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

Does today's XKCD describe you?

clinkclank.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 21 posts

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#11

Post by sophacles »

kd0amg wrote: post #9
lukesandberg wrote: post #7

Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but specifically. Bananas area good example. I love bananas but when it comes to grabbing one in the morning there is like a mental block about it, so eventually the bananas go bad.... What somebody needs to do is create a "No Ingredient Left Behind" product that will yell at yo…

My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.

So if you are willing to be anal enough to make sure things are always "in thier place" and have a few webcams to spare, you could have the webcams point at the food storage locations. This could do a large part of the inventory management automatically... at least have a "present/not present" bit for ingredients.

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#12

Post by joh6nn »

this used to describe me, but my brother-in-law turned me on to doing all of my cooking on one day of the week, and freezing everything. this has several advantages (and one major disadvantage):

cons:

  * you lose pretty much an entire day cooking
pros:

  * don't have to cook when i get home from work
  * everything i eat now is a real meal,
    (including bag lunches for work, i just
    grab something out of the freezer, and by the
    time lunch time roles around, it's thawed and ready to go)
  * i'm wasting a lot less food/money, because the
    ingredients get used almost as soon as i buy them,
    and the food goes straight into the freezer instead
    of lingering in the fridge
  * i'm (slowly) learning to really cook

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#13

Post by pamelafox »

I only started cooking a few months ago, and discovered the secret to delicious daily meals: 1) a piece of meat (steak, salmon, etc.) 2) a handful of veggies (asparagus, broccoli, green beans) 3) sea salt + pepper 4) a frying pan

You can get a fair number of unique combinations out of that, and it only takes 10 minutes to get your meal cooked (6 minutes for the veggies, 4 for the meat).

Maybe I'll get bored of it eventually, but for now, I'm shocked-and-awe'd that I can so simply make food that tastes so damn good in my mouth.

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#14

Post by mechanical_fish »

lukesandberg wrote: post #7

Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but specifically. Bananas area good example. I love bananas but when it comes to grabbing one in the morning there is like a mental block about it, so eventually the bananas go bad.... What somebody needs to do is create a "No Ingredient Left Behind" product that will yell at yo…

I will tell you the secret to bananas: A banana muffin recipe.

Once bananas are overripe you can still make muffins from them. Once they are really quite overripe, you can put them in the fridge for several more days, and then you can still make muffins from them. I haven't yet reached the point where I took the overripe bananas, peeled and crushed them, put the crushed banana in containers and froze them, then thawed them two weeks later and made muffins from them... but I bet that would work.

Once the muffins are made, they freeze nicely. Thaw them on a plate in the microwave: about 45 seconds per muffin at about power level 40%.

The more general secret to small-batch cooking is: Aim to use the freezer. (For example: I have friends who apparently went through decades of life without realizing that bread freezes pretty well -- fresh is better but frozen is not bad. Don't ever let your bread grow stale unless you have the desire to make croutons.)

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#15

Post by InclinedPlane »

joh6nn wrote: post #12

this used to describe me, but my brother-in-law turned me on to doing all of my cooking on one day of the week, and freezing everything. this has several advantages (and one major disadvantage): cons: * you lose pretty much an entire day cooking pros: * don't have to cook when i get home from work * everything i eat now is a real meal, (including bag lunches for work, i just grab something out of the freezer, and by…

Freezing meals is a smart way to go if you live alone and can't cook meals that get mostly eaten in the same day.

Most people don't know that the frozen meals they see in stores are typically low quality not because of the nature of frozen foods but because of the expectations of the market and the need to preserve frozen food for long periods of time. If you're cooking on your own then you can use higher quality ingredients and you can avoid the compromises needed for mass-produced, highly preserved foods (meals that will be preserved just fine for up to a month in your freezer are not necessarily suitable for being mass-produced or for being preserved for months to years).

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#16

Post by joh6nn »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #15
joh6nn wrote: post #12

this used to describe me, but my brother-in-law turned me on to doing all of my cooking on one day of the week, and freezing everything. this has several advantages (and one major disadvantage): cons: * you lose pretty much an entire day cooking pros: * don't have to cook when i get home from work * everything i eat now is a real meal, (including bag lunches for work, i just grab something out of the freezer, and by…

Freezing meals is a smart way to go if you live alone and can't cook meals that get mostly eaten in the same day. Most people don't know that the frozen meals they see in stores are typically low quality not because of the nature of frozen foods but because of the expectations of the market and the need to preserve frozen food for long periods of time. If you're cooking on your own then you can use higher quality ing…

actually, i think it's the kind of system that just works well, period, as long as you can devote an entire day to cooking. i actually live with my fiancee, and the practice has become go shopping one day, do all our cooking the next. we just setup a laptop somewhere in the kitchen, and either stream music or stuff off the netflix instant queue. it's done good things for our diet, our budget, and our relationship

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#17

Post by calvarez »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #5

I can't find a way to submit the form. It just stops after the HIGHEST priority question and has no scroll bar, no sensible end, and no submit button. Using Chrome something-or-other on Windows XP something-or-other. To answer the questions, I cook pretty much every day. I hate it, but it's the fastest, cheapest and healthiest way to eat. It's even faster than take-away, but I wish I never had to cook again. If I had…

man, I suck today. It's added now. If you are interested I'm at cindy at clinkclank.net

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#18

Post by calvarez »

kd0amg wrote: post #9
lukesandberg wrote: post #7

Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but specifically. Bananas area good example. I love bananas but when it comes to grabbing one in the morning there is like a mental block about it, so eventually the bananas go bad.... What somebody needs to do is create a "No Ingredient Left Behind" product that will yell at yo…

My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.

Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#19

Post by kd0amg »

calvarez wrote: post #18
kd0amg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.

Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?

Both are actually pretty frequent, but with a grocery store a block or so away, the latter is more of a problem. The current instance is chicken broth, a baguette, and spinach (and I returned home this afternoon to discover that somebody had bought more spinach), which are probably just going to get used for separate dishes.

Re: Does today's XKCD describe you?

#20

Post by joh6nn »

pamelafox wrote: post #13

I only started cooking a few months ago, and discovered the secret to delicious daily meals: 1) a piece of meat (steak, salmon, etc.) 2) a handful of veggies (asparagus, broccoli, green beans) 3) sea salt + pepper 4) a frying pan You can get a fair number of unique combinations out of that, and it only takes 10 minutes to get your meal cooked (6 minutes for the veggies, 4 for the meat). Maybe I'll get bored of it eve…

were you trying to taste food in a different orifice previously?
Post reply on HN