Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Sad Bastard Cookbook

traumbooks.itch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 445 posts

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#261

Post by didgeoridoo »

mrob wrote: post #203
bob1029 wrote: post #191

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…

The importance of the "max fill" line in an electric pressure cooker depends on what you're cooking. If you're cooking legumes, you should respect it, because they can foam and make a huge mess if you try to cook too much at once. But I've never had a problem cooking steamed vegetables past the line.

In my experience, going past the max fill line is mostly a problem when using the “rapid pressure release” on a recipe with lots of liquid. Pressing the release button can emit a a superheated geyser of soup with enough force to hit the ceiling.

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#262

Post by strken »

coolvision wrote: post #52

My food for when I can't be bothered is pasta with canned pesto sauce (+optional parmesan). Can eat it every day. Another a bit more involved option is pasta with checkpeas: https://www.seriouseats.com/pasta-e-ceci-pasta-with-chickpea... What's yours go-to recipes?

Turns out you can poach chicken breasts by covering with an inch(ish) of water, bringing them to the boil, popping a lid on, turning the heat off, and letting sit for 30 to 45 minutes (depending on size).

It tastes better than most other methods of cooking chicken breast other than stewing. Optional extras include salt, whole peppercorns, and roughly sliced lemon. If the chicken breasts are freakishly large and weigh more than 350g you might need to halve them. Lasts a couple of days in the fridge but the texture is better fresh.

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#263

Post by denkmoon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #119
Eisenstein wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With an Instant Pot, an induction burner, and a toaster oven you can make anything that would require a normal kitchen, just in smaller portions (as in, you aren't cooking a whole turkey or a giant casserole).

On that note, I've been wondering about the recent hype about "air fryers", which - best I can tell, after looking into it repeatedly - are basically countertop, underpowered version of fan ovens that have been, in my life, a standard appliance in every kitchen I've ever seen. But maybe it's a sign of worsening economical prospects of the generation - people no longer own, only rent, increasingly worse quality apartm…

I used to dismiss air fryers as just a crappy benchtop oven, but Minute Food did a cool video explaining why that's an overly reductive view and they're actually kind cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AASP4P5vRAA

It really does work better than my conventional oven.

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#264

Post by stakhanov »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #227
random_upvoter wrote: post #100

Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather neat solution for this problem: go live together in a big building, work together, pray together, cook together and call it a monastery.

We had other solutions for a while too: get married and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking. But that role disappeared because corporations needed more cheap worker-units and politicians needed more GDP, so they rode each others' coattails to eliminate that role. With each homemaker now a worker-unit, there are twice as many worker-units but employee costs are the same, household income is the…

> We had other solutions for a while too[...]

There were more solutions besides monasteries and marriage. My grandparents, living in a small town in a rural area of Austria maybe 50 years ago, had a large family. That town's teacher was single, and it simply wouldn't have been economical for her to do her own cooking, so she had a deal whereby she paid my grandparents so she could come over every day to have dinner with the family. This arrangement was so common that there was even a word for it ("Kostgänger").

I'm surprised that there isn't a sharing economy startup yet, trying to reinvent the concept. -- "Uber for warm meals". Or at least I'm not aware of one. It probably exists.

On another note: The nuclear family household with one dedicated homemaker was historically a relatively short-lived concept. Prior to that, we tended to have extended families sharing a household, and the significant amount of work involved in food preparation was surely one of the drivers of that.

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#265

Post by idle_processor »

generic92034 wrote: post #207
maerF0x0 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you and I get into very different kinds of "sad" but was even this part too much? > I just buy multiple costco rotisserie chickens, some frozen veggies, put food on plate, microwave, cover in sauce, eat.

Some days going outside for shopping groceries is just not "on the menu". But anyway, if you are eating alone there is generally a real imbalance between the time required for preparing a meal and cleaning up afterwards versus the time required for eating. On low energy days this can be already too much.

That's where instacart comes in.

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#266

Post by netfortius »

bob1029 wrote: post #191

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…

You had me at "pressure cooker". I don't even want to remember how [cooking] life was before I discovered the InstantPot, and the world of options such opened in kitchen.

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#267

Post by AmericanChopper »

random_upvoter wrote: post #100

Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather neat solution for this problem: go live together in a big building, work together, pray together, cook together and call it a monastery.

It’s a culture problem, not an economic one. Cooking delicious dirt-cheap meals is easy, and doesn’t take an unreasonable amount of time out of your day. We’ve just had a few generations of western parents not teaching their children to cook anything. So when those people realise they have to figure out how to feed themselves, they simply don’t know any reasonable ways to do it, even though plenty exist.

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#268

Post by denkmoon »

amluto wrote: post #148
doctor_eval wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to second this. My family of four have been waiting for more than a year for our new kitchen (long and boring story) and we’ve managed fine after buying two of these to get by. And we enjoy cooking. So if you’re just starting out this is a great buy. A full size stove will have a larger element and better heat control but you won’t notice. And they are way better than a gas camp stove.

If you upgrade to a Breville Control Freak (not cheap, but cheaper than your new kitchen) and you get used to it (it require recalibrating your concept of how to use a stove a bit), you might find that you never use your new stove in your new kitchen. The Control Freak has: Better heat control. (That’s the entire point. It smokes essentially everything else in the market.) Painless preheating. Put on your pan, turn i…

Holy crap. That is an insane price. Seems like it's priced for commercial use.

I've had a thought in the back of my head to use a temperature probe like that in a temperature control loop on my induction cooktop, could probably do it with an arduino but I also don't want to make my kitchen an electronics project.

Is there nothing like this that is priced reasonably?

Re: The Sad Bastard Cookbook

#270

Post by westcort »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #227
random_upvoter wrote: post #100

Any non-wealthy single person faces an uphill battle to both 1. earn a living 2. take proper care of themselves. In the Middle Ages people invented a rather neat solution for this problem: go live together in a big building, work together, pray together, cook together and call it a monastery.

We had other solutions for a while too: get married and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking. But that role disappeared because corporations needed more cheap worker-units and politicians needed more GDP, so they rode each others' coattails to eliminate that role. With each homemaker now a worker-unit, there are twice as many worker-units but employee costs are the same, household income is the…

This comment reminded me to thank my wife for doing the hard work of being a homemaker.
Post reply on HN