coleslaw, frozen orange chicken, bacon, scrambled eggs, rice and beans. For me all of that stuff just flowed in and out of each other, my kids had what they wanted and my wife had what she wanted (she wanted some of the onion soup I'd made the other day, I still have a bunch of chicken broth because I debone the chicken thighs because I'm cheap and make broth with the bones, tomorrow is cabbage soup that's as good as a restaurant). I have left overs I can do something with like I made the beans to go with the rice and some cheese for burritos that I can make and eat for several days. Our situations are different but I hope this helps a bit. Bonus recipe to consider: Doria. The Japanese take left over curry, mix it with rice and bake it with mozzarella cheese over the top and it loving rocks. PERFECT use of leftovers. Throw some slices of quick pickle on there and it's heaven.
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Nov 10, 2023 08:02
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buglord posted:With the help of Mark Bittman’s How to Cock Everything The only ingredient is dick
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Nov 10, 2023 08:15
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I cook food that can become lunch at work for the couple of following days. That helps a lot. Having two chest freezers also help.
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Nov 10, 2023 10:33
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Rice, eggs, and vegetables are my go to. For breakfast, I usually make some rice, crack an egg into it while it's hot, mix it up with some soy sauce, and add some steamed vegetables. Leftover rice can be used with leftover eggs and veggies for fried rice, or you can make a frittata with just eggs and veggies. Flour, salt, yeast, and a fat like butter or oil can make a lot of different things. I usually use them for pizza dough, empanadas, and tortillas, but you can also make a roux for sauces or gravies or use it for breading and frying. Butter and oil are also useful for stir-frying, sautéeing, and roasting, which can help you use up leftover vegetables. I typically buy chicken thighs from Costco and keep them frozen, only pulling out what I need when I'm preparing to cook something. I also save the bones and make stock with them, which I use for soup or for cooking rice or beans. Leftover meat gets chucked onto a pizza with leftover veggies, mixed with eggs and used for a frittata or empanada filling, or just eaten with beans, eggs, and tortillas. The big takeaway is that there's almost always something you can do with leftover ingredients before they go off, whether that's steaming, roasting, stir-frying, sautéeing, stuffing it into a tortilla, or throwing it on a pizza. If you don't know what else to do with it, chuck it in a pan with some butter, heat it up, and scramble it with some eggs and it'll probably turn out okay.
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Nov 10, 2023 11:04
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If you're only cooking for yourself, use it as a time to experiment with the extra ingredients instead of wasting them. Find out which flavours and textures go well together. Recipes are a good place to start but with practice you can make a decent meal with what you have lying around.
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Nov 10, 2023 11:06
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Whatever you can't finish, throw in an omelette
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Nov 10, 2023 11:07
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seconding the stir fry. you can also make an excellent pasta sauce with just tomatoes (fresh is better but tins work fine), garlic, olive oil and a lot of time to stir the sauce over a low heat. if you have the time to watch a movie or two you can cook up a lot of the stuff and put extra in the fridge for later in the week.
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Nov 10, 2023 11:20
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Live within walking distance of. Grocery store and shop for a couple days at a time. It's really the only way.
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Nov 10, 2023 11:22
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cold water can do wonders to keep leafy greens from spoiling the literal minute you get home from the grocery store. get the biggest bowl you got, throw your spinach or arugula or fresh herbs or whatever in there, cover it with water, and then throw it in the fridge. you can triple the time they'll last that way. it also works great for restoring some crispness to wilted celery and other watery veggies like that. frozen veggies were briefly mentioned earlier but they bear repeating because proper flash-frozen veggies are absolutely wonderful. they're ready at a moment's notice, they basically come pre-prepped, and they're still tasty even if they end up with a bit of freezer burn. and on top of that, they're like 99% as nutritionally complete as fresh veggies, so you're getting all the health benefits of eating your greens that way too. canned vegetables are perfectly fine, but they're less nutritious than fresh or frozen vegetables. pickled veggies are another great choice! they feature heavily in a lot of asian cuisines, and they're surprisingly versatile. have you ever made grilled cheese with kimchi before? you should. it whips. but you should also get into proper asian cooking as well. chinese stir fries are easy to prepare and are often done in minutes, which makes them perfect weeknight dinners and also the perfect way to use up foods that are wearing out their welcome. almost anything tastes good when stir-fried with garlic and soy sauce and thrown over rice or noodles.
