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RomeoStevens comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps, part 2 - Less Wrong
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How do I cook food that is at the intersection of cheap, fast to prepare, good tasting, and good for me? It is fairly easy to satisfy 3 of the 4 conditions with any given meal. All 4 are hard.
So far I only really have various soups/curries, and omelettes. I'm on the lookout for more, though it is tedious looking through "normal" recipes and trying to figure out which ones can be made to satisfy the conditions by cutting corners and still come out okay.
edit: I guess I should note that I have a definition of "healthy" some will consider weird. I don't consider bread to be healthy food, it is nutritionally empty space. Most of the nutrients you see listed on the package come from enrichment which does next to nothing for you bioavailability wise. The carbs I require for physical activity come from potatoes.
Stirfry: Oil in pan, add meat (E.g. chicken), stir, add vegetables (most supermarkets do premade mixes), continue stirring. You can add your preferred flavourings during the course of this (e.g. bbq sauce, chili, soy). Most things cook quickly like this, especially when in small pieces, and you can normally tell by sight when its ready. Eat either on its own or with rice.
This. There are infinite possible variations you can try with various veggies and cooking styles, you can make it into a soup, and it's trivially easy to test the effects of ingredients. EG, I added kale to my stir fries and after three days realized I started having intestinal troubles and then cut it out and they went away. You can make these arbitrarily "healthy" and high quality with ingredient choice variations. EG, I tend to use reasonably fresh veggies from the co op grocery, grass fed beef stirfy mix from same (though now I've purchased a quarter cow so I'll be using that instead), and coconut oil. I often mix up by using a prepackaged seafood mix instead of the beef, but I never measure anything and the only prep I do is some cutting before I toss stuff into the wok.
95% of the time I do thai curry instead because it is easier. Half a can of coconut milk instead of oil and you can walk away instead of standing there stirring.
Cooking pasta is generally fairly simple and straightforward. You boil it for about 10 minutes, drain, and then add the sauce of your choice. This cookbook has tasty ones, although I don't know which are healthy and which aren't.
Homemade bread is actually pretty fast (10 minutes prep, 12-18 hours waiting, 1 hour in the oven, 5 minutes of that requiring attention) if you do it no-knead (that is, instead of kneading it to mix up the proteins, you just let it sit for 12 hours).
I'm a big fan of crepes with apple or cheese, if you're cooking for yourself or 1 other - you make them in a pan, and then you eat that crepe while you make the next one.
Free pdf cookbook I found a while back in which the recipes are all supposed to take 5 ingredients and 10 minutes to prepare. The majority of the recipes within meet your stated needs (by my standards)
http://thestonesoup.com/blog/2010/06/a-free-e-cookbook/
A lot of those are more side dishes than meals, but several of the recipes in the meat section look like excellent places to start. Thanks.
I suppose. My brain happened to file them under the reference class for "light lunch" rather than "side dish". And no problem.
Another tip- you can steam vegetables in the microwave, and they turn out pretty well. I mainly do this with broccoli and cauliflower
put them in a lidded microwavable container, with about a centimeter of water and whatever seasonings you want (I use lemon pepper seasoning and coconut oil), nuke for two ish minutes (depending on preferences and microwave strength), drain.
Also coconut oil can usually serve as a more healthy substitute for butter, except for with baking maybe
I've used coconut oil in place of shortening but have not yet tried replacing butter completely in anything. I expect that due to different melting points coconut oil would not be good for anything where you have to cut butter into dry ingredients (biscuits, streusel, etc.) but it might well do just fine in cases where the butter is intended to be melted or softened only.
I agree that coconut oil is great, but butter is also fine. The problem is generally people using vegetable shortening/oils.
Pasta: Tasty, cheap and moderately healthy, and easy to cook. If you can make instant noodles, you're mostly there already. Start a pot of boiling water, with a bit of salt (optional, I've never done this.) Put noodles in, stir occasionally once they're mostly submerged in the water so they don't stick to the bottom. Knowing when it's done al dente requires a bit of experience, but you can always bite a little off the end of a noodle to test.
