I’ve been cooking for over 10 years now. It takes a lot of time and consistency. You just have to keep at it. I believe in you!

This is a tricky question for me to answer because of how I plan my meals.

I don’t usually buy random ingredients and then decide each day what to make with the ingredients. Instead I usually plan 1 or 2 or even 3 things I want to make and then shop specifically based on that.

This has some pros and cons but one large pro is that basically I am fortunate enough to live by several grocery stores that all specialize in different things such as stores that carry more Italian, Japanese, Chinese or Korean ingredients. What I plan to prepare will help me choose which grocery store to go to since I have a rough idea of which key ingredients I can find where. Eg. if I’m planning on making a lot of Japanese curries for the week I am not going to the Italian grocery store or else I’m not going to find my ingredients however I can choose to go to the Chinese, Japanese or Korean grocery stores because the ingredients are general enough that any asian store would have them. But if I needed something really specific such as fresh perilla leaves for something like pork bone soup then I will need to go to the Korean grocery store because it’s that specific.

So because of this I don’t really have a dish that I just cook whenever I’m lazy because I would have had to shop for it in advance. That being said I do have “emergency rations” in the form of frozen foods or meal kits (Jamaican patties, dumplings, pizza, instant noodles, etc) that I can make in a pinch.

However I do have dishes that I plan to make for the week when I’m lazy because I can make several days of the stuff and basically have no prep time other than microwaving leftovers.

Some examples are:

• Any stew/curry (Japanese curry, green curry, butter chicken, chicken korma, Chinese-style beef stew are some of my favorites)
• Any fried rice (Mexican chicken rice, kimchi fried rice, nasi goreng are my favorites. But also pineapple fried rice, or a classic chinese-style fried rice can also be good here)
• Beef broccoli
• Spaghetti and meat balls. Although the spaghetti sauce takes a while to make, I usually make ~2 - 3L of it at a time so per meal it’s a lot less effort. (You can also just buy the sauce)

One pattern you might notice is that all of these meals have both veggies and a protein. This reduces cook time since I don’t have to make multiple things. Eg. if I make cumin lamb, I will feel compelled to pair it with a veggie dish as well. More dishes = more cook time.

All that said, I can also come up a different list of examples where I think you can prepare the entire meal in 1h or less from start to finish with cleanup time included

They are:

• Baked salmon (you literally just make a spice mix or buy one, season the salmon and bake), while the salmon bakes you can make a veggie (eg. salad, bok choi + garlic, broccoli + garlic) to pair it with + a starch of your choice (rice for me)
• Spaghetti and meat balls if you buy all the ingredients premade (eg. the pasta, sauce and meatballs).
• Green curry (back in college when I first started cooking and sucked at it, I used to buy these cans of green curry that basically had the “soup” premade so all you have to do is heat the “soup” chop some meat and veggies and boil and you are done)
• Any indian curry that you can get the sauce for in the store (same as green curry)

Basically if you want to reduce cook time significantly, you either need to parallelize and make multiple things at the same time (eg. by baking) or buy premade stuff from the store to skip the prep.

Try the 1 hour recipe. In my opinion is likely far better than any stock you can get from a grocery store. It is more work but it’s worth it.

Cumin lamb

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VVjD3Jm9jVwKLGFnjE7EaAFNlq9RERjz3h8RPPj_URk/edit?usp=sharing
• My major note here is to not over cook the spices. For years I’ve been frustrated because I can’t get the spices to taste “right” until I learned to add the spices in last and stop cooking right after.

