back
83 comments
Why do people say it only takes 10 more minutes to make the food? They never factor in the time it takes to mentally prepare what you are going to make, go out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards. It is never just 10 more minutes.
> go out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards

Plan food for the whole week. Buy the ingredients in one trip. Clean as you cook.

Take one day a week to pre cook and freeze as much as possible. Cook three or four nights a week and eat leftovers for the remainder.

Build a repertoire of around ten meals you train yourself to bang out quickly and without thinking.

If you're cooking for your kids, make them help with the cooking and the clean up. (This is how I learned to cook.)

It's not rocket science.

Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this. When I'm done with a meal I have a few plates to clean and maybe one pot. That's it though. Everything goes away when I'm cooking. Scraps constantly thrown in the compost. It makes you much more mentally organized.

It's an obvious source of fluster and stress for my friends who don't. They never seem to figure it out either. Even when I do it for them.

Plus. Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it. Have a few proteins and a few cheeses and kitchen basics and you can improvise many things.

I figure the main difficulty lies in the "economics" part of "home economics". There's a huge efficiency difference between "cooking every day" and "only cooking occasionally". The only way to benefit from cooking at home is if you accept the ongoing cost of keeping essentials stocked. Then, you have to accept that you're going to waste a considerable amount of money and time while you're learning to cook. When I started, it sometimes took an hour or more to get food on the table because I hadn't figured out mise en place. Then, when I did, I ruined more than one dish because I lost track of things and something got overcooked or burnt. Finally, I've had a certain amount of food go to waste because of bad planning- perhaps I bought too much for the week, and then went shopping the next week without keeping the existing "stock" in mind.

These are all huge stumbling blocks- especially when it's so easy to just order take-out, which will at least be consistently edible, with the added bonus of not resulting in wasted ingredients.

What ultimately turned it around for me was when my girlfriend and I decided to fully commit to cooking at home, and went and spent $150 on groceries- but instead of buying ingredients, we bought pantry essentials. Flour, sugar, baling powder, baking soda, cornmeal, table and kosher salt, seasonings, potatoes, rice, pasta, and so on. Not to mention an initial stock of perishable basics: onions, garlic, lemons, limes, milk, butter, eggs, and cheese.

While it left a dent in our wallet at the time, it turned out to be a game-changer. We found that it was immensely easier to plan meals, because we already had half the ingredients of any given recipe.

This is a huge societal problem, in my opinion. I'm a pretty privileged dude when it comes down to it, and I was able to absorb the inefficiency of not being able to cook at home while still eating pretty healthy food. Furthermore, I was able to get over the hump of figuring out how to cook on my own, because I had the resources to absorb the inefficiency of learning how to do it.

What about the folks that can't?

> Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it.

Yes, this.

Always have the essentials stocked for your repertoire.

I grew up Italian-American, so we always had: onions, garlic, lemon, parsley, green peppers, sausage, tomato paste, anchovies, pasta, a few types of beans, grated cheese, olive oil, balsamic, etc.

Add some random meats or fresh vegetables, and you've got like, a hundred different recipes right there.

> Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this.

So many, many people don't understand this. My mom DRILLED this into my head as a kid. When I'm cooking with a friend who doesn't clean as they cook, I usually just hand them a glass of wine and kick them out of the kitchen.

I second everything you're saying, but I recognize that cleaning as you cook, composting, stocking your kitchen smartly, and improvising menus are very difficult skills for many people to attain.
We do try to follow the aggregation approach in our household but it still averages out as the same amount of preparation time per meal; time required to prepare ingredients scales linearly with their volume.

plus it wipes-out one of our only two days off together.

Unless you have huge freezer space that can accommodate multi-week batches there's no real way around that.

This has always been weird for me. After a few days, the vegetables are not as fresh. Why would you buy Friday's vegetables on Sunday?

Then again, I'd say 40% of our grocery budget is vegetables, if not more. Perhaps we're not the average case.

There's nothing wrong with making a quick stop in the middle of the week to pick up leafy greens and other perishables. But quick is the key.

I also really like frozen vegetables - green beans, broccoli and cauliflower florets, etc. I don't understand the stigma against them, particularly if they're organic.

Vegetables take longer than a week to become inedible. It's the week-and-a-half mark where they start to get limp and questionable. It's the two-week mark where they start to rot completely. If you have a problem with rotting vegetables (bought from the grocery store, fresh out of a garden are much more durable), then you're keeping them longer than you think.

