this used to describe me, but my brother-in-law turned me on to doing all of my cooking on one day of the week, and freezing everything. this has several advantages (and one major disadvantage):

cons:

  * you lose pretty much an entire day cooking

pros:

  * don't have to cook when i get home from work
  * everything i eat now is a real meal,
    (including bag lunches for work, i just
    grab something out of the freezer, and by the
    time lunch time roles around, it's thawed and ready to go)
  * i'm wasting a lot less food/money, because the
    ingredients get used almost as soon as i buy them,
    and the food goes straight into the freezer instead
    of lingering in the fridge
  * i'm (slowly) learning to really cook

Freezing meals is a smart way to go if you live alone and can't cook meals that get mostly eaten in the same day.

Most people don't know that the frozen meals they see in stores are typically low quality not because of the nature of frozen foods but because of the expectations of the market and the need to preserve frozen food for long periods of time. If you're cooking on your own then you can use higher quality ingredients and you can avoid the compromises needed for mass-produced, highly preserved foods (meals that will be preserved just fine for up to a month in your freezer are not necessarily suitable for being mass-produced or for being preserved for months to years).

actually, i think it's the kind of system that just works well, period, as long as you can devote an entire day to cooking. i actually live with my fiancee, and the practice has become go shopping one day, do all our cooking the next. we just setup a laptop somewhere in the kitchen, and either stream music or stuff off the netflix instant queue. it's done good things for our diet, our budget, and our relationship

Yes, it does. I'm a young bachelor, and I actually run through this exact scenario every several months. Right now I'm in the point where a few months has passed and I'm thinking of cooking again. During lunch today, I saw an advertisement for pasta primavera and thought to myself, "Wow, I should totally make some of that for Wed night when that girl wants to hang out."

I couldn't think of a real clever solution to the problem besides bundling the necessary fresh ingredients into portions that would feed one or two people. This is pretty much what a meal in a box type thing already does. Perhaps someone can come up with a better solution for this pain point.

There are a few strategies I use.

1. Dinner parties. Nothing formal, just invite people over for food. I am pretty well compensated, so while I spend a little more than is strictly necessary, it is less than eating out all the time, and I can share tasty meals with friends. Further, costs can be amortized by having others bring dishes, and you'll start getting in dinner invites too.

2. Know lots of recipes and variations for a few ingredients. This helps with the "too much" problem, as you can use stuff quickly without getting bored. When you add new ingredients to your repertoire add them with depth. Eventually you will start learning how things work together and just whip up stuff pretty easily. A good way to get into this is make it a game -- try to figure out how to make a tasty meal from say, only things on shelf #2 or have each friend bring one ingredient and it is your job to make a dinner.

3. Similar to the previous one: get good at what I call "ingredient chains". There are lots of these, but a classic example: Buy a chicken, roast it. eat it hot. Take some of the meat for sandwiches this week. Take the bones and bits and pieces of meat and make a stock out of them for soup.

4. Don't worry about throwing away food. Seriously, I throw away ingredients all the time... sometimes I just don't get around to using them, or I change my mind. This is still so much more frugal than eating out, that it is worth it (within reason of course).

5. Buy the good stuff.. reasoning here is the same as #4. I can pay $100 for groceries per week, getting the quality stuff, and still spend less than eating out at all but the crappiest fast food places.

None of these are clever solutions, but they are a different approach to the situation that obviate the problem by either eliminating the problem via base assumptions or by changing the problem to "not actually a problem".

hth :)

I can't find a way to submit the form. It just stops after the HIGHEST priority question and has no scroll bar, no sensible end, and no submit button. Using Chrome something-or-other on Windows XP something-or-other.

To answer the questions, I cook pretty much every day. I hate it, but it's the fastest, cheapest and healthiest way to eat. It's even faster than take-away, but I wish I never had to cook again. If I had money that's one of the things I'd happily spend it on.

EDIT: OK, now I can complete the form, but you ask if you can contact me for a follow up, but give no way to give you my contact details!

man, I suck today. It's added now. If you are interested I'm at cindy at clinkclank.net

I only started cooking a few months ago, and discovered the secret to delicious daily meals: 1) a piece of meat (steak, salmon, etc.) 2) a handful of veggies (asparagus, broccoli, green beans) 3) sea salt + pepper 4) a frying pan

You can get a fair number of unique combinations out of that, and it only takes 10 minutes to get your meal cooked (6 minutes for the veggies, 4 for the meat).

Maybe I'll get bored of it eventually, but for now, I'm shocked-and-awe'd that I can so simply make food that tastes so damn good in my mouth.

were you trying to taste food in a different orifice previously?

Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but specifically. Bananas area good example. I love bananas but when it comes to grabbing one in the morning there is like a mental block about it, so eventually the bananas go bad....

What somebody needs to do is create a "No Ingredient Left Behind" product that will yell at you to east the tomatoes before they go bad.

I will tell you the secret to bananas: A banana muffin recipe.

Once bananas are overripe you can still make muffins from them. Once they are really quite overripe, you can put them in the fridge for several more days, and then you can still make muffins from them. I haven't yet reached the point where I took the overripe bananas, peeled and crushed them, put the crushed banana in containers and froze them, then thawed them two weeks later and made muffins from them... but I bet that would work.

Once the muffins are made, they freeze nicely. Thaw them on a plate in the microwave: about 45 seconds per muffin at about power level 40%.

The more general secret to small-batch cooking is: Aim to use the freezer. (For example: I have friends who apparently went through decades of life without realizing that bread freezes pretty well -- fresh is better but frozen is not bad. Don't ever let your bread grow stale unless you have the desire to make croutons.)

My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.

So if you are willing to be anal enough to make sure things are always "in thier place" and have a few webcams to spare, you could have the webcams point at the food storage locations. This could do a large part of the inventory management automatically... at least have a "present/not present" bit for ingredients.

this works out a little better if you go shopping with recipes in mind. that way, as the days/weeks go by, and you're looking at the food on the shelves, you already know at least one recipe that they can be used for.

this might be a little harder to keep working for an entire household (eg, someone doesn't get the memo that a particular ingredient is for a particular recipe), but that's perhaps something that can be solved internally

Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?

Both are actually pretty frequent, but with a grocery store a block or so away, the latter is more of a problem. The current instance is chicken broth, a baguette, and spinach (and I returned home this afternoon to discover that somebody had bought more spinach), which are probably just going to get used for separate dishes.

Cindy: Might wanna remove that html {overflow:hidden}

Your site doesn't scroll, obscuring the rest of that form (OSX 10.6, FFox 4.0b10)

Thanks - done!

Also, the "powered by" link is taking up a column of space the whole height of the page. I was clicking on one of the fields, and it redirected me to the Wufoo home page.

If you can add inline CSS to the "powertiny" link element ... specifically, position:absolute;right:0;bottom:0; it should get it out of the way.

I am a little skeeved out but the unattributed (and presumably unauthorized use of a free hacker webcomic for advertising purposes.