Food and Cooking

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How are you able to cook while working full time through the week? Do you have some kind of strategy? How do you plan your food? (self.food)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Templa to c/food

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We want to break out of this cycle of ordering delivery but at the same time, cooking everyday has been a challenge. We also have been trying to develop some sort of routine where we meal prep on the weekends but we live in an apartment with a really small kitchen so cooking and storing food for 5 days doesn't seem doable. Maybe cook for 3 days and then prepare the ingredients to cook again on Wednesday?

I'd appreciate if you could share your strategies and experience. The goal here is to eat healthy and good food.

Edit: Thank you everyone for all your contributions! I am a little overwhelmed by the number of replies so I if I do not reply to you please do now feel bad!!

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[–] sanjuro 2 points 1 year ago

I'm going to tell you exactly how I do it, in excruciating detail. Sorry in advance.

I cook 4-5 nights a week, and that's with a fairly demanding job, wife, two small kids. From when the kids are down at ~7.30 to about 8.15 or 8.30, I'm cooking. We've had a good, home cooked dinner most nights before 9pm. We do frequently get a delivery on Friday night but I think that's no sin.

The principles that make it work are:

Limit experimentation and get good at your recipes. Everybody knows that the prep and cook times on recipes are bullshit... until you actually master the recipe. Most of the stuff in our weeknight dinner rotation consists of meals I have cooked many, even dozens or hundreds of times. I can do the prep quickly and almost absent-mindedly while listening to a podcast. I can answer emails or chat during the cooking. And the dish comes out reliably great and quickly.

This doesn't mean that I'm not trying new stuff! But I try perhaps one new recipe a week. And on weekends, I'm doing big "project" cooks where I might be in the kitchen all day. But weeknights are for shipping quality food fast, and familiarity with the recipe makes that work.

Make a meal plan that uses ingredients intelligently. I use Paprika Recipe Manager to plan meals and manage my grocery list. I'm just cooking for two people on weeknights, so I make sure that I have a meal plan that uses everything in the shop. I only need half a block of feta for Baked Feta Pasta on Tuesday night, so I'll do Orzo with Spinach and Feta on Wednesday night. I get two grocery deliveries a week so I have fresh ingredients on hand and can limit waste; I make a meal plan in Paprika before every shop.

Do a big Sunday night cook and eat the leftovers Monday night. I have less time pressure on a Sunday night; if you do as well, do a big batch of something like bolognese sauce or lentil soup that you can reheat for dinner on Monday, when you might not feel like cooking.

Find a recipe developer you like and stick with them. This is kind of an adjunct of point number 1, I suppose, but once you find a cook whose food you like, make more of their stuff. Some of the tricks you pick up for adjusting or speeding up their recipes will frequently cross-apply to other stuff they do. For me, I like Melissa Clark and Kenji Lopez-Alt from the New York Times, the folks from the Woks of Life, and Daniel Gritzer from Serious Eats.

I enjoy cooking a lot, so I am probably willing to spend more time thinking about it than most. But I spend perhaps an hour a week doing meal planning and shopping online for groceries, and maybe 2-3 hours total doing weeknight cooking. That's a pretty good return on investment for me.