

Does today's XKCD describe you? - calvarez
http://www.clinkclank.net/getcooking/
If so, can you take 3 minutes to answer a quick survey on why you want to cook more often?  (You'll be helping a side project of mine and I'm happy to return the favor.)
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joh6nn
this used to describe me, but my brother-in-law turned me on to doing all of
my cooking on one day of the week, and freezing everything. this has several
advantages (and one major disadvantage):

cons:

    
    
      * you lose pretty much an entire day cooking

pros:

    
    
      * don't have to cook when i get home from work
      * everything i eat now is a real meal,
        (including bag lunches for work, i just
        grab something out of the freezer, and by the
        time lunch time roles around, it's thawed and ready to go)
      * i'm wasting a lot less food/money, because the
        ingredients get used almost as soon as i buy them,
        and the food goes straight into the freezer instead
        of lingering in the fridge
      * i'm (slowly) learning to really cook

~~~
InclinedPlane
Freezing meals is a smart way to go if you live alone and can't cook meals
that get mostly eaten in the same day.

Most people don't know that the frozen meals they see in stores are typically
low quality not because of the nature of frozen foods but because of the
expectations of the market and the need to preserve frozen food for long
periods of time. If you're cooking on your own then you can use higher quality
ingredients and you can avoid the compromises needed for mass-produced, highly
preserved foods (meals that will be preserved just fine for up to a month in
your freezer are not necessarily suitable for being mass-produced or for being
preserved for months to years).

~~~
joh6nn
actually, i think it's the kind of system that just works well, period, as
long as you can devote an entire day to cooking. i actually live with my
fiancee, and the practice has become go shopping one day, do all our cooking
the next. we just setup a laptop somewhere in the kitchen, and either stream
music or stuff off the netflix instant queue. it's done good things for our
diet, our budget, and our relationship

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retroafroman
Yes, it does. I'm a young bachelor, and I actually run through this exact
scenario every several months. Right now I'm in the point where a few months
has passed and I'm thinking of cooking again. During lunch today, I saw an
advertisement for pasta primavera and thought to myself, "Wow, I should
totally make some of that for Wed night when that girl wants to hang out."

I couldn't think of a real clever solution to the problem besides bundling the
necessary fresh ingredients into portions that would feed one or two people.
This is pretty much what a meal in a box type thing already does. Perhaps
someone can come up with a better solution for this pain point.

~~~
sophacles
There are a few strategies I use.

1\. Dinner parties. Nothing formal, just invite people over for food. I am
pretty well compensated, so while I spend a little more than is strictly
necessary, it is less than eating out all the time, and I can share tasty
meals with friends. Further, costs can be amortized by having others bring
dishes, and you'll start getting in dinner invites too.

2\. Know lots of recipes and variations for a few ingredients. This helps with
the "too much" problem, as you can use stuff quickly without getting bored.
When you add new ingredients to your repertoire add them with depth.
Eventually you will start learning how things work together and just whip up
stuff pretty easily. A good way to get into this is make it a game -- try to
figure out how to make a tasty meal from say, only things on shelf #2 or have
each friend bring one ingredient and it is your job to make a dinner.

3\. Similar to the previous one: get good at what I call "ingredient chains".
There are lots of these, but a classic example: Buy a chicken, roast it. eat
it hot. Take some of the meat for sandwiches this week. Take the bones and
bits and pieces of meat and make a stock out of them for soup.

4\. Don't worry about throwing away food. Seriously, I throw away ingredients
all the time... sometimes I just don't get around to using them, or I change
my mind. This is still so much more frugal than eating out, that it is worth
it (within reason of course).

5\. Buy the good stuff.. reasoning here is the same as #4. I can pay $100 for
groceries per week, getting the quality stuff, and still spend less than
eating out at all but the crappiest fast food places.

None of these are clever solutions, but they are a different approach to the
situation that obviate the problem by either eliminating the problem via base
assumptions or by changing the problem to "not actually a problem".

hth :)

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RiderOfGiraffes
I can't find a way to submit the form. It just stops after the HIGHEST
priority question and has no scroll bar, no sensible end, and no submit
button. Using Chrome something-or-other on Windows XP something-or-other.

To answer the questions, I cook pretty much every day. I hate it, but it's the
fastest, cheapest and healthiest way to eat. It's even faster than take-away,
but I wish I never had to cook again. If I had money that's one of the things
I'd happily spend it on.

EDIT: OK, now I can complete the form, but you ask if you can contact me for a
follow up, but give no way to give you my contact details!

~~~
calvarez
man, I suck today. It's added now. If you are interested I'm at cindy at
clinkclank.net

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pamelafox
I only started cooking a few months ago, and discovered the secret to
delicious daily meals: 1) a piece of meat (steak, salmon, etc.) 2) a handful
of veggies (asparagus, broccoli, green beans) 3) sea salt + pepper 4) a frying
pan

You can get a fair number of unique combinations out of that, and it only
takes 10 minutes to get your meal cooked (6 minutes for the veggies, 4 for the
meat).

Maybe I'll get bored of it eventually, but for now, I'm shocked-and-awe'd that
I can so simply make food that tastes so damn good in my mouth.

~~~
joh6nn
were you trying to taste food in a different orifice previously?

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lukesandberg
Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often
buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but
specifically. Bananas area good example. I love bananas but when it comes to
grabbing one in the morning there is like a mental block about it, so
eventually the bananas go bad....

What somebody needs to do is create a "No Ingredient Left Behind" product that
will yell at you to east the tomatoes before they go bad.

~~~
kd0amg
My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software
to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use
these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date
would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.

~~~
calvarez
Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or
that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?

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kd0amg
Both are actually pretty frequent, but with a grocery store a block or so
away, the latter is more of a problem. The current instance is chicken broth,
a baguette, and spinach (and I returned home this afternoon to discover that
somebody had bought more spinach), which are probably just going to get used
for separate dishes.

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slater
Cindy: Might wanna remove that html {overflow:hidden}

Your site doesn't scroll, obscuring the rest of that form (OSX 10.6, FFox
4.0b10)

~~~
calvarez
Thanks - done!

~~~
charliepark
Also, the "powered by" link is taking up a column of space the whole height of
the page. I was clicking on one of the fields, and it redirected me to the
Wufoo home page.

If you can add inline CSS to the "powertiny" link element ... specifically,
position:absolute;right:0;bottom:0; it should get it out of the way.

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crux
I am a little skeeved out but the unattributed (and presumably unauthorized
use of a free hacker webcomic for advertising purposes.

