in a few days the dining hall i have been relying on will shut down. almost everyone i know will have left. i have:
a stove and oven that i don’t feel safe using
a microwave
limited fridge and freezer space
whatever appliances i can inherit from my parents before they move to the other side of the country
no car
a bike with no good way to carry groceries
only a safeway and an indian food market in acceptable walking distance
a ~$450 food stipend from my university that can only be spent on junk food, microwave dinners and domino’s pizza (colloquially referred to here as “the trash compactor”)
i would summarize my cooking experience as “i boiled water once.” i have the physical coordination and life skills of a small child.
but i refuse to subsist and give in to the harsh tyrranny of the Domino’s Monopoly. this is the time of reckoning. i will not stop until i BECOME AN ADULT.
and i could use your help to not die or contract scurvy. we can enter into a three month journey together. i can give you the vicarious “pleasure” of reading yet another food blog, and hopefully be a good enough writer that you continue to put up with me; and you can help me by offering general advice and answering my dumb questions so i don’t set anything on fire.
GOALS:
to cook at least one thing a day
to learn to cook enough things that i don’t go crazy
oh, that is a thing i should mention: i can’t eat onions. everything else is fair game though. (i am addicted to garlic bread but the time:nutrition ratio there isn’t really acceptable with where i’m at now)
Why can’t you eat onions? Are shallots off the table too?
I taught myself to cook basically from scratch over the past couple years. I do work in kitchens these days so I’ve had some help. However I’m trying to work within a very tight budget lately and I would fuckin luuuuuuv to have a good conversation about this stuff
Tell me what you’re curious about and I’ll try and help. I don’t eat meat or fish though, so I’m no help there.
how do you feel about breakfast foods? Breakfast meals are basically the easiest to cook and how I got started when I was 12.
Here’s the thing about cooking that makes it unlike a lot of other life skills: you don’t really have to learn a bunch of fundamentals before you start making stuff. You just have to pick simple recipes and learn those, and keep doing this while slowly ratcheting up the complexity. Eventually you’ll be at the point where you can say that you know how to cook, and you got to that point not by practicing abstracted fundamentals but by actually feeding yourself food that you made. The time to personal reward with cooking is shorter than any other skill I can think of.
Oh yeah, don’t use recipes you find on some person’s blog, they’re usually pretty bad. If you need a real idiot’s guide to cooking, grab the achewood cookbook, here. They’re all recipes for people who have never cooked before.
FWIW you don’t really need a lot of appliances or gadgets to cook either. The essential basics are a frying pan, a good chef’s knife and cutting board, and a pot of some sort. You can introduce variety from there but you should be able to get pretty far with just those things.
yeah like @Tulpa says just start making stuff and you pick up fundamentals that way. Breakfast food is great cos eggs are the cheapest good protein you can get. Tamago Kake Gohan is a good thing to learn early! it’s easy, filling, cheap, and open to improvement.
I also recommend investing ~$50 in a decent 8" chef’s knife and a sharpening iron. I seriously think everyone should have these. They don’t have to be super fancy. Sharp knives turn out to be much safer and save you time and headache. Take care of the blade too! never use steel wool or a dishwasher, or immerse it in standing hot water for more than a few seconds
if yr interested in creative cooking or wanting to stop relying on recipes, a cheatsheet of ratios and techniques is a good thing to have around once you have some experience.
Oh yeah, spend no more than 20 bucks on a nonstick pan for breakfast. they’re all the same. you will thank yourself when that shit wears out in a year or two and you didnt spend a fortune on it.
i can dig up a couple recipes that i started out with, they won’t be the cheapest thing around but they can be onion-free and they’re great teaching tools?
it’s 10 dollars more than a nonstick and you won’t end up eating bits of melted teflon, and it’s way more durable and versatile (You basically won’t have to replace it ever)
i think a nonstick of some kind is really necessary for eggs and starchy stuff, it will really save you a lot of trouble. if you don’t wanna super cheap out, a good cast-iron secondhand or a carbon-steel pan nicely seasoned in an oven. Those will really last forever and you can use metal utensils with them
Yeah second hand cast iron is fine (@seven if you go for one of these look up a guide on re-seasoning it and do that before you start cooking with it) but I can’t in good conscience recommend anyone buy non-stick, especially cheap non-stick.
