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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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?
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.).
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