Food and Cooking

Sustainable cooking is a function of the amount of time you're willing to commit to cooking and the tools you have at your disposal. A slow cooker, for example, can involve almost zero prep and very little time actively spent cooking (you toss it all in the pot and hit go). A much more involved meal which requires regular attention, on the other hand, might take less total time to cook, but more active time cooking.

I think the best way to provide advice is to get a grasp on a few important factors:

• Price sensitivity/budget
• How much time do you tolerate between starting cooking and eating the food (active cooking + all other time, such as time spent in the oven or slow cooker)?
• How much time do you tolerate where you are in the kitchen actively cooking or preparing ingredients?
• Do you have any food restrictions or preferences?
• How varied do you want your cooking to be? Are you okay with eating the same thing every day or want more variety?

I am not great at this, but I find these things helpful:

Cook before you're hungry. That's kind of a Captain Obvious line, but sometimes a meal can take more than 1/2 hour to cook and that's a long time when you're starving.

Have a limited menu. Find a few things you can stand eating on the regular. Example, I could probably eat meatloaf once every couple of weeks till I die. I keep a list of things like this so if I'm drawing a blank, I can look at it. It's funny how you forget.

Figure out how to make leftovers not be awful. Example, make meatloaf on a day you don't work so there's no time crunch to get dinner on the table. The next day a slice of meatloaf (microwaved or not) with toasted bread and mayo or whatever sauce you like makes a good sandwich with a salad. The salad doesn't have to be fancy. It can be lettuce and dressing. No time crunch if you rinse the lettuce while the bread is toasting. The next day you could make spaghetti. It's easy and cheap and you can throw cubed meatloaf into the sauce to be "meatballs". If you have two days off in a row, make two different meals those nights and rotate the leftovers to last a week without getting bored.

Make a Taco Bell system. By this I mean think about the Taco Bell menu. Most of their menu items are made from the same ingredients, but are prepared differently.

I make something called burrito soup which is browned ground beef, undrained canned green chilis, taco bell sauce (you can buy it bottled at the store), undrained ranch style beans, undrained black beans, undrained canned corn, and whatever else is in the fridge that would work. Seems like it's all cans, bottles, and beef, but it's really good. Sometimes I'll throw in fresh bell peppers or other veg. Anyway, a batch of this is great for burrito filling, served in a bowl with tortilla chips for scooping, in a bowl with extra milk to make a soup, on top of rice, on top of a salad to make a "bowl". All of these are heated up, btw. One thing is used in a bunch of different ways. Sour cream and guac make this extra special.

Find a "burrito soup" that fits your tastebuds and run with it.

Keep "fast food" in your freezer. It's no big deal to keep a pizza in the freezer (or something else you know everyone will eat) for when you're too sick to cook or just aren't feeling it. It beats eating just chips for dinner or calling for food. I also try to keep the fruit bowl full for snacking. Being hungry will make you quit before you start. Go ahead and eat an orange while you're making dinner.

Bonus tip If you're cooking something that can be frozen, double it and stash some for another meal when you aren't in the mood to cook.

I doubt most people are good at this. Anyway, good luck.

For me, cooking at home is less about finding the time and more about decision fatigue. I still fail at this a lot, but on the days I’m successful it’s because I planned ahead of time what I’d be cooking for dinner. That way when dinner comes around it doesn’t require thought, just a bit of chopping.

I'm far too lazy to meal prep on my weekends. But I will choose 3-4 dinners for the week and write it down like a menu and get the ingredients I need for them. If I know it's going to be a crazy week, I will cut the vegetables immediately after grocery shopping that way I can just dump them in the pan or bowl or whatever when I'm cooking. Then I have options to choose from several different foods over the week.

I always make enough to have leftovers so I don't have to plan for lunches too.

Best of luck

I cook 6-7 nights a week for a household of four adults. I work a full-time job, but it's WFH so I don't have commute time. This is part of the strategy, but I could do and have done it while commuting to and from work each day as well.

Each Monday, I plan out the meals for the week. I write them down. The meals are based on ingredients we have on hand as well as things which are on sale from the local ads, or which someone from the household has requested.

If any ingredients are needed for the week which we don't have, they are added to a mutual shopping list and someone picks them up while they are out.

When I'm done with work, I relax for 30-60min and then it's time for cooking. I bring out all the ingredients for the meal and get them set up near my cooking station. I bring out pans, cutting boards, utensils - whatever I feel I will need.

I try to fill "dead" time with prep for other parts of the meal - that way time is used efficiently. Sometimes I'll rope one of the others into cutting veggies or doing other prep, but i usually like to fly solo. Just some music to keep me moving and maybe a beer.

