site banner
PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   521 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 16, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Do you cook? I think there's a lot of people out there that would say they don't know how to cook and yet most people can't eat out every meal, so I wonder what are most people actually doing? I'm trying to learn to cook and I've realized something. There are so many cooking resources out there but they are all focused on recipes and techniques. It gives the impression that learning to cook is just about finding recipes and executing them well and doing this over and over. The problem with this is 1. it's a lot of work and 2. ingredients get wasted. This is even more of a problem if you are cooking for one and the less frequently you cook.

I see two ways out of this. First way, develop an understanding of how to use ingredients flexibly across a variety of meals, knowing when and what ingredients to buy ahead of time, understand how food can be preserved. It's actually a pretty high bar, especially when you don't even realize these are skills you need, which I think is why I've bounced off learning to cook in the past. Second way, cook the same few things over and over. I'm guessing most people are actually doing this, but doesn't it get boring eating the same thing repeatedly?

So I'm curious how often posters here actually cook. What does your cooking situation look like: are you cooking for one or more, are you cooking everyday or less? Do you have a system that makes it work for you?

I cook almost every day. Usually, I ingredient prep proteins for 2-3 days in advance and for carbs, I make them fresh everyday. Learn how to make the basics first. Carbs - potatoes, rice, pasta. Proteins - chicken and beef (start with ground beef, easier). Don't get fancy, just get some classic seasonings, can go for a store bought seasoning mix for starters. I recommend getting an air fryer. For oil, I prefer avocado, olive and butter. You can ask an AI to help you with steps and recipes, just tell it what ingredients and tools you got. You'll get a hang of it after just 1-2 weeks preparing all these, then you can expand your seasoning selection and figure out what you prefer. Red sauces are your friend, don't indulge into oil based sauces. I sometimes prepare more elaborate dishes, but for the most part it's very simple 4-5 ingredient meals.

I cook for 3, one is a baby though. I have no natural talent and often make basic mistakes even after cooking for 2 (before baby) for about 10 years. If it was just me my meals would be simpler, and I would probably eat out more because getting groceries, cooking, and cleanup is time consuming.

I prefer to cook simple meats like steaks, pork chops, and chicken thighs with minimal seasoning. Fresh meats do not last long at all before developing off-taste so I restock 2 or 3 times per week. I'll pick up some zucchini, asparagus, or broccoli when I restock meat.

An air fryer with a removeable dishwasher-safe basket is a great time saver in cleaning. It can't replace a good pan sear on meat, but sometimes you just want a lazy quick steak and it can deliver that.

I make ground beef dishes in bulk to freeze in disposable plastic containers, like spaghetti or cream pastas. Ground beef seems to tenderize and taste fine (to me) after reheating from frozen, so it is an ideal protein base for tasty and cheap frozen meals. When there's nothing to cook quickly or I'm too tired to cook, I put a premade frozen meal in the microwave for ~6 minutes and it's ready to eat.

Yes, cooking for one, maybe a few times a month. For context, I don't eat breakfast and get free lunch a lot at work, so often dinner is a snack. I consider myself a mid-tier cook that make a few things well if prone to certain culinary sins (oversalting my food!), but my friends and family tend to like what I cook. As for boring, I get just as bored with the restaurants in my area and have the same ability to eat pretty much the same thing or at least same theme if prompted. I cook because I'm a cheapskate and like to make an at least nominal effort to eat healthy.

The crock pot and freezer are my best friend, as can be the oven (Oven roasted chicken and vegetables doesn't take much skill and in my experience usually turns out good.). If I like something I cooked (Usually, what I cook turns out decent Sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's mediocre, but it's rarely bad enough that I don't like it.), I have no problem eating the same thing multiple times a week, supplementing with eating out or frozen convenience food for the sake of variety. I gravitate toward soups and stews and usually don't care for pasta. I tend to stick to a set of recipes and techniques that I've been using for years and with experience one gets an intuitive grasp of "this can be substituted for that". Some things just aren't hard, and some convenience foods aren't that bad. Mashed potatoes are not challenging to make from scratch. On the other hand, "just add water" sausage gravy is good enough that I've never felt compelled to learn to make it from scratch.

