I've decided that I eat too much freezer-to-oven and fast food shit, and I want to cook more. Part of the problem is I'm not very experienced, and the few things I 'can' cook aren't very interesting, and I'd rapidly get bored of.
Can anyone suggest a few easy recipes or tips for someone who's really just dipping their toes into this? I want to have a few things so I'm not just alternating between the same 2 or 3 dishes every night. If it helps, I tend to prefer chicken over other proteins.
Brotherman, if I wanted to buy a cookbook I would have. I was hoping for a little more guidance than just a recipe on paper.
Samuel White
I actually have one, but I've only used it a few times. Most of the recipes I find when I go LOOKING are just soups that don't look very good.
Jayden Brooks
Find cuisine you enjoy (italian, mexican, african), look up simple recipes and cook them. Learn basic cutting techniques, and how to grip a knife. Watch shit loads of youtube tutorials. Cooking is not hard. Dont over think it.
Julian Rivera
I've got the cutting stuff down- I can already cook a few things, it's just that most of the things I make tend to be "cut up some chicken, then add it to the shit from this box". I want to be able to cook different things, but when I look over recipes everything looks too frustrating or too boring.
I dunno. I should just give up, it's stupid.
Tyler James
He has all the recipes for free on the website you lazy ass
If you need something more specific than a general resource for lazy ass bachelors, which is exactly what Bittman's schtick is aimed at, you should specify. You need help boiling water? You need to know what "preheat the oven" means? What do you mean by "guidance"?
Sebastian Phillips
Sorry, I saw 'buy' and assumed you were just being a dick.
I know some basics, I just don't really know what to -do-. I know how to make a roux, but I don't know what that's good for beyond that point. Shit like that. I can do some basics, but I'm not sure how to combine those basic techniques and shit to make a meal that's not just "hot meat".
Evan Hall
Of course it says "buy", he's trying to make a living as a food authority for neckbeards with pretensions of respectability, and he's been quite successful at it
The way to figure out what a roux is good for is you make a bunch of recipes involving rouxes. If you do this enough you start to recognize patterns on your own, and you can "develop" "new" recipes based on personal taste. Just like any other kind of learning.
If you don't know what you want to cook, you could either (a) think of a meal you really enjoyed, and try to make it perfectly, practicing multiple times if needed, until you get bored, succeed, or fail and decide it's not possible, then move on to something else. Or, (b) scroll through a list of recipes until you find one that sounds good on paper, follow all the instructions, and if it didn't come out right, google "why is my steak dry" or whatever it was that came out wrong. Read about what makes steak dry or not (or whatever the problem was), make inferences based on what you think you did based on this new knowledge, and compensate on the next round until you did it right.
Blake Diaz
>general resource for lazy bachelors >recipes include things like braised rabbit and broiled cornish hens lol k
Liam Ward
I just started small and slowly built my way up. Look up a recipe for something you like that's not too difficult, and follow the recipe. Then do that again and again. Eventually combine recipes or change them to your taste. Try more advanced recipes...
This isn't fucking rocket science.
Luis Hall
I'm really not interested in spending entire afternoons and chunks of my paycheck repeatedly failing to make food so I can 'figure things out'.
Brayden Ortiz
All the recipes I can find are either "empty the contents of three cans into a skillet" bullshit, stupidly above my skill level, or shit that looks disgusting.
Xavier Hill
>rabbit, an animal humans have eaten for thousands of years, is impossible for me to learn to cook because I didn't think they were edible It's a fucking chicken with fur on it. If you're unwilling to try new things simply on account of their being unfamiliar to you, you should just give up on this idea of becoming "experienced" because being a whiny little bitch doesn't magically confer experience.
James Rodriguez
Then just eat canned soup. Mistakes are a required part of learning. If you're so scared of making a mistake that it cripples your ability to try, just install the Domino's app. Assuming that isn't beyond your comfort zone.
Alexander Collins
I'm not the guy who posted a thread, I just find it hilarious that you think someone marketing shit like that is aiming his stuff at 'lazy bachelors'. I don't think they carry cornish game hens or fucking rabbit at the Walmart OP shops at.
Levi Howard
I'm not afraid of making mistakes. The reason I want to learn to cook is because I'm sick of wasting money on fast food, so why the fuck would I want to take a path where I spend 40 minutes cooking dinner, and it comes out trash? Then I'm out whatever the ingredients cost me, and I either try it again and hope I get workable food, or I just go buy a hamburger because it's 8 PM and I have shit to do.
