I don’t enjoy cooking to be honest. It takes so much time and since im only one person i always have too many ingredients so stuff goes bad. I can cook ramen but other then that im pretty lazy at cooking. Its hard to motivate to do it and i don’t have any recipes. I wish i was a better grocery shopper and cook. How can i get better at being a grocery connoisseur
There are many websites that break the steps down to cooking that makes it very do-able.
There is one site (been awhile since I was on it though)
that’s like a slot machine- those casino machines where you spin the wheels and hopefully match all/most of the same icons to win)…
so you just enter all the ingredients you have in your cupboard
(tortillas,eggs,lunch meat, peanut butter, noodles, rice, catsup, sugar, raspberries…you get the idea)
and it will think a moment,then,
it lists (with instructions on how to make it)
every single dish possible,
with those ingredients you have on hand.
The tip to cooking is not to over do it, keep it simple as possible.
Maybe buy a cookbook. It’ll give you ideas at least.
A lot of traditional Italian dishes are very simple, minimal ingredients and whole foods, and the fun is in picking out the best items at the grocery store, like finding that perfect bundle of basil.
Here’s a free cookbook from Leanne Brown. It is designed for people who are rookies in the kitchen, who don’t know a lot about shopping, or who are on a very tight budget:
There are links to download a free PDF copy.
There’s a million websites that have recipes. Some of them are not hard or complicated, in fact you can find a zillion recipes that are actually labeled “easy”. Cooking doesn’t have to be like rocket science, I always figured that if I can read, then I can cook.
You don’t even have to cook every meal or every day. You can cook some stew, soup, meat dish, desserts etc a few days a week to break up the monotony and other days you can open a can or eat a frozen dinner, or even maybe go to a restaraunt. You can find recipes online for your favorite food or you can try something new that you’ve never had before.
But yeah, recipes will take you through step-by-step on how to cook a meal. But just kind of surf the web for cooking and recipe sites just to get an idea what’s out there. Start off with something that looks easy and once you get a little comfortable with the easy recipes you can graduate to some harder recipes. When you cook, occasionally you will run into some cooking term you don’t understand. No problem, you can look it up online.
Also, if you start cooking different simple dishes you will find some that are your favorites and you can cook them more than once and then you will get familiar with them and they will be easy to cook you can to whip them up anytime. I used to waste food too when I cooked by having unused ingrediants go bad on me. But I bought some tupperware and stored the excess ingrediants in them. You can even freeze some that will last for weeks or even months. You can freeze meat, fruits, vegetables, butter etc.
I don’t like grocery shopping, the market is always too crowded, it’s too bright and noisy. So I ordered groceries online to be delivered to my front door. Walmart, Safeway and few other places will deliver.
But the best way to shop for groceries is to sit down and make a list of what you want before you go and stick with the list. Everybody on this planet knows that you should never shop when you’re hungry because you will end up making impulse buys and you will end up spending more than you planned on. Stick to the list. From what I’ve read, the slowest, least crowded time to shop is around 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm when everybody is home eating dinner.
Another tip is to shop sales and buy in bulk if you have some extra space in your cubbards or drawers.When you see a favorite food of yours is on sale than buy several of them or more to save money. And then on the days you are too tired to cook or you don’t feel like it and you don’t feel like going to the grocery store than you can just open a can of soup or corn or whatever you stocked up on or pull something out of the freezer and whip it up.
But on the other days you can cook something fancy.
You might have to invest in some certain kitchen tools, appliances, pots and pans etc but if you get fairly decent ones they will last years.
If you can cook ramen then why don’t you add some boiled/fried vegetables to it? Bean sprouts, spinich, sweet corn, or even an egg can be a good ingredients for ramen and becomes much more balanced and nutritious.
If you have left-over ingredients, then cook other meals using them or store/frozen them for later use. Just wrap boiled spinich with plastic or put the corn into plastic box and frozen. If you buy bacon for example, you can fry it with the left-overs and it becomes a new dish. If some bacon is left unused, why not try another dish with new ingredients? Home cooking is basically the repeat of this process.
I think the key is to add something little to what you can do now and slowly build this up.
i agree… i have really bad cooking skills… indonesian food is hard to make and western food has expensive ingredients. (cos of import)
I have the same problem. I just buy microwaveable food and stuff that goes into the oven like ciabattas and spring rolls. I know it’s not good but I can’t afford to spoil lots of food and I don’t have the surplus mental energy to plan all my dinners like you have to do if you’re going to cook. And I don’t even have a dishwasher.
Cooking is not that hard. Olive oil, onions and garlic first, then the minced meat, some salt and some pepper, tomato sauce, some cream and let it cook. Some spaghetti on the side. Voilá, bolognese!
This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.