I also like to meal-prep multiple entrees to help with variety. In my freezer I have 15 bean soup (This recipe checks all the boxes. It's idiot-proof, cheap per serving, nutritious, and tasty. I like to add spinach and okra for some greens, and maybe carrots.), Brunswick Stew (My latest batch turned out over-seasoned because I didn't account for using pre-cooked barbecue pork instead of raw, but it isn't bad.) and a chicken and lentil curry abomination (I wouldn't serve it to guests, and it turned out spicier than I intended, but I like it.).

I typically cook for two to four people. I am not a good cook. Having a repertoire of recipes that you like and can produce consistently, while selecting purchase sizes carefully, and having a chest freezer for perishables, lets you cover a lot of gaps.

For these recipes:

  • Tamale pie's the only one where a 1lb ground beef, couple boxes of corn bread mix, and a couple cans of beans and veggies will make 8+ servings. This one you are committing to eating for most of a week.
  • Risotto, a cup of rice is a great side for four people, or if you're heavier on the meat, it's two servings of a main dish. Smoked sausage easily makes a separate meal with bread roll or baked potatoes if your batch size is small, and keeps a couple weeks after being opened if fridged. Uncooked rice lasts for years, BetterThanBouillon lasts for years, and it's one small can of sliced mushroom per cup rice.
  • Skewers are four decent servings per pound meat, bell pepper, and onion. Oil and almost any marinade lasts forever, most fruit chutney is good for a few months. You'll waste some fresh mushroom and naan bread if you're cooking literally one batch, but it's an easy thing to use elsewhere. Probably won't get through much of the onion.
  • Sushi, you can get 8 ounces or 6 ounces of most smoked and raw salmon - paying a premium compared to 16 or bigger sizes, but not that much. Most of the vegetables make great snacks if you don't finish them. Only real rough part's the avocado; it goes brown in a day, and can be a little hard to get through unless you like diy guacamole. Leftover nori keeps for about a month if you keep it in a ziplock bag, but it can just be eaten plain as a snack, or torn into strips as a good garnish for normal rice or soup.
  • Shakshouka is just a quarter-pound red meat, tomato, half an onion, and an egg per serving for a hearty version. It does really benefit from cumin, which a lot of people don't have, but that's a one-time investment and keeps for years.
  • Savory pies (or hand-rolls) are about eight servings per pre-made puff pastry or pie crust dough and pound of ground meat. You can use chunk canned chicken, an apple, and an 8 ounce goat cheese to make a four-serving version using the single puff pastry sheets.

Some other fun ones:

  • Tofu gets a (deservedly) bad wrap, but it makes hilariously good target for breading and sauce. If you don't have an air fryer, baking at 400-425 F for 15 minutes, flipping and cooking another 15-20 works. Dowse in whatever type of 'Asian'-American sauce you like, spread with rice. The bottled General Tso's or Orange Chicken sauces are the traditional options, but there's a lot of custom options: I'm currently addicted to a black vinegar, honey, and sesame oil/paste combo that's. Only big downside is tofu's a little fattier than chicken. There's a variety that works for chicken, but it's a bit more complicated and a lot more sensitive to getting overcooked.
  • Oatmeal biscotti is just 1.5 cup flour, 2 cups rolled oats, 0.5-1 units sugar or monkfruit sweetener, 3 tblsp melted butter, 1 egg, 1tsp vanilla, 1tsp almond extract, 1tblsp cinnamon. If you really want to class it up, throw in a half-cup of freeze-dried or dried unsweetened fruit, strawberry and cranberry tends to be easiest to track down, or sliced almonds or walnuts. Mix everything wet and the sugar, then mix everything else in until you end up with a dough, throwing in a tblsp of water at a time if needed til all the flour's absorbed into a ball, dump it onto a baking sheet with parchment paper on top. Bake at 350 for thirty minutes, slice, and bake for another 12-20 minutes until golden brown. Base recipe makes 8 big slices or 16 small ones, and you're never going to get sick of 'em before you're done with 'em.
  • Dylan's Magic Cinnamon Twists and Coffee Loaf have goofy presentation, but they're surprisingly good desserts.

