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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2108 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 27, 2026

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Cooking

Looking for some delicious meals to make for family. But upgrading easy meals seems to have more bang for the buck than making hard meals. For example: fish tacos.

Caesar salad kit from the grocery store. Frozen fish sticks. Tortillas. Combine them and they make acceptable fish tacos. My girls won't eat those fish tacos, but they will eat fish sticks with their chosen sauce, and Caesar salad.

Anyone have any similar food hacks?

Pasta Puttenesca is the dish with probably the highest perceived/actual complexity ratio I have in my repertoire. It uses primarily canned and jarred ingredients, is pretty good for you, costs virtually nothing (though you must spring for good italian tomatoes), and takes 15 minutes front to back depending on the parsley workflow.

Combine with red wine with the wife for maximum effectiveness.

If it's too easy and you want to step things up, roast garlic 45 minutes beforehand and make a compound butter for some bread. Lightly broil as you finish the pasta.

I would still try the harder meals once in a while. As you get better at cooking you get a sense for what goes well with what and you end up being able to quickly make something nice from whatever you have in your fridge.

And a lot of stuff isn't even that hard. This channel has a bunch of YouTube shorts you'll find some easy recipes in: https://youtube.com/@fallowchefs?si=eY7RFEkzQH8d7Gpw

Time is an ingredient. Usually you are able to trade hands on for hands off time. Sous vide and pressure cooker. Sous vide - allows you to have a lot of protein ready for finishing. I usually have couple of beef skirtsteaks (24h at 56C), pork tenderloin (56, 4h) and shoulders (70C - 24h) ready to go. If your fridge have proper cold storage (under 4C) they keep forever. Since vacuuming one or ten is the same effort - saves a lot of time doing it in bulk.

Stove top pressure cooker - legumes in half an hour, perfect foolproof rice every time, perfectly boiled eggs, for a weekday dinner - throw some tough beef, carrot, onion, celery, wine and stock. go away for two hours - shred beef and finish under the broiler if feeling fancy, discard the veggies, concentrate the stock a bit.

Almost no knead bread - if you plan on fermenting for more than 12 hours minimal kneading is needed. Good protocol is - gather ingredients, mix for a short while in the mixer (or mix with a stick and then do couple of stretch and folds every 30 min for 2 hours), ferment overnight, shape and throw in the fridge, bake when dinner is ready.

Deserts - lava cake is surprisingly easy for the fanciness - nytimes recipe is spot on.

Make giant pots of soup and freeze them (in individual serving sizes). If you x3, x4, x5 a normal soup recipe it takes less than that many times effort. Especially if you use one that includes a bunch of things like canned tomatoes and beans rather than fresh chopped vegetables (though most of mine take a combination of both). Eat some of it fresh, freeze the rest (we have a bunch of plastic 2-cup containers my wife brought home from work). This doesn't work for every type of soup (noodles turn to mush, for example) but for some of them it's fine. Then on demand you can unfreeze a serving of soup and it has all of the cost and nutrition value of homemade soup but the convenience of canned soup. If you regularly do this with a variety of recipes then you can have a variety of soup types so you're not stuck eating the same thing every day.

It also works with other things like pizza or calzones. My basement freezer is a big box packed with presents from past me to future me. The point being I don't want to cook every day. But I can have home cooked meals every day anyway, as long as I force multiply when I need to.

Buying premade staple ingredients is usually both good value and efficient. For example, I regularly cook with what I guess is a standard vegetable / ‘soffritto’ base (very finely diced onions, celery, carrots) as a base for sauces, stews, whatever. Could I buy the ingredients myself and make this on the weekend, freeze it in bags, then use it when I’m cooking? Sure.

But I can also get it perfectly, finely and evenly diced, with no waste or disproportionate amounts of celery or whatever from the grocery store, where 1lb of the “frozen soffritto mix” costs me $2.50. There’s a French grocery store I found that sells pre-finely-diced frozen shallots, perfect for a fast pan sauce if you don’t want to buy and chop shallots, which I use too.

I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well (the “hacks” for quickly peeling garlic have never worked for me). I buy jarred diced ginger, chili etc in vinegar, which saves both time and in the latter case that horrible feeling when you chop chili and imperfectly wash your hands and then touch your eye or something.

The store also sometimes has very good pre-marinated meats which, again, save a lot of unnecessary time and effort at miniscule cost (perhaps an additional 10% on top of the price of the meat itself). Store-bought curry sauces are also great; the gain from hand-grinding spices, mashing chillies, hand-making a massaman or red curry paste over a good store-bought base is real, but minimal. I think the same about homemade pie crust. A premium store-bought brownie mix is likewise superior to most homemade alternatives.

I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well

Infinitely well, if you chop and then freeze it. I learned this from my wife, who generally hates frozen vegetables, but who always has a baggie of frozen garlic ready, shaped into a thin pattie so it's easy to break off chunks of various sizes. It somehow thaws and cooks to be indistinguishable from fresh, better than any jarred garlic we've tried, and infinitely better than trying to sub in powders or salts in a recipe which needs fresh.

I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well (the “hacks” for quickly peeling garlic have never worked for me).

Chinese cleaver is your friend.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UYCKIroDVBY&t=183

My technique is a little bit different. I smash it with root and unpeeled. Once smashed the skin is usually in one peace and you just remove it.

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