While that's going, you can make your sauce on another stove slot. There's a lot of variations here, but make sure not to add the actual sauce in until the very end, otherwise it takes a lot longer for the fresh ingredients to fully cook. (Tip: Add individual ingredients in order of how long they take to cook - generally, meats, then hard fibrous veggies, then soft veggies. May require some experimentation over time.) Prepackaged jars of pasta sauce work just fine, but a dash of herbs goes a long way, IMO.
When the noodles are done, drain the pot and move the contents into a bowl(s), then top with sauce when that's done.
They'd better be completely submerged. The usual suggestion is to use 1 litre of water for each 100 grams of pasta.
The number of minutes they write on the pack is usually about right.
Or, drain the pot, move the noodles into the pan with the sauce in it, stir, and move into a bowl.
It's entirely possible to cook pasta in very little water in a small pot. Since Procedural Knowledge is the context, I'll give my mother's recipe:
Use about 2 times the mass of the pasta in water. (Keep the lid on the pot as much as possible so as not to lose water.)
Generally, the resulting pasta is delicious_kpreid, and requires almost no draining (sauce goes right in the pot).
Addendum for spaghetti: It generally won't fit in the pot raw, so put it in and put the lid on top as best as you can, then when it is sufficiently softened, stuff it the rest of the way. While returning to boil, about once per minute open the pot and stir the strands as much as possible until they have formed a tangle rather than lying parallel.
I just break the strands into two before dropping them into the pot. I assumes there must be some reason not to do this because I don't know anyone else who does this, but I honestly can't tell the difference when I eat it.
I think the only reason not to do this is that it's "bad form", i.e. I don't think there is any actual downside. (I have stopped doing it because people make fun of it, but I don't think there's any actual reason not to do it.)
Sorry about the bad wording, I meant "once they're soft enough to be able to be stirred", which means they're mostly or completely in the water. You do want to put enough water in the pot to submerge all the noodles.
This might not be exactly what you're asking for, but it's worth noting the power of leftovers if you haven't already! If you're bothering to cook, most of the time it hardly takes any more time to cook twice as much as you're going to eat right now, or even more. That's at least one more meal for the next few days solved. If you have a freezer, developing a small stockpile of frozen leftovers in it is excellent for the fast-to-prepare dimension. Also note that preparation time speeds up a lot with practice.
Yeah I do this a lot with the slow cooker and highly recommend it.
Sushi salad: Cook 4.5 dl short-grain rice with 5 dl water for 10 minutes, mix sushi sauce made from .5 dl vinegar, .5 dl water and .5 dl sugar or sweetener to the cooked rice. Then mix in whatever extra bits you want to have, I generally put in chopped raw carrots and cucumber and bits of gravlax.
What is a "dl"? ...Deciliter?
Yes.
I guess that's better than when metric recipes measure everything in grams and I'm all "I do not have a kitchen scale!"
Using weights instead of volumes in recipes is weird. You need cups to cook, but not a scale.
Nitpick: grams are for mass*
And I've heard they do it because it is (arguably) more useful in evaluating nutritional value and hunger-satiation / stomach-filling power.
I can see getting by on estimates for lots of cooking tasks, but I'm sure I recall from somewhere that you bake... how on earth do you achieve that without a scale?
Volume measures. Measuring cups and measuring spoons. (I also eyeball a lot of stuff, but I do actually break out the cups and spoons for baking.)
Oh, haha, yeah. I had forgotten that's how it's done in America! I'm always a bit bewildered by American recipes ("...but my cups are all different sizes!").
Scales are actually better for powders (i.e. flour); volume measurements can vary significantly depending on how hard you pack the stuff in.
(Having said that, it seems relevant that my plastic kitchen scale met a sad melty end on top of my toaster oven and I haven't replaced it.)