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 cook almost every day (for one). In a typical week I make two big batches of food in a pressure cooker or dutch oven and that covers about half my meals and all of the lunches I pack for work. This could be a bean stew, Thai red curry, Jamaican stew peas, or Chinese pork rib and daikon soup (to name some recent examples) and I will plan those out at the start of the week. The other meals I make are improvised from the ingredients I have available in my fridge/pantry. For instance, I might see that I have ground beef, bell peppers, tomatoes, and canned beans and decide to make chili, or that I have bok choy, eggs, and frozen shrimp and decide to add those to ramen. When I go grocery shopping, I get a mixture of items I know I need for dishes I've planned or to replenish things I always want to have on hand (onions, potatoes, spices if they run out, etc.) as well as whatever looks like a good deal that day. I consult recipes, but never follow them exactly, and I don't measure things except in very specific circumstances where precision is needed e.g. baking.
That paints a picture of how things might look when you are an experienced cook, but when starting out I would pick a category, let's say pasta, gather recipes that interest you, learn to make them by the book, and then try to remix them. Limiting yourself to one cuisine reduces the cost of entry as far as spices/shelf-stable ingredients goes and lets you slowly build up your pantry and improv skills. You'll make some dubious food along the way, but I'd say that getting to the point where a shelf of produce that's about to go bad looks like possibilities and not a source of anxiety is worth it. As for variety, continuing with our pasta example, initially that could look like preparing one or two sauces in bulk, alternating them over the course of a week, and serving them with different kinds of pasta every day.
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