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Nov 10, 2023 11:24
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buglord posted:With the help of Mark Bittman’s How to Cock Everything, lol
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Nov 10, 2023 12:54
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Don't make fun of the OPs autocorrect, they've been living with slobs for a year and never type cook.
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Nov 10, 2023 12:58
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That aside, that was the book I started out with a few years ago when I also had an opportunity to just cook whatever I wanted for myself. Cooking is one of the few things where I'm not going to care if I vanish down a rabbit hole and I'll drive a half hour one way if it means I can find a couple ingredients I wouldn't be able to get otherwise. It's a massive fuckin tome but The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt was a huge, huge help in making sure I sort of got my poo poo straight in my kitchen. He's pretty science-forward and puts some common kitchen knowledge to the test (does heating butter in oil prevent it from burning as quickly? should you let meat come to room temp before cooking?) but one of the best bits of the book is at the start - practically a whole chapter of important kitchen implements, common food items, spices, shelf stable stuff, etc etc. I refer back to it a lot and I'm always kind of surprised when I have some weird food question and it turns out there's an answer in there. Anyway, highly recommend that. Also, buy and use Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Also also, get a Food Saver or some other type of vacuum-seal food bag system so that you can cook and freeze leftovers you aren't gonna get to, or that you're getting sick of eating. I haven't had freezer-burnt food in a long rear end time. ElectricSheep fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Nov 10, 2023 |
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Nov 10, 2023 13:14
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Just lower your standards OP. Little bit of mold is fine! Cut around it. I also don't buy meat, so there's a whole word of food going bad I'm not familiar with anymore.
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Nov 10, 2023 13:42
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Nov 10, 2023 14:26
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I can relate. I lived with the most rancid slobbish rear end in a top hat for years, I took lots of war horror pics. When I finally got away I had no idea how to cook because I had to eat McDonald's every day. It takes time. Finding a few simple recipes to do frequently you can get a good hang on spoilage and cook times. You'll always have something spoil if you aren't shopping for every meal. I cook for 2 and you sometimes have ground meat that went off a week before its expiration. Hardy veggies are always nice, stuff like potatoes and onions take ages to go bad just hanging out on the counter. E: oh yeah we also love rice, buy a 10lb bag, won't spoil and you can use it for tons of stuff. Grey Cat fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Nov 10, 2023 |
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Nov 10, 2023 14:57
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buglord posted:
You can schedule in-person sessions with Mark through his website and he is surprisingly gentle despite how rough his hands are.
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Nov 10, 2023 15:15
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Also if you bought a bunch of fresh veggies and gently caress up like I do and not cook them don’t forget you can always just make veggie soup
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Nov 10, 2023 15:17
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Also, expiration dates are not all the same. Some are "best by" dates, meaning, you can use it after it might not just taste as good. Also, just because the milk has an expiration date on, it does not mean it expires on that date. I've milks stay good for a long time after the date. I've also milks go bad well before the date.
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Nov 10, 2023 15:19
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redshirt posted:Also, expiration dates are not all the same. Some are "best by" dates, meaning, you can use it after it might not just taste as good. I habitually sniff the milk container every time I pour it. You take a swig of rancid milk and it changes you. This technique does get you past the expiration pretty often.
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Nov 10, 2023 15:25
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reiterating the posters who said shop frequently (if you can) and realize there’s a learning curve as to what and how much to buy. I always keep onions, carrots, celery and bell peppers for veg, I buy mushrooms, potatoes, etc. when I need them. cans of beans in the pantry, maybe corn and peas but I like those better fresh. broccoli, asparagus, brussel sprouts, green beans, zucchini I buy the day or day before I cook them. always have garlic and garlic powder on hand, also the minced garlic that you keep in the fridge. and a block of fresh Parmesan cheese, freshly grated is a huge step above the store bought cellulose stuff.
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Nov 10, 2023 15:25
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ElectricSheep posted:Also also, get a Food Saver or some other type of vacuum-seal food bag system so that you can cook and freeze leftovers you aren't gonna get to, or that you're getting sick of eating. I haven't had freezer-burnt food in a long rear end time.