Meat goes bad much more quickly. If I'm not eating meat within two--maaaybe three--days of purchasing it, I will freeze it.

Blue Apron has been a revelation for us in this regard. We went from rarely eating lousy food together to frequently eating great food together. Even when I try to recreate the meals on my own it's a hassle.

Also, something like this can really help: http://www.buzzfeed.com/christinebyrne/clean-eating-2015

Oh man, I wish I could up vote this comment more than once. I had never heard about this service but it looks perfect for me. I love to cook but hate grocery shopping or planning meals. I'm starting to get into other services like these. For example, I've started to use Trunk Club for clothing with good results.
I just sent you a free week to try it out. I've been a customer for close to 3 years and love it.
My bullshit detector is pinging wildly on the linked diet. Gluten-free, measured salt intake, 6 glasses of water per day, and the list goes on. No thanks — I'll take my diet advice from people that follow the science, not pop trends.
Fair enough but it's mostly just whole foods and quite a bit better than a lot of people's diets.
Have you considered meal prepping? It takes me maybe an hour to prep almost a weeks worth of food, which is lunch and dinner.

Well ill have to be honest, i just eat the same thing over and over again. Chicken, Quinoa (or rice if you want) Broccoli, potatoes, lentils.

My digestive system loves it.

I'm always kind of surprised when I encounter people that go purchase ingredients for nearly every meal. Then again, where I grew up, unless it was something like bread, milk, or eggs, going to the store meant driving half an hour. We had a chest freezer full of beef and broccoli and a a basement room full of jars of green beans and tomatoes. Not really a realistic option living in an apartment or a suburb with postage-stamp yards, I suppose

Lots of family time planting, weeding, picking and processing all those damned vegetables, though...

Every single one of the opinions in this thread, as well as that of the original article, are completely alien to me.

Dinner in my household is not difficult or fussy or unhealthy or expensive or bland.

We don't buy food every day, but we also don't buy processed food. We eat fresh meat and vegetables, with small servings of simple carbohydrates, going to the grocery store once a week. Our trips come out to about $100 total, which is about $2/meal per person.

I make dinner from scratch almost every night. I design it to leave leftovers for lunch the next day. It takes no more time to make four servings than two for most things. This means that the time I spend on dinner saves time on lunch.

Once a week, I make a meal designed to leave a LOT of leftovers, like a roast chicken or tacos or chili. Roast chicken takes a long time to cook, but takes almost no prep-time. Tacos take a little prep time, but almost no time to cook. Chili takes a lot of prep time, a lot of cooking time (if you want to do it right), but makes so damn much that we freeze half so we don't burn out on eating it for the entirety of the week.

And don't get me wrong: we don't eat the same thing every night. I'm somewhat of a fussy eater. I don't mean there are only a few things that I will eat, I mean I am very intolerant of poorly prepared food. We eat extremely well in my house.

Oh yeah, there are nights where I say to myself, "damn, I'm just too tired to make anything special". That's when we eat the leftover, frozen chili. Or I dice up the leftover chicken from the roast and make a chicken salad out of it and we have sandwiches. Or we have tacos a second night, because we freakin' love tacos (I could eat tacos for every meal, and I know this because I have done it before).

Eating well doesn't mean complexity, it doesn't mean expense. Simple food, the right symphony of spices, and the correct cooking method. It's no different than programming.

So you have someone to do the dishes? Not everyone has children or someone else around to do it for them. There's also the extra laundry it makes if you don't use paper napkins/placemats. It's nice to have the time to do it, but it's not the quickest thing you can do in an evening.
We have a dishwasher and run it once every other day. The pots have to be washed by hand, but if you aren't burning your food like a newb, pots are the easiest thing to clean because they're optimized for surface area versus volume.

Hell, some things like knives and cutting boards, I clean while I'm cooking. While I'm waiting for something to finish roasting or frying, I'm already cleaning my work area. Usually, the only dishes that are left over are plates, forks, and glasses.

And it's part of the day. Brushing your teeth takes time. Taking a shower takes time. Getting dressed takes time. You have to decide that you are a person who takes time to cook, not spend 15 more minutes on Twitter.

