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Oct. 5th, 2011 09:13 pm( Deutsch )
( 日本語 )
I was talking over cooking while you're doing twenty other things in your life with a couple people recently, and it got me thinking of all the things I've learned while cooking and doing twenty other things with my life lately. I like to think I eat pretty healthy. I get fast food maybe two meals a week, only one of which (and sometimes none of which) yield leftovers, and the rest of the time it's cooking and scrounging for myself. So, you may be interested or you may be bored to tears and scroll on past, but here are some of the lessons I've learned while cooking and doing twenty other things (like studying four languages, writing, holding down a day job, doing crafty stuff, gaming, watching tv, exercising, sleeping...)
(And if you're interested in healthy snacks/quick meals I've discovered, leave me a note with that, too, because that's what I was originally going to post about. Then I got sidetracked.)
* You don't have to be Superwoman. Or Martha Stewart. This is not about being the perfect cook on 20 minutes a day, this is about making meals YOU will eat. And the other members in your household, hopefully. Learning that took me a lot of time and a little bit of wasted food, but eventually I got over this need to know how to do ALL THE THINGS. Learn from my mistake! Don't abruptly decide you're going to eat healthy and therefore must cook everything from scratch. That said...
* Find 10 recipes you're pretty sure you'll eat. Steal 'em out of a restaurant if you want, there's a lot of websites devoted to replicating restaurant recipes. This is why I have whiskey chicken sauce. But find 10 recipes that you're pretty sure you'll eat, before you start experimenting with changing anything else about your cooking habits. Keep the ingredients list short, to start, especially if you don't do a lot of cooking but you're looking to change that.
* Make the recipes. Trial and error! It's a fantastic thing. Print them out and scribble your notes all over them. Be careful not to get food stains on anything you want to read later.
* Are these recipes you'll want to go back to again and again? When I first started this I used a Dungeons&Dragons metaphor: I had to make a recipe three times before I achievedSpell Recipe Mastery, and then I could Inscribe it in my SpellCookBook. About half of these are stir fry. A quarter of the rest are soups. But they're recipes I know I'll eat again and again and again, so they're useful to have down. And once you have those...
* See what ingredients you're using a lot of. NOW you can do that thing all those websites tell you to do, and start buying in bulk. If you can't afford to buy in bulk and use a little at a time (because yes, overall it's cheap, but the initial outlay for bulk buying can be really fucking expensive on a limited budget) then buy ONE ingredient in bulk and the rest individually. The one that will store the longest and that you use the most of. Then, over time, start buying other things in bulk. Spices and grains are easiest, tins of things are possibly second easiest but then when you open the tin you have to store the rest. Tupperware containers are your friends. Fridge/Freezer Tetris is a good skill to have.
* Develope your mise. Mise en place is a fancy French way of saying I Know Everything Is Where I Can Handily Get To It. Having your spice rack out where you can glance at it and go "Crap! I'm out of ginger!" is useful, but only if you have enough counter space/wall space. Me, I have two spice racks on the counter that I can spin and glance at and a shelf full of bottles under the counter. No, not those kinds of bottles. Giant bottles of low-sodium soy sauce and mirin (expensive in small amounts but, again, remember the bulk?) and vinegar are towards the back, smaller bottles of everything are towards the front. I open my recipe book, see what bottles I need, pull them out and set them on the counter. Mix liquids and spices, throw it on a pan/in a pot, cook. Done.
* Prep, if you can stand it. I just cooked dinner in 30 minutes, half of that was waiting for the rice. Take a 2-4 hour period where you can stand to be on your feet and chopping things, and chop. Chop your veggies and stick 'em in the freezer in single cooking-batch portions, if you're just going to cook them anyway you can let them freeze for a few days and then throw them in whatever you're making. I chop up 5-10 pounds of chicken and cook it on the weekends, then when I'm exhausted and I get home from work I don't go "fuck it I'm ordering pizza" anymore. I throw some chicken on the stove, splash some liquids and spices on it, boom dinner in 20. Hell, if I have avocado dip I slap some chicken and avocado and cheese on a slice of bread and I have one of those chicken-avocado-dip flatbread appetizers people keep offering. Dinner in 5, healthy, easy, I can fall over and watch an NCIS marathon.
Finally, the most important two rules:
* Take your time doing this. Don't immediately run around to all the local bulk grocery stores or what have you, just check out a store here or there on your way home from work/school/soccer practice/the gym/the dance studio/the strip club. I just recently discovered the best ever Asian food market near the local game store, and that they have bulk low sodium soy sauce and bulk mirin and bulk jasmine rice. I'm now saving about 50c per fluid ounce on soy sauce and 70c per fluid ounce on mirin. SCORE. I also saved a bunch of frustration by not going around to every place that sold mirin and comparing prices and freaking out about it, and then giving up on cooking and ordering chinese takeout for the next five years.
* Find the recipes you know you'll eat. Anything is much, much more better and much more fun when you enjoy the result, and if you go to all that effort and end up eating maybe a quarter of the food you make and tossing the rest because you can't bear to look at it anymore, it's a waste of food and a waste of effort and you'll just get frustrated and stop. Find the recipes before you do ANYTHING else. Then try them once or twice and see if you like them, if you know you can cook them (I STILL haven't mastered the art of making a crepe), and if you can stand to eat them pretty often. THEN do the comparison shopping, bulk buying, chopping for 4 hours and freezing everything in portions, etc. Then you can be pretty sure, when you've gone to all that effort, that you'll have a result you enjoy. Like tasty, zesty stir-fry chicken. Om nom nom.