As I'm cooking, I'm also cleaning up. Utensils which are no longer going to be used are getting rinsed and put into the dishwasher. Pans are getting rinsed and set aside for washing up later. Counters are getting wiped down as needed. The idea is to have as little to do at the end as possible.

After the meal is ready, if stuff needs to cool, that's a great time for a smoke out on the porch. Then back in to eat.

Rinse and repeat. I enjoy cooking, it keeps me centered at the end of the day, and a good meal at least once per day is important. The key things I have learned are mainly to prep everything in advance which you can, to clean as you go, and to buy ingredients which overlap for multiple meals in a week.

Bonus: Make a few extra helpings and freeze them. Freezer containers are cheap, and it's generally only a small extra cost for the additional food. Then you have ready to go meals when you don't feel like cooking.

When my wife and I were both working we faced this challenge. We meal prepped on the weekends, portioning the meals out and storing them in our freezer. You could, also, just cook 3 days worth of meals to be frozen and have grab and go type stuff in the fridge (like salads, sandwiches, etc.). We, also, would choose Saturday to have our main meal out and Sunday we would make a pizza (My wife made a crust from scratch or sometimes we would use a pre-made store bought crust) with fresh ingredients.

I'm a big fan of instant pots. chili, curry, risotto, etc all without any prep other than chopping.

Our primary motivation was weight loss ahead of our wedding, but the guiding principle should transfer: make it super easy. We’ve found that the lowest effort method will win out over all our intentions, so we’re rolling with it.

An example: chicken curry with rice. Also a disclaimer, we have a couple of appliances that make stuff slightly more convenient but I’ll put the alternative down too.

It takes around a minute to wash the rice then chuck it in the rice cooker. you can get microwave rice cooker pots or just use a pot on the stove. Once you’ve got the weights and timings dialled in this produces perfect rice just as you’re going to serve with no interaction during.

Then cook the chicken breast and set a timer for when the rice will be ready. We use an air fryer, but used to use the oven.

5 minutes before the chicken is done whip up the curry sauce.

Then it’s just serving - rice goes in the bowls, slice the chicken and put on top, then pour on the sauce.

Whole process looks like this:

• start rice cooking
• start chicken cooking, set timer for 25 minutes
• go do something else for 20 minutes
• start heating the sauce
• when chicken timer goes ding, put the rice in bowls
• slice the chicken, add to bowl
• pour on curry sauce

Total cook time is around 26 minutes. Total interaction time is around 10 minutes.

It’s also super cheap.

Edit: forgot to mention that you can cook whatever veggies you want in the same thing as the chicken and don’t need to adjust your timings

As someone else mentioned, decision fatigue is so real for me. Millions of recipes out there, everyone recommends cooking a given meal a bit differently, and then reviews online have further suggestions. I cook enough to follow a recipe well but not enough to know how to cut through the noise.

I started out bouncing around to all the meal delivery services when they’d offer discounts. Try it for a bit, swap to another when the discount ended, swap back when they gave me a “come back” discount. All those services come with recipe cards so I’ve kept those and curated a little recipe book with our favorites. All the info for shopping and prep is right there for me. I guess it’s like a regular recipe book with extra steps, but it sure beats what I used to do with scouring the internet for too long and trying to read my phone while cooking.

I dunno if my life is easier because I'm a vegetarian or what but we mostly make our food and most of what we make is not time consuming. Steamed greens and carrots with boiled potatoes. Roasted veggies in the oven. Stir fries. Beans and whatever stewed in a crock pot with canned tomatoes.

For breakfast, oatmeal with chia seeds, hemp hearts, flax meal, sunflower seeds, peanut butter and fruit goes together real easy. Alternatively, frying some eggs and having the above things on toast instead of oatmeal.

Usually we make a bunch of stew or soup that will be used for lunch over several days. Cook like 4 cups of rice to go with it. Then for dinner, usually steamed stuff or perhaps roasted veggies or a stirfry with rice or noodles.

Homemade pizza is also pretty easy. It takes about 5 minutes to throw the dough together, then you can prepare whatever toppings you want while the dough rises for 45-60 mins. Takes ~10 min to bake when ready. I can post the recipe if anyone wants it but I'm sure you can find stuff online.

I'm a confident cook making food for two people in a small kitchen.

I wing it, but I'm making choices so that everything fits together and I have some recipe patterns that work well. I don't do meal prep. Most dinners double as a lunch.

A lot of what makes my cooking efficient only comes with practice. I know the timing of different things and cook accordingly to line stuff up. Rice in the pressure cooker takes 30 minutes. That kind of thing. Make choices so that stuff goes in parallel, or make one pot dishes.

