For breakfast - instant porridge! Simple, quick, high protein and good for you. You can always vary it slightly by throwing in other things like raisins.
Ask HN: got any food hacks?
111–120 of 170 posts
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#1121/2 cup cous cous
1/2 cup chicken/beef stock
+ shallots (chopped finely)
+ any vege's you want
+ curried meat ( you can make this in a batch for the week and dish out as required or resort to chinese/indian take out - just a box of curry make the rice yourself..you might as well)
It takes 5min for the cous cous and about 1min to reheat the curry.
This meal gets me by when I need something in a rush..
If its winter a pot of chicken soup goes down well too.. add rice for more 'substance' when required..
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#113I wrote this post a while back: http://iamelgringo.blogspot.com/2008/12/hacking-your-food-su... I think that's one of the posts you were referring to.
We haven't done once a month cooking for a while, though. We've actually outsourced a lot of our meal prep to Dream Dinners now. Link: http://www.dreamdinners.com/main.php?static=index
You can either go there and prep the meals in a two hour period, or for an extra $20, they will actually prep the food for you. It's not really grad school budget, but we figure it saves us around 40-60 hours a month of cooking prep time. So, to us, the extra time is worth the expense.
That takes care of our main courses and every weekend, we go to the local farmer's market, and get our produce for the week. We also stop by the local deli, and pick up some fresh bread.
And, we recently discovered Trader Joe's wine selection. They have a bunch of wines for less than $10. A lot of them are undrinkable, but we've found a couple of $4 bottles of wine that we love, and we tend to buy several cases of them at the same time. That helps us keep the Mediterranean diet going.
For a long time, we also went to Costco or Sam's club. We'd buy a whole bunch of food in bulk and then wrap it up into smaller portions and save it. I hate grocery shopping, and it really helped to only have to do it once every couple of months. The $200 mini freezer also helped a lot. It's move from Chicago, to New England, to the Bay Area with us. We love it.
We also love SafeWay's grocery delivery. It's $10, or $8 if your order is over $100. It really helps cut down on spending time dealing with buying groceries. They keep track of the products that you buy and like, and it's really easy to reorder stuff. The prices are exactly the same as in store, too, so you're not paying hidden fees. I don't know why more people don't do that.
We've been trying http://Alice.com, too for non-grocery items. It's a pain to tell them what you purchase up front, but over all, after the initial hour of setting up the account and preferences, it makes recurring purchases of TP, deodorant, toothpaste, etc.. a cinch.
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#114Shameless self promotion. Our startup (coming soon) helps solve exactly the problem you are having. In fact, one of the reasons we started building it was to solve the problems you describe, which we also suffer from. http://delicioustasty.com It will be free and as a tool, does some things we haven't seen done (very well) on the web before.
Delicious & Tasty = Repetitive Redundancy.
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#115I think the ultimate time saver for cooking good tasting food with little effort is a crock pot. Anything that cooks food over low heat over a long period of time. This method always seems to produce food that has that special "something" where all the ingredients meld into something magic. It's virtually impossible to mess up and it's good for getting rid of odd bits left in your fridge. It can also be easily adopte…
+1 for the slow cooker. I cook 25% of the time with a slow cooker. There is magic to it and it's fast for prep.
Recommendations:
- Buy a decent pair of kitchen scissors. I cut up almost everything directly into the slow cooker with a pair. It's very fast.
- Load up on fresh veggies (a local farmer's market would be ideal). If you make something like chili, cut in 2 - 3 extra bunches of greens like parsley, coriander, young celery, etc.
- Buy an extra large cooker and always make enough to have leftovers. I usually plan on getting a solid lunch out of it the next day.
- You can make noodle dishes right in the pot if you have access to fresh (refrigerated) noodles. Fresh spaghetti or udon work well. Just rinse and throw them in the pot 5 - 10 minutes before you eat. They soak up sauce and are great.
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#116What you just asked for is a full-sized SUV that costs $10,000, rides like a Lexus, gets 45mpg city, and never loses the new car smell. If you don't want to cook or clean, that means someone has to cook/package for you. If you don't want processed food (and I don't blame you) where this is done by machine, then you have to pay for something done by real people. This will by-definition be not cheap, since labor is rel…
He said "I don't want to spend an hour every day". That leaves the possibility of finding a few friends to rotate cooking duty with. The added effort of cooking for more people is less than linear with the number of people, so that can save a lot of time.
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#117http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
This guy even "invented" his own style recipe card.
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#118Soup. 3 potatoes, 5 leeks, 2 carrots, 2 turnips, 2 parsnips, some celery, parsley, one onion. Peel them, throw them in 3 liters of cold salted water, boil for 20 minutes in a pressure cooker, then mix. In one hour you have soup for 1 week for 4 persons. You may freeze it and keep it for later, too.
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#119Risotto. A pack of rice, an onion, some garlic, two carrots, two tomatoes, some spices (saffron or curcuma, pepper, cumin, clove), some oil, two chicken breasts. Cut the chicken and vegetables in small cubes, pour oil in the cooker, fry the onion, then add the chicken; add the rice, wait for a minute until the rice becomes translucid; cover with boiling water, add the garlic, vegetables and spice as wished. Boils gently 10 minutes, et voilà.
Re: Ask HN: got any food hacks?
#120Couscous. It's cheap, cooks really quickly (about 6-7 minutes), makes no mess, and requires no dishes other than the pot it's cooked in. It's also really versatile. I often use it instead of rice in simple rice dishes (rice and beans, etc.), and it can substitute for pasta too.
it can substitute for pasta too
Since it is pasta.