Nasi goreng

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1umhwxcInCJ1KUXDnxTccPHDUs1MkS77tQCIzn-qhaqU/edit?usp=sharing

Butter chicken

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QF2iXpz9MSydPjIolqkmp7cWDSD9woYXGq9EZcJ7_Lo/edit?usp=sharing
• My main note here is to use greek yogurt and tomato paste instead of regular yogurt and fresh (or canned) tomatoes for a tastier result

Hot and sour soup

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TcF_bgHwwQQ_HUblSQpWcalAy3FtFrxx2y64vQUlobk/edit?usp=sharing

Pho

• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OjeslHUgzhRip4NUvcOb9vcMHwbsLHGTQStKBX3S_I8/edit?usp=sharing
• General notes here is I used to add the fish sauce when making the soup base but I found that the taste of fish sauce really changes when it’s cooked so these days I only add fish sauce when assembling the bowl. Although if you don’t like the taste of fish sauce, add it when making the broth instead.

The pho recipe is probably my worst recipe because I make pho so often I usually just wing it these days. The recipe I wrote is sort of a mess since it attempts to combine random notes from each time I make it. I can give some general guidance which are:

• Based on which ingredients you end up gathering for the broth, look up the cooking times of each ingredient and layer the ingredients so they all end up cooked at the right end time, that or set a timer and fish the ingredient out when you need. For instance beef can disintegrate after some time after boiling so if you want to serve that beef with the pho later, you will need to figure out how long to boil it before it disintegrates so you can remove it and cut it up for serving.
• You can pre-roast any of the meat and/or veggies and/or ginger in the oven before starting the broth. For veggies/ginger it can change the flavor while for meats I’m not exactly sure of the food science here but it seems to help with soup clarity and also seems to cut down on the cooking time for meats.

Maybe a 6 or 7 out of 10

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be taste wise. Like I finished all of it no problem. But amongst all breakfast foods its pretty mediocre and nothing to write home about.

Funny enough, a lot of popular food today was invented due to a food scarcity with people forced to make due with what they had on hand.

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I tried the fabled beans on toast and i was shocked when I bit into the toast that there was butter on the toast. It was a dumb thing to be shocked by but I did not expect it 😂.

That being said, it looks really stupid in person because it’s literally toast with a ton of beans. Taste wise, it was ok.

Here’s a crappy photo:

I was in the same boat.

Originally I never made pho at home because I thought it was too much effort. Every traditional pho recipe has the dreaded “boil for 6+ hours” step that always intimidated me and turned me off to the idea.

The first time I tried making pho was when I saw campbell sold a premade pho stock. I thought it was a great idea since thats the most annoying part to make so I tried it. It was pretty bad but it made me want to try again.

That’s when I stumbled across this 1 hour recipe. It got me curious if you could actually make a good pho in such a short period of time with little effort and no pressure cooker. So I tried it and honestly it was not bad for the effort.

These days I actually do make pho closer to the more traditional methods. I reduce “cook time per meal” by always making a large amount of stock each time I make it (4 - 6L). I bought some huge mason jars that I use to store the pho and put it in the fridge or freezer depending on how long I plan on using it for.

If you are in the same boat as I was and want to get your feet wet I would definitely recommend trying one of the “fast pho” recipes like the one I posted. And then later on you can decide whether you want to try the more traditional recipes.

The thing with pho is I swear every one has their own stock blend and I almost never use the same blend myself. What I use is based on what’s on sale and what I can get my hands on most of the time.

Damn that sucks 😞

Usually what I do is research some recipes, paste them into a doc and then edit and modify them as well as adding notes for myself. I don’t like sharing the recipes publicly usually because I don’t always record where I took the recipes from and they are more for personal use.

If there are any specific recipes you want to see I can clean those docs up and post them.

That’s hilarious

Yeah becareful about 2. I have gotten at least 3 angry phone calls now from people I don’t know telling me to stop calling them when it wasn’t me :/

But I genuinely love momento and the prestige T_T

Yeah we just keep the feeder on one time for the cats since theres no reason they should suffer for our mistakes.

idk man. I went to the UK to sample some of the cuisine thinking it can’t be that bad and I have mixed feeling afterwards. Like the food is edible at least.

Go fuck yourself /s

This is literally me right now (the minecraft thing) but its been going for 2 month :/. They actually added so much content since I last played I still haven’t explored all of it yet.

Yeah. Responsibilities suck T_T