I generally try to have a main dish, potentially a starch side if the main isn't, and a vegetable.

Some example meals:

• Mashed potatoes (steam in instant pot, mash with olive oil salt and water when ready), kjøttkaker (meatballs) which finish in a brown gravy, and some seasonal vegetable, maybe sauteed.
• Pasta, red sauce with vegetables in it (always an onion, maybe some other stuff), maybe ground meat or sardines. Sauce cooks in pan and then mixes with pasta
• Vaguely Thai curry (sauteed veggies, chicken, garlic ginger onions, curry paste, coconut milk), rice in the instant pot

We usually cook a large meal or two during the weekend. And will generally get two to three meals out of the dish.

We eat yogurt marinated chicken breast pieces cooked on a frying pan with curry sauce, alongside rice-cooker steamed veggies. We usually get 6 lbs of chicken, chop and marinate in an evening, then eat that for ~4-5 days; also keep on hand things like pasta and frozen meatballs for the days where we’ve run out of chicken but haven’t shopped yet. We allow ourselves to order food once or twice a month but no more; this usually happens on days where we’ve run out of chicken.

That both of us are totally cool with eating the same thing for months on end really helps cut down on cooking time. 😅

My fiancé and I both work and we usually get groceries for 1-2 days at a time and cook for the two of us most days of the week. For us there have been a few key elements to being able to cook after work:

• Find dishes that you like that take max 45 min to cook including prep.
• Once you each have a handful of go-to's (let's say 5-7), you can rotate between these on a regular basis. Of course some will be more suitable for lazy days than others.
• Be sure to update your short list when you feel it's getting boring to cook and eat the same things.
• It really helps to always have tortillas, pasta and rice in the house.

Hope some of this is helpful!

Meal prep! I cook once a week, enough to last me most of the week.

We usually go out for food once a week (unless we're having a hard month). Beyond that, it's usually the same 5–6 dishes over and over again.

We've got a tiny kitchen and a ¾ fridge - it can fit a pizza box if nothing's in the door. We'll do things like casseroles, or make enough pasta to fill a casserole dish just small enough to fit in the fridge for leftovers after meal 1. Salads can stretch them further and make each one different enough, and meals of something else in between switches it up quite nicely. A few minutes with some sealable bags and some dressings/condiments around can make marinades easy to make and to store in the freezer. Sunday is our usual meal prep day to prep some containerized lunch for the week while the other gets a dinner made to make leftovers ready to cook.

Everyone around us raises chickens so eggs are easy to come by. There's usually a quiche or two in the freezer in case we need a quickish meal and are both feeling too lazy for anything else.

We use and sous vide or the instant pot. I can throw a steak in the sous vide we I leave in the morning and then finish it in the cast iron pan when I get home.

I used to love cooking, but have not had the time lately. I bought an Instant Pot and have been pleased so far. As other commenters have said, a pressure cooker is the magic solution here, but I do appreciate that mine also functions as a traditional slow cooker and air fryer. I live alone, so cooking once a week is normally enough to last most of the week (or more), so I usually find a recipe I like (usually just by searching "Instant Pot [whatever food sounds good]") and cook it on a weekday. I end up eating a lot of soups. I like soups.

What does “working full-time” mean for you?

How many hours are you away from home each day? I suspect everyone is answering with their view of what working full-time is, but it can be different depending on where you live, how long your commute is, if you work shifts, overtime, etc.

Just for reference, between last Monday and Tuesday I spent 90 hours at the office. Luckily exceptional, but no, I didn’t cook.

Also, leftovers can be great.

Using some prepared ingredients like already marinated chicken or precut veggies can help if you have a small kitchen. Also things like frozen pizza and bag salad is great when you don't feel like cooking and much cheaper than takeout. As far as meal planning I decide what I want to cook for the week and write it on a whiteboard on my fridge.

I do meal prep with some nicer meals on Sunday for three days.

On Wednesday I make some low-effort mealprep again, but with simpler recipes (mostly stir-fry noodles).

This means no boney meat here for protein. Only stuff like canned tuna or chicken breast. Tofu is also an easy protein source. For vegetables I only use the food processor, because cutting with knives is too slow. For carbs I use noodles.

If I am too exhausted on Wednesday for even that, I just eat some oats with milk with a protein shake on the side and some vitamin pills.

the crock pot is a lifesaver here, and I've learned a couple tricks to make it even better. The go-to example that I have is throwing some chicken and some french onion soup mix in there before I got to work, then shredding it when I get home. What you end up with is juicy, flavorful chicken but in an almost entirely generic way such that you can use it on almost anything. Dinner salads, mayo-based chicken salad, toss it in some oil w brown garlic to go over pasta, sammiches, whatever. Any crock pot meal is gonna be your friend here, but this one is something that I make before I have a plan for it just because I'll almost always find something good to do with it and it takes literally less than a minute of actual work from me.

