I am not a chef by any means or even a cook, but I learned how to cook in University due to being unbelievably poor and got tired of "low budget fast meals". Quotes because I don't think that the meals that fall into this category are at all better than their "proper" counter parts.
Prepping a quick pasta with béchamel does not take long at all, and with a common pot and pan from Ikea or even Target or Walmart and a fork and knife, you have all you need. Prepping a quick pizza by hand, some general Wok style cuisine, etc, it's all quite fast once you learn a few things about how to prepare food.
I'm sure it's cliche, but watching Good Eats with Alton Brown a few times helped me understand why certain combinations work and gave me the confidence to understand how to make different things match. In particular, watching his episodes on knife skills helped me understand how to speed up a lot of prepping (an unabashed advertisement for Shun from Alton, but let's ignore that part) [0]
When I was still in the US, long and laborious kitchen exercises were glorified; the longer and more putzy the recipe, the more most people I know fawned over the idea of the meal, but I'm here to tell you that taking the time just to understand the basics of cooking, you don't need the blogpost 2 hour narrative story for cooking, it's very basic chemistry at its best. Some meals have unavoidable time and complications, and that's fine, but you can make very tasty, very healthy meals quite fast while listening to your favorite show or some music or even just enjoying the silence of the kitchen and the sound of the cooking.
> You can't just buy a slab of chicken breast, it needs to be trimmed and put away until ready to be used. Hardest of all: planning, what to do with it, what else goes with it.
Absolutely not true IMO, but I get where you might have this if you don't have a more European style city to live in. I do not pretend to guess where you are from, but usually I heard and hear this from people I know still in the US, and it's distinctly because of how US cities are built. In Europe and in quite a few Asian countries, proper grocers are a dime a dozen and every couple hundred meters. I stock the basics (flour, salt, spices, other grains, and some slow-perishing sauces like tomato paste) and buy perishables on the way home since there's a fully stocked market no bigger than a chinese takeout shop at the base of my apartment or < 200 meters from it.
The meat and produce I get are used immediately or over the next day for another meal, and it's very nice. Half of my lunch break for work is cooking, the second half eating a freshly cooked meal.
I really feel that there is a bit of a cult around cooking that wants to overcomplicate the process because complex == classy, and I need to stress that when you're first starting, it is going to be slower because you haven't developed your technique. It's the same reason you'll probably fall a lot when first learning to ice skate or why you'll sound like a drunk playing a guitar when you first learn. The good news is that even if the end result of your first few meals is ugly, likely it still tastes pretty good.
The time is very relative -- I'm monitoring a global market so I have 10+ hour days almost every day depending on how bad certain situations get, but I made cooking part of my skillset because I didn't want to be indebted always to food delivery. It absolutely is possible even for a family without a dedicated cook, and I think the first step most people need is admitting that it's not the time sink they make it out to be. Once you get a few basics, you are some sort of wizard to most people.
For example take dicing an onion. If you didn't know this technique it'd likely take you more than 30secs to dice an onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuebC0CfD8E
If you want to splurge, I also like a few bamboo spoons.
What's the argument for the pull-through sharpener? A decent enough set of stones is tiny, costs $15 after shipping, and isn't that hard to use. Are we just making sharpening as easy as possible so they don't give up?
Pasta + bechamel is easy, you can't do this 5 nights a week. I'm moving away from carbohydrate-rich main dish, more to grains and pulses. A slow-cooked shoulder of pork, like a cassoulet, is easy, yet still takes time to roast, then the meat separated from the connective tissues, the fat, then a stock reduction, then the beans. I offer it as an example of cheap, easy, tasty, and time and labor intensive dish. You need some greens to serve with it, and you can't prep greens 5 days ahead. I also don't want to eat this 10 meals in a row.
Edited to add: I find Gordon Ramsey YouTube videos quite instructive, his menu is simple and tasty. I got a lot of mileage out of his techniques.
* Prepare huge amounts of meat (in the smallest one you can prepare up to a kg of meat). * Very simple meal prep. Plop some meat, throw some salt in, add some sauce (soy sauce, spicy or whatever you prefer), add some liquid (water usually) and turn it on. 5 minutes or less. * It never boils, so the water level never rises, avoiding spills (or having to even worry about it). So you can leave it overnight for the 8+ hour cooking process. * You can transform cheap, tough cuts of meat (like Gulash soup meat) into fantastic tasting dishes.
One of the best things about a slow cooker is that the meat softens up, it uniformly absorbs all seasoning, and it makes the meat release its best fatty flavour.
I'd also suggest to actually calculate how much food delivery costs. I live in a relatively cheap European country, but even here getting two good meals delivered (i.e. not pizza or McD's) is close to 25€. Over a month that adds up to a not insignificant amount of my take home pay. Plus I find cooking is a really good way to forget about work and de-stress.
Some of the sister comments say you need a Dutch oven, knife sharpener, etc. This is honestly nonsense (see other comment threads about American culture over complicating recipes). The main tools I use are a knife and non-stick pan I got from a supermarket a few years ago (probably 15€ each) and they are perfectly fine. You don't need anything fancy to get started.
I also batch cook using sous vide. So I'll buy a bulk package of protein, then portion it into bags with various marinades or sauce bases. These don't have to be intricate or high effort, eg, I'll sometimes do a chicken tinga for tacos that's nothing more complex than a chicken thigh and a can of El Pato. I do a lot of variations of Thai curry that are just a thigh, some premade paste, and coconut cream, and maybe some aromatics if I feel fancy.
Anyhow, these all get batch cooked in the sous vide. It takes me around 10 minutes to process 10 lbs of chicken or such into 20 portions, usually 4 or so variations. Then into the freezer they go where they last indefinitely. I generally do about 2 to 3 batches this way per month. At any given time I have around 3 to 4 weeks of food ready to go in the freezer, with a wide variety of options, and all reflecting the nutritional balance I want.
So then how I use this on a day to day basis. Say I feel one of the Mussamum curries I made a couple months back. Even though it's not thawed I can plop it back in the sous vide to handle that. I load up the rice cooker at the same time. This takes all of 30 seconds, then I just ignore stuff for about 30 minutes. When ready I come back, pull the bag, and toss the contents into a skillet along with whatever selection of frozen veg I feel like. Adjust seasoning and then just simmer until the veg are where you want, about 5 minutes. Plate up with the rice.
So again, just because of how I've organized things, I've got a whole menu in that freezer that takes less than 15 minutes active time to get on a plate.
I wouldn't underestimate just how fast and breezy things can get once you figure out the patterns that work for you. And for me now this stuff is on auto pilot, so the active time involved doesn't feel like any particular effort. Honestly it reduces my stress levels quite a bit knowing I've got plenty of good food ready to go for weeks if I need to be a hermit for whatever reason. This whole approach particularly helped during the worst of COVID.
I saw in one of your other comments you mentioned Gordon Ramsey videos. He's very savvy as far as recipe concepts and knowing what will appeal. However a lot of his specific cooking advice is off the mark, or not particularly helpful for someone cooking at home vs in a classic french brigade kitchen.
I'd suggest checking out J Kenji Lopez-Alt's youtube channel. He's got a bunch of low key videos where he cooks various things, often using a POV camera. All his advice is grounded in modern food science vs some of the older folklore, and he has a very practical and unfussy mindset overall.
Absolutely! You can't just buy a slab of chicken breast, it needs to be trimmed and put away until ready to be used. Hardest of all: planning, what to do with it, what else goes with it. Pointless to buy broccoli and kale if you don't know what makes it tastes good, and when the inspiration strikes you, there's an ugly head of broccoli you need to cut up, and a bunch of unwashed kale you need to trim. 80% of cooking is peeling, cutting, dicing, shredding, skimming, straining, pounding, deboning, deveining, and waiting. All unglamorous, time-consuming, boring, manual labor. You need to speed this up to gain efficiency. Technical and planning skills gets you probably 50% efficiency. Cooking food is labor intensive and it appears to me all attempts to commercially scale is failing.