Ask HN: got any food hacks?

I have a small blog here: www.seevishal.com. In it I keep a log of what I've eaten for the past week. Many of the things I make take 15-20 minutes to prepare, taste pretty damn good and are good for you.

I agree 100% about using sharp knives. The Kiwi knives from Wok Shop are fantastic and incredibly cheap:

  The Wok Shop: Kiwi Brand Knives from Thailand
  http://knurl.us/url/acefb63

There are plenty of reviews:

  Cool Tools: Kiwi Knives
  http://knurl.us/url/6xx9oac

  Pattio Daddio BBQ: Discovery: Kiwi Knives
  http://knurl.us/url/vz75rau

  Pattio Daddio BBQ: Follow Up: Kiwi Knives
  http://knurl.us/url/e1f9etx

  Tactical-Life.com » Credible Cutters on the Cheap
  http://knurl.us/url/1rykse5

I'm considering getting a few Wok Shop chopping blocks, too. Has anyone used them?

  The Wok Shop: Chinese Chopping Blocks
  http://knurl.us/url/mvhaa45

  The Wok Shop: Chinese Ironwood Round Chopping Boards
  http://knurl.us/url/1xj0ufu

I prepared a very long and sarcastic response to you but in the end decided I probably agree with you as much as disagree. However, I adamantly disagree with you on one point: what johnswamps wants is achievable in less than an hour a day. He just needs to learn to cook.

Personally, I enjoy cooking and often manage to turn it into a positive, relaxing part of my day: a drink, some music, ideally a friend (though not lately), and results that I'm proud of. Unfortunately, this is the image of cooking that most educated people are confronted with when they first face the task of cooking for themselves: yuppies amusing themselves and/or showing off their uber-conscious, uber-sophisticated lifestyle-fu. (I never reach such heights, but I understand that's what I'm supposed to be, and in some sense really am, aspiring to.) The problem is that you can't really do this every day unless you dedicate a lot of time to it.

That's not the only way to do it, though. Sometimes I like to cook something interesting or impressive, but more often than not, my priorities are elsewhere. I only cook because would rather not order in (too unhealthy) or go out (too time-consuming.) I usually manage to spend well under an hour cooking, preparing, and cleaning. Consider some of the slapped-together things I've eaten recently:

- Whole-wheat pasta plus lentils plus pasta sauce from a jar plus some broccoli haphazardly chopped up and cooked briefly in the pasta sauce. A nutritional powerhouse of a meal; who cares if it's a bit too unrefined to serve to dinner guests? Who cares if this meal doesn't exemplify any trendy food idea? Who cares if half of it came from a jar, as long as I can recognize the ingredients on the label?

- Frozen baby lima beans plus olive oil plus garlic (a few cloves quartered) plus some dried thyme and sage that have been sitting in my pantry for about a year. The recipe calls for kalamata olives, but I didn't want to go to the store. Fuck it, it would have been much better with the olives, but it was perfectly acceptable without. For guests I would have used fresh herbs, but I don't feel like I'm abusing myself by using slightly stale dried herbs. Oh, but it's just a side dish! That doesn't worry me when I'm cooking for myself. Oh, but it's not a whole protein! I had fish yesterday. I'll be fine. Serve it with brown rice if you want.

- Doen jang chi gae. A Korean soup or stew made by simmering dried anchovies in water for a few minutes, removing the anchovies, and throwing in a ball of doen jang and a bunch of vegetables and cooking for a while. I'm sure it's a gross simplification of what a more patient or sophisticated cook would do, but I just threw in daikon and collard greens, and later bean sprouts, jalapeno peppers, and tofu. Served with brown rice. Delicious.

- Plain brown rice and lentils with some kimchi thrown on top for flavor. No leafy greens? Nothing green at all? Relax; you don't need all the nutrients at every meal.

And finally, though it isn't really cooking:

- Amy's Brown Rice & Vegetables Bowl. Processed, packaged, frozen, and quite nutritionally respectable. Maybe x% of the nutritional value was lost during freezing and storage. So what? It's not like I have any vitamin deficiencies. I'll use the time I save to flip through my copy of Hungry Planet.

There's nothing wrong with cooking like this. As other posters have pointed out, johnswamps simply needs to learn to cook.

On an entirely unrelated note, I had an odd realization while writing this post. About my pasta dish above, I wrote: "Pro tip: Cook the lentils, toss the lentils on a plate, and use the same pot for the sauce and broccoli. Voila: two dirty dishes instead of three, which makes a huge difference." Then I thought: I never do that, so why would I write it? Washing one extra pot only takes about a minute. I wrote it because washing pots looms much larger in people's minds than it should. The "huge difference" is 99% psychological. The only practical reason to care about using an extra pot is if you're going to leave it sitting dirty on the stove, depressing you until you finally take care of it. Part of learning to cook is getting over psychological hang-ups like that, embracing the task, and learning to be objective. You can't let your night (or worse, your week) be negatively impacted by a one-minute task.

I'msurprised nobody else mentioned this, but in the past decade there's ben quite a growth in chains that prepare home-cooked meals for you. I know people who buy 7 of these at a time, and freeze them. Then you just mix the ingredients together, and bake or fry it. No thought has to go into it, but where's the fun in that?

Brown rice. Simple, soak it in water for 24 hours before you cook it, tastes great. I add soy sauce, and chillies for taste.