By cooking meal types that are fast, like stir fries.

Frozen Costco foods heated up and put together. Put some (heated) frozen broccoli in a box of mac and cheese. Eat fish sticks with a bagged salad. How about a pre-prepared frozen Asian noodle dish with veggies? If you’re careful about the nutrition stuff, it’s a real step up from takeout in terms of health and saving money. I know because I only stepped up and started doing it a few months ago. Good luck.

Poorly. There's a reason so many people are either malnourished or obese.

I just buy premade meals from Trader Joe’s. Not necessarily their frozen foods, but their salads, wraps, and burritos.

I think prior posts cover things pretty well, but I wanted to add a couple of ideas/thoughts:

1. Single pot meals can be very convenient and save prep and cleaning space. The instant pot is great because it can sauté, steam, slow cook, pressure cook.
2. Sheet pan meals. Foil over the pan, maybe a bowl for mixing - easy, single pan, space efficient, minimal clean up.

Have simple recipes on hand to lean on. Simple fried rice or pasta recipe with no more than 5 ingredients. Chop, all in the pan, wait 10 mins. Done.

On super lazy days I just have freezer pizza. I don't care...

So the prep is have onions, have rice and penne, then have some ingredients. Mine are roasted aubergines, red peppers all in oil, chuck them all in the pan. Or on the fried rice side peas, sweet corn, eggs maybe.

I'm terrible. If I'm cooking for myself? I won't make anything that takes longer to prepare or clean up than it takes to eat. LOL.

Breakfast, generally, is a small can of whole kernel corn mixed in with a can of chowder.

Lunch is a couple of sandwiches.

Dinner maybe a couple of burgers. Sometimes a big salad.

Now, cooking for OTHER people... that's a different deal. :) But, yeah, it takes planning, sometimes a week in advance.

https://imgur.com/uGoBsq9.jpg

I meal prep on Sunday but I'm also ok with eating the same thing 4 or 5 days in a row. If you aren't ok with that then meal prepping is going to be a lot more work. I also strongly suggest making extra and freezing some in individual portions so if you do run out of food, or just really aren't digging what you made, you can grab something out of the freezer.

And let's not underestimate the power of making your own frozen junk food. Like frozen burritos? Make a pile of burritos (which is great because you can put exactly what you like and make them healthier) then wrap them individually in tin foil and freeze. Make a frozen pizza in a square casserole dish and freeze pieces. Lasagna also freezes really well. It's a lot of work up front but it will keep for months so you have something easy to grab when you want it.

You can also precut things like vegetables if you will want to eat veggies later in the week, or if you'll want to cook something fresh later but know you won't do it if you have to spend a lot of time on it.

Edit: I forgot to say since it seems like storage space is an issue that you should make sure you have the most space efficient storage containers. A big circular container might not be as good as a rectangular one of the same volume that you could stack multiples on top of each other.

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.

If I actually wanted to make an event out of it and didn't have plans for Sunday, then the classic Sunday meal prep strategy applies.

But many times, I also feel lazy or have stuff going on so I try to find one day in the week where I can cook some type of larger effort item that takes more than a couple hours and do the rest on other days. Mind you, I live alone so YMMV. But for example, I could spend one day with the high effort portion of a main dish. This would classically be some type of protein but I don't always want to limit myself to that mentality. Just anything that I'd be most excited to eat.

If I don't have the time to make any other sides, I won't. I'll have a partial meal that day and do other stuff while I put the rest in the fridge. Then the next day I'll cook a different side or two. If I do it right, I'll have a rotating menu of options in the fridge where I cook new dishes to replenish ones that are about to be gone.

This way, I don't need to dedicate a whole day to cooking, and I can still have fun with cooking in smaller portions and still have the evening to do other things. My meals can also be a mix of various sides which can stagger. This is not always the case as I do find myself just clearing things out frequently to start from a fresh palette of foods. But just a different take on the meal prep that I personally find is manageable.

I make sure I always have a fallback meal, something that I always have the ingredients for. For me it's yellow rice and beans. Could be spaghetti or other simple to make and keep in stock meals

For me, it's all about making easy meals and making a lot of it. Part of that is making meals that don't require a ton of dishes. Soups are pretty good for that and so are things like fried rice. If you can make enough food for leftovers, that'll help a ton because you can skip cooking a few meals.

I relied a lot on using a slow cooker. I planned out what meals to have each week and I planned to make enough to have leftovers. I often made a new meal on Mondays and Wednesdays, leftovers on Tuesdays and Thursdays.