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Nov 10, 2023 15:39
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Just eat everything the day you buy it
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Nov 10, 2023 15:40
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I use a random app my aunt recommended to organize recipes but my mom has a composition notebook that’s older than I am for hers. Whatever it may be, if you follow a recipe and it turns out well (or you want to give it another go), find a method of saving it. It’s helped me improvise other dishes as well. Don’t be afraid to gently caress up. Took a lot of janky loaves before I got good at baking bread. Also get an oven thermometer, or like any other thermometer because the one for your oven is probably a bit off.
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Nov 10, 2023 15:43
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Buy air tight dry bins Get a rice bin going - at least 5lb bags of brown, basmati, white, etc. Get a lentil bin going - red lentils, green lentils, etc Get a bean bin going - 5lb bags of garbanzos, navy, black, pinto, etc I keep everything in its bag but then contained within the larger bins. Very OCD about my dry goods storage, and I'm not even in the south or anywhere buggy. Emphasis on getting disciplined with basic prep stuff though. Like you can buy canned black beans and dump them in your recipe OR you can take the time to soak even cheaper dry beans. Or you can buy a pressure cooker and spend a Sunday cooking dry beans and freezing them in 1-pound bags. And then for us its just kinda like your staple meals that you get you through the week don't even need recipes. Often recipes you get from the internet make you waste money - you need to think for yourself. "A curry situation" or "burrito bowl thing" or "protein + potatoes" are some examples of our regular "recipes."
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Nov 10, 2023 16:17
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I used to have a far too tiny fridge with a token freezer compartment that could just barely fit a loaf of bread and a box of frozen peas at the same time so I went shopping basically every day and it sucked so much. Do not listen to people telling you it's an acceptable way of life. Having a good fridge with actual freezer space is a godsend. Make proper use of the compartments, use air tight containers, accept that everything is packaged for families and not for singles. Some stuff will spoil before you get to finish it, but you get a feel for what to prioritize soon enough. Dry stuff like rice and pasta keep forever. Smaller jars / cans of sauce can be added for a quick and easy meal when you're feeling lazy. As for cook books, your best bet would probably be ones aimed at students, those tend to be a bit simpler with less ingredients needed. There's also absolutely nothing wrong with buying prepackaged stuff and spicing it up a notch with some extra fresh ingredients added.
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Nov 10, 2023 16:38
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Try to buy fresh things one at a time and not in packages. Since cooking for myself, when I shop I look for loose veggies. Even if it's slightly less ideal on a dollars per pound basis, you make up for that fact because you simply aren't using as much. You can reuse many things, and extend the life of veggies, by learning to pickle them or make soup out of them.
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Nov 10, 2023 16:40
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Plan out meals for 3-4 days in advance and just buy ingredients for those meals.
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Nov 10, 2023 16:46
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Always add more garlic and/or paprika to your dishes.
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Nov 10, 2023 16:49
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There's two practical choices to cooking with perishables that depend where you are and what your capacity to go shopping is. You either do a big shop and meal prep for 1week, up to 2-3 or more months, by cooking a shitload and freezing leftovers like homemade TV dinners. Or you shop every 2-3 days. Meal prepping is often looked down on by variety eaters but that's avoidable if you organize and do meal prep for a month, letting you alternate your home made TV dinners along with some staple meals. As alluded to by others you can also just ignore perishables, get big bins of rice and noodles, and a pantry of canned fruits and veggies and a chest freezer of more fruits, veggies (learn which fruits and veggyirs can well like tomatoes vs freeze well like broccoli) and proteins, and just make varyingly combined rice and noodles dishes. 100s of different meals made of foods that don't go bad for years, turning into 1000s if you consider fresh accents like splurging on some eggs for fried rice or carbonara.
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Nov 10, 2023 17:03
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What you should focus on OP is cooking techniques, what goes well with what and how flavours combine is a thing you get with experience. Once you know how to make a good onion soup for example you know enough to make just about any other kind of soup or sauce.
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Nov 10, 2023 17:04
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 20:14 |
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Also pesto is just amazing for adding fresh flavours to starches(or salads or tomato sauce) and incredibly easy to just grind in large quantities, divide to containers and freeze. Good for about three weeks and you'll finish it much quicker than that, you glutton.
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Nov 10, 2023 17:08
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