I'm not some rural hippy who has no real job, living off of the land, disconnected from the pace of life. We live the DC metro area. And by that, I don't mean we live in a mansion in Herndon or Reston, I mean we live in an a small apartment in Alexandria. I'm the CTO of a technology consulting firm. We have only one car between my wife and me, which she drives, and I take public transit everywhere.

Perhaps I'm revealing my ill-breeding, but people actually use placemats on a regular basis?

If you don't feel like doing the dishes every day, you can just stack them up and do them once a week...

This sounds more-or-less like how I started cooking when I was 18 (2004), in the first year of university.

We probably had a bit more "bland" — I couldn't help being British — but we'd also go shopping once a week, cook most evenings, and vary between short/long prep/cooking time things. We'd sometimes use semi-prepared foods, (British-)Indian curry pastes were used relatively often, but something like a "make tacos kit" was expensive for what it contained, and only used once or twice before we'd work out how to make it ourselves.

Also, being four 18 year olds, we were never able to make leftovers last until the next day :-D

(None of this was unusual in Britain; /not/ doing this was unusual.)

I think it's all about habit forming. Our household mirrors your description.
Completely anecdotal, but I suspect some part of this comes from modern Americans' desire to have a meal that has a specific name and must be made with an oddly specific recipe that uses the exact ingredients. Apparently "thing of tomatoes and eggplant with some bread" is not acceptable – but when some chef puts the same recipe in a magazine and labels it "rustic Mediterranean bruschetta", people are all over it.
Some of it is the agony of choice, and the effectiveness of marketing.

If my dad woke up in 1975 where he lived in Brooklyn and decided that he wanted a Greek yogurt fresh blueberry and organic granola parfait... Well too fucking bad. Best case, you had a tub of Dannon plain yogurt and a bag of frozen berries.

Now everything is available all of the time, and that hyper-specialization of everything has eliminated cheap stuff that everyone bought to get by. Something like flank steak used to be sold for pennies on the dollar, now I see it prices the same as a strip steak!

My pet peeve in discussions like this is that people insist on looking up or following recipes, slavishly, as if that's the key to making a good meal.

It's not. If you don't know how to cook, buy a cookbook, one that has the fundamentals in it, one that teaches you about meat and bread and vegetables and starch and sauces and fish and condiments. And once you've learned the basics of "frying meat" or "cooking pasta", you can easily start to combine what you've learned into meals, and you can more easily follow recipes for variations or ideas on how to spice it or prepare it or present it.

I really love Ad Hoc at Home for this. It is Thomas Keller's most accessible book and in addition to recipes contains instructions for things like piecing out a chicken. I've bought the book as a gift at least a half-dozen times.

But, I do believe as you allude to in your last sentence that nothing takes the place of practice. I think a lot of people get overwhelmed looking at a list of ingredients. With experience you know what ones are critical to the dish and what can be left out or substituted as you have learned tastes and can intuitively understand measurements.

If you want to eat better without breaking the bank and without wasting food to rot: buy the cheaper, bulk packs of meat. Optimize for price per pound. Pork loin, chicken thighs, beef roasts, in as big of packages as you can find. When you get home, split them into single-meal proportions and repackage them in good quality ziplock bags, remembering to squeeze as much air out as you can. Put them straight in the freezer.

Then, when you want to have a meal, fill your kitchen sink full of hot water, maybe half-full, and throw one of those ziplock bags in. In 15 to 30 minutes, the meat will be completely thawed and you can cook whatever you want.

Given the right recipe, you might even be able to work the thaw time into the vegetable prep time.

EDIT: There are three other options for defrosting meat: in fridge, on the counter, and in the microwave, in order of speed from slowest to fastest. In the fridge takes extreme pre-knowledge: you practically have to do it the night before, and I am too fussy of an eater to know what I will want to eat a day ahead of time. On the counter is same-day, but has to be done in the morning, plus some people might be squeamish about leaving meat out at room temperature for several hours. Using the microwave takes 15 to 30 minutes, but is imperfect and often ends up cooking the meat to a certain degree. In short, the waterbath method is the most convenient defrosting method.

> when you want to have a meal, fill your kitchen sink full of hot water, maybe half-full, and throw one of those ziplock bags in.

Meat should only be thawed in a fridge or, in an eemergency, in a bath of cold water.

Plunging it into hot water is heaven for bacterial growth.

