Hate cooking

Post Reply New Topic

40 years old
Live alone
Age 18, cooked/baked: bread, spaghetti, rice, some other things like that

Hate cooking. But earn minimum wage and not enough money to buy prepared foods all the time. Also don't want to gain weight. Manual labor job. Have to eat something that makes me physically stronger and faster and energetic.

Last week, got tired of eating frozen vegetables (microwaved). But frozen vegetables are easy to prepare and cheaper than alternatives.

Hate cooking

What are the alternatives to cooking?

I don't much like cooking either, most of the time. I don't know any cheap way of avoiding it completely, so I just minimise the labour time as best I can, by cooking large batches and cold-storing portions. I also stick to a very few recipes to keep things simple and reliable. I'm used to those recipes now so I don't have to think very much about them. I suppose I'm lucky that I don't much mind having only a small number of choices about what to eat.

I like grapes. They're the least messy fruit I know about, so there's very little cleaning up necessary. I don't eat any other fruit. I also like raw salads with spinach, olive oil, grated carrots, chopped walnuts, grated cheese, and cherry tomatoes.

Of course it's all a compromise. In an ideal world I'd just press a button and the food would appear ready to eat. But that's impossible.

Besides the obvious expensive options like restaurants/takeout/delivery etc & batch cooking, I think some automated appliances help simplify things. Rice cooker cooks rice perfectly. Air fryer can cook a lot of things by just pushing a few buttons to set temperature and time. Can set a timer on a regular oven, too.

I have a daughter who swears by her slow cooker/crock pot. All you have to do is toss stuff in, make sure the temp is right, and ignore it for hours while it does its thing.

^
Yes slow cookers are good for that. I don't like having to cook things "by inspection" where I have to keep stirring and checking the food. And when I use conventional saucepans on hotplates, the food tends to stick to the bottom of the container and burn, hence the tedious stirring. In practice I use both, and when setting up a new recipe, one of the first things I do is to find out the best setting and cooking time. Then I always use the same containers for the same recipe, so that the times and settings I've figured out will remain accurate and appropriate.

Microwave ovens are also good at not burning things, but one downside I've noticed is this: if I've been using it at full power for a while, it'll quietly start cycling the power off and on. I guess that's to avoid overdriving itself and burning out, but it also means that I don't always know that when I set it to full power for x minutes then I'll actually get that. Depends whether I'm using it from cold or whether I've just been cooking something else in it. So it's not exactly repeatable and it's not easy to predict how much it'll underperform.

In my experience, most people turn hotplates up way too far. Gentle heat reduces the chances of burning and boiling over, and the need for stirring. The cooking times will be longer, but that's often better, because you get more free time between the steps. I hate anything that needs cooking for between 1 and 4 minutes because it's hard to get anything else done in such short time, so I end up standing there waiting.