I’ve never had any trouble with any of the multi-ply stainless steel pans I’ve used and I make eggs and egg dishes on the regular. I’ve even made tamago-yaki in a multi-ply and those are pretty much instantly ruined if they stick at all. It’s just a thin layer of oil spread to coat the surface of the pan and heated appropriately works just as well as non stick for me.
Beans and rice are cheap, easy to cook and good in just about any meal.
You can make spaghetti squash & yams in the microwave. Just poke them full of holes so’s they don’t explode first and cook for 8 min. on each side.
You should probably get a way to mount a milk crate onto your bike so you can buy groceries from a grocery store and carry them home w/o hating yourself. this is from someone who has walked upwards of an hour round-trip to buy groceries in the past.
thanks for the equipment suggestions. i will see what my parents are willing to part with this weekend, probably, and then i’ll come back here to optimize my build.
yeah i love almost anything with eggs. i also prefer everything spicy because i am a simple man. so… i’m guessing my first project is going to be to scramble some eggs and throw them in a tortilla along with some salsa, diced tomatoes and ??? not sure what my options will be beyond that. i’d love to move away from red meat if i get to choose what i’m eating now, but i dunno what you’d substitute for sausage or bacon, especially with all two of the stores i have available. i have mixed feelings about tofu.
i also tend to throw starch in with every meal i can, so when i’m not doing stuff with rice i should learn at least a few options for preparing potatoes that aren’t too labor intensive.
i’ve lived mostly on southwestern food for all my life so i’m down for this. not sure what i’ll be using to cook the beans (i may or may not get access to a pressure cooker) but i enjoy doing stuff like mixing rice and beans together with chopped hotdogs, melted cheese, green peppers, sambal and paprika like the uncultured and decadent hedonist i am. this is probably as close as i’ve come to actually doing anything with food.
i’ll see what i can do. i’m definitely not excited at the prospect of carrying groceries for a mile in a tempe summer.
hmm. getting someone to take me grocery shopping once a week isn’t out of the question either, but i don’t want to dream too big yet.
make huevos rancheros! Just eggs and salsa on fried corn tortillas plus refried beans on the side.
just skip the red meat entirely, it’s not necessary for a good breakfast.
the ‘home fries’ recipe in the achewood cookbook is basically perfect and still the one I use to this day, so that’s probably a good breakfast option for starch
A few YouTube channels for you to start out with. Tasty simplifies everything and is charming and pleasant to watch, whereas Cooking with Dog is far more advanced but sort of bizarre and most likely aligned with your interests? Anyway, pick some stuff out on Tasty to master and move on to Cooking with Dog once you’re ready.
i will take a look at those youtube channels when i wake up, thanks jodeaux
oh yeah this sounds really good, definitely the kind of thing i’d want to make. it will take me a while to get here from “eggs that i threw some stuff on top of, possibly on toast,” but should be doable regardless.
would diced + sauteed potatoes (maybe with some peppers and eventually garlic) be easier than home fries for the time being?
also, i’m guessing that with a pressure cooker i can make a few days’ worth of beans in one go? not sure how long that stuff stays good.
the recipes are on the gimmicky end of home cooking. I’ve made a few of them and they just tend to be overcomplicated versions of fairly straightforward dishes.
you don’t need a pressure cooker for beans! you don’t need to soak them even. just need a big pot and time and you can make yrself a week’s worth.
A bag of dried beans should get you around 2 litres and you can just freeze whatever yr not going to use in ziploc bags, it will last a few months in the freezer.
i like black beans. super easy. whole bag of them gets rinsed and goes into a pot. cut an orange into quarters, squeeze the juice out into the beans and then toss the hulls in along with a bunch of cloves of garlic and a whole onion peeled and cut in half (obvs you can leave this out.) bring it to a boil, stirring it so it doesn’t burn on the bottom, then turn the heat DOWN LOW and just let it simmer really gently for around 3 hours, stirring every now and then and adding a bit more water if the beans get too exposed. you can also put a lid on it and toss the pot into an oven at around 315F, either way works.
Anyhow, in a few hours when the beans are really super tender, you can take the orange hulls (and onion) out and turn the heat up to medium or medium high. You want to reduce it, stirring to avoid burning on the bottom, until the liquid has evaporated mostly away and the whole thing is totally creamy. looks a bit like gravy. at this point you can add salt (consider a tablespoon) and pepper to taste.
proceed to do whatever you want with your enormous amount of beans you just made for like five dollars
i might actually do this today if i can get dickscab roommate to leave for a few hours