This is the sort of comment that makes me aware of how alien even very similar cultures can be. I'm Irish and I grew up there. I had never defrosted anything in a fridge before moving to Shanghai. It was all either countertop defrosting or hot water. I wouldn't defrost fish in hot water because it'll cook or let it defrost at room temperature for more than an hour which should be plenty for most fish. If room temperature where you live is above 20 or so degrees you probably shouldn't counter top defrost unless you can check it regularly to see if it's done and

Hot water isn't really that bad for bacterial growth. Lukewarm water is the enemy but even that's fine as long as you cook the meat within half an hour of taking it out of the fridge for defrosting. If you're taking longer z than half an hour that's a substantial cut off meat and you really should be able to plan a day ahead.

> Meat should only be thawed in a fridge or, in an eemergency, in a bath of cold water.

> Plunging it into hot water is heaven for bacterial growth.

Only true for large roasts; for steaks and similar portions, hot water thawing is safe and convenient:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/dining/a-hot-water-bath-fo...

Fear mongering. You're cooking the damn meat in a few minutes.
This isn't about the mechanics of cooking. It isn't really even about food. It's about social expectation, and the unreachable perfection of TV lifestyles, and family, and the end of passing down certain skills matrilinearly while they are not yet taught equally to kids. It's also about time and money.
None of this seems to apply if you don't have children. I've never had this kind of stressful meal (on a recurring basis) with friends, housemates, colleagues, conference friends, customers or other work people, or significant others. Sure, maybe one-off unpleasant conversation or something ("we need to discuss the production outage which affected our site last week"), but not on a repeated basis.

Whether you cook from scratch, make some kind of prepared food or leftovers, have take-out/delivery, or go out to eat seems irrelevant by comparison.

As as society, we're all agitated about dinner because we're trained to be by billions in ad spending. Part of that is a self loathing of one of the key elements of the dinner meal -- culture. Nothing is good enough.

My sister is a good example of this. She picked up a crazy, pain in the ass fad diet, has two kids and high powered corporate gig. Her husband is in a similar gig. The kids are in care from 7-7. So yeah, even buying a vegan, glueten free burrito is a pain in the ass. I worry about her, as she's going to have an anxiety attack someday.

The "Norman Rockwell dinner" is definitely doable - my family did it when I was growing up. But my mother didn't work outside the house, so she could shop during the day and thaw frozen meats and what not while working mothers are still trying to get away from the office.

That, I think, is the key. It's not reasonable to expect a big production dinner when both parents have full time jobs, particularly professionals who have to work late on occasion. That takes a level of organization most people just don't have.

> At home one night after my meal with Ochs, as I labored to make pasta sauce from scratch while a child wailed at my feet

Everyone knows you start the gravy (aka sauce) in a big pot on Saturday morning, make the kids stir it all day long, then heat it up for quick dinners throughout the week.

The comments by the parents to their children made me cringe.

It's hard to read this and come away from it feeling that the problem is anything more than willfully ignorant parents (healthy eating information isn't hard to come by), indolently wallowing in their lack of self-awareness and inconsistencies.

In other words, normal people.

The spaghettios and burritos comment rang true, however. Particularly for families with both parents working.

I get how some people derive great pleasure from making a meal from scratch, but for people in a great hurry, it's one of many checkboxes. And time spent stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family time.

> And time spent stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family time.

Invite your kids into the kitchen. Teach them how to cook. Cooking can be some of the best quality family time if you make it a priority.

> time spent stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family time

Teaching one's offspring what is and is not good to eat is perhaps the oldest and most fundamental task associated with raising young. It predates humanity by millions of years. If that is not "quality family time", I can't fathom what is.

It's frequently higher quality time than what is invariably the alternative.
> It's hard to read this and come away from it feeling that the problem is anything more than willfully ignorant parents (healthy eating information isn't hard to come by), indolently wallowing in their lack of self-awareness and inconsistencies.

> In other words, normal people.

As much as this looks like a rude thing to say, (and it kind of is), it's really quite true and I've experienced similar things with various parents I've seen (thankfully not mine).

Isn't this whole thing just another case of the upper middle class sneering at the lower middle class for not being as educated, sophisticated and clever as we are? This time through the lens of dinner?
There is a big problem in America with people not knowing how to cook anymore, especially from scratch. I wasn't taught very well as a child and had to learn myself in my 20s. Now I spend a small amount of time cooking and trying out recipes, and have gathered a huge notebook of things my family loves. We do lots of soups which take very little time to make and can last for several days.