The Sad Bastard Cookbook

The trick for me is to apply engineering to the kitchen. You can actually enjoy really elaborate meals if you simply make more each time and utilize pyrex+freezer. Why make only 6 servings of spaghetti when there's still 50% free space available in your instant pot? (that 'max fill' line is but a polite suggestion :D) Planning ahead, logistics, etc. can make all the difference in the world.

Imagine spending one hour in the kitchen to only feed yourself one time. That would be peak insanity to me today. I used to live it for about a decade myself. Ate out about every other day as a consequence. Ordered in a pizza once a week. Today, I eat out about once a month. I haven't ordered a pizza in 3+ years.

I absolutely hated cooking until I learned about terms like "mise en place" and realized that manufacturing/lean/six sigma principles work just as well in my kitchen as they do on a factory floor. Also, tools like the humble pressure cooker can take your 2 hour process cycle down to 20 minutes. It arguably tastes better in many cases too. Cooking is not a mystical process. Much of it (not all) is science and engineering. You can robotically produce incredible meals. And I argue you should - The food on America's shelves and restaurants is only worsening in my estimation.

I say this as an Italian, because legend wants we love pasta and we all eat it every day almost religiously, pasta is the worst way to cook a quick and healthy meal in my opinion.

Sauce must be really good to enjoy pasta, pesto especially should be eaten fresh, it's true that here in Italy you can eat it at a fresh express pasta place for like 5-7 euros (more like 7-9 in a big city), it's not really that expensive, but still not that cheap either considering it's pasta, and cooking it at home requires a lot of preparation and attention IMO. You can't leave pasta unattended.

So here they are my go-to recipes for when I don't wanna be bothered:

- in summer: caprese salad, which is tomatoes + mozzarella + olive oil + basil + origan. you can add olives or capers if you like them, my favourite variant is with anchovies. Or you can have ham and melon. Or you can have mozzarella and ham and all the combinations you can think of: caprese + ham, caprese + melon, melon + mozzarella + ham etc. All of them take 5 minutes top to prepare, they're all delicious.

- fish: swordfish, tuna, mackerel, salmon, sardines etc. you can buy them steamed, grilled, smoked, marinated or in oil, they come in cans, jars or you can buy them at fresh food counters. not all of them come suuuper cheap, but they are usually affordable enough, and most of them are as cheap as pasta, especially the canned versions. you can heat some steamed/grilled mackerel fillet in the oven or in the microwave, add an herb sauce and it's like being at the restaurant. also buying it fresh at the fish counter is an option, they prepare it for you so you don't have to and most of the time you just cook it in a pan for a few minutes in half a spoon of olive oil.

- everything with beans. I love beans, I could live just by eating beans every day of my life. my favourite kind is borlotti beans, you can eat them straight from the jar, we have a lot of high quality packaged beans which are also very cheap, like less than 1 euro for a 250 grams jar. My go-to recipe with beans is beans and tuna salad. It's simply borlotti beans + canned tuna + olive oil + some vinegar + some raw red onion. You can replace beans with your favourite legumes, for example chick-peas. you can also replace tuna with some other canned fish, like the aforementioned steamed or grilled mackerel.

- chicken: buy chicken breast, pound it a little bit and grill it for a few minutes, add olive oil and you're done. if you feel fancy, marinate it with some lemon juice, herbs and half a glass of white wine, put it in a covered glass bowl and leave it in the fridge over night. grill it at lunch the day after.

- caponata: which for the Italians who might read this, here I use as an umbrella term for a mix of vegetables. Take the vegetables you like, for example peppers, aubergines and zucchini. cut them into sorta like cube shaped pieces. put them in a pan, add olive oil, add some tomato sauce if you like it, cook it as much as the hardest vegetable requires, stir it from time to time.

what's really important in my opinion is cook/prepare your meals at least once a day. At least eat some food straight from the kitchen, if you are not the cook. Avoid eating delivery/pre-cooked/processed food everyday.

You'll be doing something for yourself and you'll feel much better.

Take your time to cook for yourself but also for other people, it's never time wasted.

I got the actual Instant Pot. This is my second actually, I got the one that also does air frying.

It's a great purchase. Get some cheap protein that needs to cook for long, get some vegetables, brown the protein a bit (can be done in the Instant Pot), add chopped vegetables, salt, spices, and a little water; pressure cook for 1 hour. Shorter version: add meat, add vegs, add water, turn on.

You can get fancier as you learn, but stews are my favourite food because they require cheap ingredients, and with the instant pot I don't even need to take care of it while it cooks. Toss everything together and turn the thing on. It has a timer and a keep warm function, so you can literally fill it in the morning, and come back from work to a warm pot of stew.

My favorite recipe is chilli con carne, which is little more than minced beef with onions peppers and beans in tomato sauce. Stews, chilli and random salads are 90% of my diet.

I am curious - what does your weekly grocery bill look like?

> because the frozen food was cooled so quickly I'm not worried about food safety if it's not thoroughly reheated.

This is something I picked up on. My meals go straight from 200F+ to freezer. I don't really even let the containers cool down first.

Grocery bill is almost certainly below average. Rolled oats and pasta are cheap. Dry legumes are cheap, and the electric pressure cooker makes cooking them easy. Minced (ground) beef is cheap too. Canned sardines and salmon are also reasonably priced (I mix these into bechamel sauce before freezing). The main fresh vegetables I eat are onions and carrots, which are cheap all year. Swedes (rutabagas) are cheap when in season (they're expensive now in the UK). Frozen spinach is also reasonably priced, and it goes well in most legume dishes.

Each batch of food weighs about 2kg, so I'm not sure about putting it directly into the freezer without pre-cooling. It might be a good idea to set up some temperature logging to see if I can safely skip the ice bath step.