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?
I really, really enjoy cooking as a hobby, and I love baking, so yes. I tend to cook at least 3 times a week, and bake twice, or more depending on what I make. I cook a lot with my partner too, and it's a lot easier to cook with two people.
I recommend looking into why certain recipes work, rather than just following them as a list. There's a lot of different kind of websites where some explain better why you should do certain things, rather than telling you do do them. I recommend Ethan Chlebowski, Adam Regusa, J. Kenji López-Alt, as well as the book On Food by Harold McGee.
What works well for me is saving all the recipes I make a in text file, then edit it to add or decrease portion sizes to reduce waste. I dislike wasting food or ingredients, so I tend to use up everything quite easily, but at most I only ever cook for two, this might be harder if you cook for more. This is especially useful for baking.
The real trick for solo cooking is to get into either freezing your meals, or making big stews/sauces you can just ladle on top some pasta or rice. One stew can last 4 or more days depending on the size of the pot, and there's a lot of stews that actually get better the next day. You can also for example make lasagna out of it, so one day you can eat pasta, the next make lasagna and eat that the day after too.
Ethan Chlebowski has great introduction videos where he breaks down ingredients down by the type of taste and aroma, which if you apply that to other recipes, will simplify them and help you understand why certain things are there.
Also a lot of recipes in the end are also quite similar, or at least if you stick to a particular cuisine type. I tend to stick with European food, and there's a lot of similarities, like a lot of overlap between French, Italian, Belgian stews. I'm sure the real pros would laugh at that though.
I like to have some meals that I know are easy to make, and can make them during the week if I don't have a lot of time, or effort to spend on them. But it's also nice to try new recipes pretty much every weekend or potentially even during the week if I have time, and it's not too long.
A lot of people buy premade meals. In the grocery store, there's often a whole isle solely dedicated to premade food that only has to be heated up to be ready.
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