I would also not ignore meals that are shy of 'cooking' in the traditional sense. A block of soft mozzarella cheese, a loaf of bread, a tomato, and some pesto sauce makes an excellent sandwich that's much classier-feeling than the typical PB&J, and the only thing you need to be able to use is a butter knife and a toaster, and looks restaurant grade if you toast it in an oven or panini press with 'fancy' sourdough bread. Same for a ton of pastas and soups that are basically just heating it up and maybe adding water. Chili is hilariously easy, keeps well so you can have it for a few meals across a couple weeks, and can be spiced or mixed up to your preferences pretty easily -- cornbread is traditional, but long grain rice or spread thin on a naan works wonders, and if you really want to summon dark gods heavier mixes do genuinely work on pasta at the cost of your immortal soul.

You can go fancier and still keep it in a single pot and <6 servings, but you really don't have to.

That said, accept that some food waste is going to happen, and it's not worth optimizing out. A whole onion is about two dollars at unit count one, and 50 cents for a bag. A bachelor or couple will probably start an onion and have to throw out or compost half of it. That's fine, it's a rounding error, and if you try to optimize it out you're going to waste more time, energy, and money anyway.

What aren't you good at?

Definitely making shakshouka this weekend!

I detest cooking and the resulting food too.

However, I will cook for others who don't have that problem, and by their judgment I know I am at least passably competent.

The industrial kitchens do this better (more variety, more consistency, specifically engineered to be a tasty and relatively well-balanced product, drastically less time) and cost the same as it would for me to do it; the ingredients and the waste thereof are the reason why (I can't buy portions small enough for this to be cost-effective). At last count, it cost about a half hour's wage to do that.

Modern ingredients are generally completely tasteless outside of specialty stores, so I'd rather buy from people whose recipes are built around overcoming that fact. (And they are successful; I don't know how, I've yet to fixate on flavor chemistry.)

If I was married or had kids I'd cook more simply because that economic calculus would no longer hold in the "you can just use the whole bag" sense. Until such time, I'm going to McDonalds because that's still a nutritionally-complete meal (I'm not Big Smoke but I'm also not magically repelled from fast food places and don't understand why anyone would be outside of "it's low class").

For a relatively sedentary lifestyle a breakfast (or dinner, if I do decide to cook it myself), that, and some snacks/drinks throughout the day results in roughly 1,000 calories as surplus per month. I'm as thankful for the supply chain that makes this possible as I am for the food itself in terms of being able to survive the day, and would prefer to move to an area where a wider variety of these places existed.

I am one of those people who will eat the same thing for a literal year, then get tired of it and never eat it again (and am thankful that I haven't hit that point with hamburgers; truly the Platonic ideal of foods, perhaps appropriately named after a city bearing some of the most autistic peoples on the planet). I have some intellectual appreciation for people who eat nothing but chicken nuggets, it's just that I don't have any reason to resist situations where I can't do that and won't explode if I can't do it. (Comfort isn't actually that much of an end.)

For this evening's dinner I fried a venison burger (local Scottish venison) boiled peas, sweet corn (maize), and broccoli. Added some butter to my vegetables. Does that count as cooking? I get the impression that "cooking" is supposed to be more complicated, and produce a tastier meal. On the other hand I've avoided the added sugar in a ready-meal, and I'm happy enough with meat and vegetables, so I'm going to call it cooking :-)

Yeah I cook. Probably 6 or so times a week now that I'm unemployed and living off savings.

The way I learned how to cook was to pick certain dishes I liked, make the bare minimum version of them, then gradually increase complexity by adding more and more ingredients. I naturally picked up how certain ingredients behaved over time. I'm pretty great at making a steak now, and I can make a variety of sides to go with it.

Eventually I get bored of even food I like. I find AI is helpful there. You can ask it for other things you can do with the same base, or different sides/sauces to make.

I live alone. I cook for myself. When I do I do it in batches for at least 3 servings. Sometimes my friends come by unannounced and eat my food. Always have people lining up whenever I make a pot of stew. Stew is good with a dutch oven, just takes forever. If you're just starting though, either bake stuff in an oven tray or fry it in a pan. Keep it simple, add complexity as you get comfortable.

Ethan Chlebowski should be right up your alley.

My wife usually cooks for us, but I cook for myself when she's away at the summer cabin and I'm stuck in the city. I am fine with making a big pot of stew and having five identical dinners in a row.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats