I regularly grind up a pile of vegetables in the vitamix and drink the result. Prep time is 5 minutes. Cleanup is 1 minute.

I'm not really buying the "no time to eat healthy" thing.

The time involved in living healthy is not in the time it actually takes to make a meal (which is trivial, and can easily take less time than the round-trip to a fast food outlet.)

The real time it takes is in the time you need to learn a bunch of skills that make that possible. In an ideal world you learnt those skills at your mother's knee, but we are now 3 generations into "fast food" so it's probable that was missed.

It takes time, and effort, to regain those basics. From something as trivial as boiling water, to using a knife, to "knowing" how long things cook for. Then experience as to what ingredients go together (tomatoes love Basil, chocolate doesn't like garlic).

A skilled person can make a lovely pasta dish in minutes, an unskilled person has literally no idea.

My mother learnt to cook with minimal information (recipe books and magazines), my children can get a master-class in anything on YouTube.

We live in an age where we have access to any knowledge we want, and yet seem to be incapable of doing anything for ourselves.

"chocolate doesn't like garlic"

Mole (https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/223261/authentic-mole-sauc...) would like a word with you...

Why don’t we just teach that in schools? Instead of learning that the interior angles of triangles add up to 180 degrees maybe we could learn to cook healthy meals for ourselves?

They used to: "Home Economics"

BTW, not learning math can be very costly to your financial future.

My high school offered Home Ec. But my guidance counselor made me take Latin instead (I had already completely several years of French and didn’t need language credits). Probably a good thing - in hindsight, the home ec curriculum was pretty watered-down.

Isn't cooking classes quite common? Atleast I had that for two semesters. Mandatory.

A lot of places have abandoned that in favor of optimizing for STEM and the college rat race.

*aaS all the way down is the end result of a purely service economy. When we don't manufacture anything tangible, or develop skills of our own, it leads to reliance on 'specialists' to meet all our needs. The end result being a dependent, unskilled consumer culture... not quite as utopian as the MBAs made it sound. .

I learned those skills initially at my mother’s (and father’s) knee, but I have better access to good equipment, good ingredients, and information than they ever did when they raised me.

It’s easy to say we “seem to be incapable of doing anything ourselves” but home-cooked meals are still de rigueur for younger generations.

Recipe I described. You have to know how to chop an onion and mushrooms. How to break up a lump of ground beef.

That could be "learned" in 1/2 an hour if you don't want nice TV chef uniformity in the veggies.

That's another way. Fruit/veggie balance up to you. Add Spirulina powder or similar if you want.

Do you find the Vitamix ones reliable. I've run though a number of blenders from other companies and had them fail after a while. Usually the motor just stops working.

I know many people who use them. The only one that burned out did so after about 10 years of 3x per day use.

Also, the optional stainless container is a lot easier to clean than the plastic one that comes with it.

I've had various juicers and blenders in the past, the vitamix replaces all of them.

No, I am not shilling for vitamix. I'm just a satisfied customer.

TY for the recommendation thinking about doing this again, will look into it.

Time yes, but also “no lapses in self-discipline” is a factor as well.

Something I came up with one day because my gf wanted a cabbage dish:

Slice a head of cabbage, an onion, and 5 slices of bacon (or alternatively use smoked ham hocks or turkey necks).

In a large pot or dutch oven over medium heat, saute the bacon until not quite fully cooked. Add the onion to scrape up the fond and cook until soft. Add a cup of chinese cooking wine, cook for 3 minutes, then add two cups of chicken stock and a tablespoon of chicken bouillon. Add cabbage. Cook with lid on for about 45 minutes over medium heat and then another 15 minutes with lid off, stirring occasionally until the liquid is evaporated. Finish with pepper and season to taste with a bit more bouillon. It's slightly sweet, savory, smokey, and salty. My kids tear it up.

Want to make it a main course? Add some cooked ground meat and a few of cups of cooked rice. Now you have a meal that can last you all week. LOL.

We eat that as a main regularly (with ground beef or turkey). No rice, just the veg and protein. Although we dumb it down even more and skip most of the liquid steps you mention - just cook up the cabbage and onion in some oil, with seasoning, toss in the meat, and done. Yours sounds richer, but ours takes all of 10 minutes from start to plate.

I came up with it as a riff off of hers, which was... chop a cabbage into large chunks, throw in a pot with bacon strips and water, and cook for an hour. You ended up with wet, bacon-flavored cabbage. Was never a cabbage eater outside of eggrolls and cabbage rolls before I met her, but this is a staple side nowadays.

It's quick but it requires actively prepping and cooking for the whole time. It's 20 minutes where you can't do anything else (well, you can, podcasts and audio books ftw). Cooking a frozen meal takes 1 minute of activity and then you can do other things for 30 minutes before you eat. For some that's a huge win.

I often cook like that but pre-packaged fast-food is in fact faster to cook. I am not saying it should be eaten all the time, but the receipt you describe is not that fast. Mushrooms specifically are time consuming to clean in any non symbolic quantity.

And you also need rice/potato with it unless you go keto in which case you need much more cleaning/slicing mushrooms and more meat.

> Mushrooms specifically are time consuming to clean in any non symbolic quantity.

FWIW, in my ~10 year professional cooking career I think I've washed a batch of mushrooms a grand total of 2 times, only because they were uncommonly dirty. You've probably eaten unwashed mushrooms many times in restaurants. Eating a little dirt probably isn't going to hurt you. If there's anything pathogenic on them a rinse in water isn't going to do much.

Clean? I rinse them under running water. This isn't a TV cooking show. It's just home cooking.

I should mention that the mushrooms are always cooked well.

A lot of cooking time can be done async tho.

Rice can be put in a cooker and prepared ahead of time. Some cookers even let you specify a time in the future when it should be ready. Similarly, marinading develops a lot of flavor over time that you could be doing work or errands.

Or prepare four or more servings. Put in refrigerator or freezer depending on how fast they will be consumed. So the 20 minutes, let's say, turns into 30 but split over four or six meals, so it's not so bad.