(... my god I ramble.)
( 日本語 )
I was talking over cooking while you're doing twenty other things in your life with a couple people recently, and it got me thinking of all the things I've learned while cooking and doing twenty other things with my life lately. I like to think I eat pretty healthy. I get fast food maybe two meals a week, only one of which (and sometimes none of which) yield leftovers, and the rest of the time it's cooking and scrounging for myself. So, you may be interested or you may be bored to tears and scroll on past, but here are some of the lessons I've learned while cooking and doing twenty other things (like studying four languages, writing, holding down a day job, doing crafty stuff, gaming, watching tv, exercising, sleeping...)
(And if you're interested in healthy snacks/quick meals I've discovered, leave me a note with that, too, because that's what I was originally going to post about. Then I got sidetracked.)
* You don't have to be Superwoman. Or Martha Stewart. This is not about being the perfect cook on 20 minutes a day, this is about making meals YOU will eat. And the other members in your household, hopefully. Learning that took me a lot of time and a little bit of wasted food, but eventually I got over this need to know how to do ALL THE THINGS. Learn from my mistake! Don't abruptly decide you're going to eat healthy and therefore must cook everything from scratch. That said...
* Find 10 recipes you're pretty sure you'll eat. Steal 'em out of a restaurant if you want, there's a lot of websites devoted to replicating restaurant recipes. This is why I have whiskey chicken sauce. But find 10 recipes that you're pretty sure you'll eat, before you start experimenting with changing anything else about your cooking habits. Keep the ingredients list short, to start, especially if you don't do a lot of cooking but you're looking to change that.
* Make the recipes. Trial and error! It's a fantastic thing. Print them out and scribble your notes all over them. Be careful not to get food stains on anything you want to read later.
* Are these recipes you'll want to go back to again and again? When I first started this I used a Dungeons&Dragons metaphor: I had to make a recipe three times before I achieved
* See what ingredients you're using a lot of. NOW you can do that thing all those websites tell you to do, and start buying in bulk. If you can't afford to buy in bulk and use a little at a time (because yes, overall it's cheap, but the initial outlay for bulk buying can be really fucking expensive on a limited budget) then buy ONE ingredient in bulk and the rest individually. The one that will store the longest and that you use the most of. Then, over time, start buying other things in bulk. Spices and grains are easiest, tins of things are possibly second easiest but then when you open the tin you have to store the rest. Tupperware containers are your friends. Fridge/Freezer Tetris is a good skill to have.
* Develope your mise. Mise en place is a fancy French way of saying I Know Everything Is Where I Can Handily Get To It. Having your spice rack out where you can glance at it and go "Crap! I'm out of ginger!" is useful, but only if you have enough counter space/wall space. Me, I have two spice racks on the counter that I can spin and glance at and a shelf full of bottles under the counter. No, not those kinds of bottles. Giant bottles of low-sodium soy sauce and mirin (expensive in small amounts but, again, remember the bulk?) and vinegar are towards the back, smaller bottles of everything are towards the front. I open my recipe book, see what bottles I need, pull them out and set them on the counter. Mix liquids and spices, throw it on a pan/in a pot, cook. Done.
* Prep, if you can stand it. I just cooked dinner in 30 minutes, half of that was waiting for the rice. Take a 2-4 hour period where you can stand to be on your feet and chopping things, and chop. Chop your veggies and stick 'em in the freezer in single cooking-batch portions, if you're just going to cook them anyway you can let them freeze for a few days and then throw them in whatever you're making. I chop up 5-10 pounds of chicken and cook it on the weekends, then when I'm exhausted and I get home from work I don't go "fuck it I'm ordering pizza" anymore. I throw some chicken on the stove, splash some liquids and spices on it, boom dinner in 20. Hell, if I have avocado dip I slap some chicken and avocado and cheese on a slice of bread and I have one of those chicken-avocado-dip flatbread appetizers people keep offering. Dinner in 5, healthy, easy, I can fall over and watch an NCIS marathon.
Finally, the most important two rules:
* Take your time doing this. Don't immediately run around to all the local bulk grocery stores or what have you, just check out a store here or there on your way home from work/school/soccer practice/the gym/the dance studio/the strip club. I just recently discovered the best ever Asian food market near the local game store, and that they have bulk low sodium soy sauce and bulk mirin and bulk jasmine rice. I'm now saving about 50c per fluid ounce on soy sauce and 70c per fluid ounce on mirin. SCORE. I also saved a bunch of frustration by not going around to every place that sold mirin and comparing prices and freaking out about it, and then giving up on cooking and ordering chinese takeout for the next five years.
* Find the recipes you know you'll eat. Anything is much, much more better and much more fun when you enjoy the result, and if you go to all that effort and end up eating maybe a quarter of the food you make and tossing the rest because you can't bear to look at it anymore, it's a waste of food and a waste of effort and you'll just get frustrated and stop. Find the recipes before you do ANYTHING else. Then try them once or twice and see if you like them, if you know you can cook them (I STILL haven't mastered the art of making a crepe), and if you can stand to eat them pretty often. THEN do the comparison shopping, bulk buying, chopping for 4 hours and freezing everything in portions, etc. Then you can be pretty sure, when you've gone to all that effort, that you'll have a result you enjoy. Like tasty, zesty stir-fry chicken. Om nom nom.
(... my god I ramble.)