Chase Price
>if you are unmarried you are required to shop at Walmart Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of unmarried men in my city, where Walmart hasn't been allowed to open a store
Blake Smith
Thanks to everyone for being condescending dicheads when all I did was ask for advice. Fuck all of you, and I hope you choke on your hoity-toity 'cuisine' and die.
In what universe do you pitch something where you have to go to a specialty shop for ingredients as a great recipe for a LAZY bachelor? "Oh hey, we hear you can't do anything more complicated than throw a DiGiorno in the oven- have you considered making a Beef Wellington?"
Cooper Ross
Oh wow, someone who knew where to look and knew which recipes take less time was able to quickly find a fast recipe!
Imagine that.
Luis Williams
I quit looking at that website when the recipe for mac and cheese involved boiling bay leaves in milk.
Ian Sullivan
2/3 of the recipes involve the kinds of ingredients you can buy at fucking Winn Dixie in the deepest of food deserts, it's not my problem you saw one thing that was outside of your comfort zone and collapsed into a quivering ball of panic and tears I've never even looked through his recipes before, today was the first time I took a serious look at his page, because of you. I only know his name because I used to read his column when he was writing for my local paper
Adam Baker
Again, I'm not the OP, I'm just laughing at the concept of someone sticking shit like that into a list of 'easy recipes for lazy bachelors'.
Bentley Ramirez
They are easy recipes. I am a lazy bachelor. I can get rabbit at the grocery store across the street from my work. If you can't, pick another recipe. Once again, sorry you're triggered by stuff that isn't microwave tendies dipped in ranch.
Nolan Russell
Still not the OP, dude.
Jaxon Bell
Nowhere in my post did I suggest you were, dude
Liam Allen
>Sorry you're triggered by stuff that isn't microwave tendies dipped in ranch
You're pretty heavily implying that my 'issue' is that the recipes are outside my comfort zone. They're not- I don't know about the shitstain OP who's terrified of anything involving two pans. Again, I'm just laughing that you hand over a list of recipes with shit like braised rabbit, skate wing, and stuffed lamb shoulder as "easy recipes for a lazy bachelor".
Dylan Wood
How are any of those difficult? Because the meat isn't boneless skinless chicken breast? Brotip: if you can cook chicken, you can cook all of those others. There is nothing magical about those ingredients other than the fact that they have a "scary" name.
Ayden Bennett
For the tenth fucking time, none of it is scary -to me-.
But do you honestly think that a guy who's trying to graduate from Kraft Dinner to actual cooking isn't going to be intimidated by that shit?
Evan Sullivan
>none of it is scary -to me- Obviously it is, since you asked >do you honestly think that a guy who's trying to graduate from Kraft Dinner to actual cooking isn't going to be intimidated by that shit? A guy like that will be intimidated by anything whether it's "preheat the pan" or "ask your fishmonger for ______". It's pointless to rule out a perfectly good resource because some of the recipes seem, to you, to involve "exotic" ingredients.
Lincoln Howard
Cool projecting, dude.
Asher Wood
>braising and broiling are too difficult for a lazy bachelor.
Christ, braising and broiling are two fundametal techniques that any home cook has to know. The techniques are the same no matter the meat. You sound like either you think cornish hens and rabbit are some fancypants exotic meats, in which case braise shortribs and spatchcock a chicken for broiling, or you you want to throw up your hands and say basic cooking techniques are too complicated so I'm justified in continuing my diet of tendies, burgers, and pizzas. Fucking millenials, I swear to god.
Nathan Powell
Try going to better restaurants than you usually go to and recreating what you eat there. Just shift some of your "eating out" budget around.
Lucas Richardson
I'm not the guy intimidated by meat that isn't boneless skinless breast. Just you. And possibly the op.
Isaiah Morgan
Start by mastering a few simple dishes. Stews are the hardest to fuck up, so try something like chilli, bigos, goulash, or beef bourguignon. Here is a recipe for chili 1lb minced beef (a cut like shin or neck is good) 2 large onions 1 bell pepper Half a bulb of garlic 200g kidney beans (soak these overnight) 1kg passata 4 habanero or scotch bonnet chillies 330ml of dark beer 2 tablespoons cumin 2 tablespoons paprika Some thyme
Put some colour on the meat and onion, before adding the spices and some chilli powder if you desire a high level of spice Add the bell pepper, garlic, chillies, and kidney beans Stir this until it begins to brown Add the passata and simmer for 3h, adding beer as the liquid turns to vapour Garnish with avocado, sour cream, and fresh coriander, and serve with your choice of carb
Ps many sharts will reject this as unauthentic. They can suck a dick.
Carter Edwards
>no beans Opinion disregarded
Levi Sanchez
OP, is money no object? I tend to cook what is on sale, so this means you'll have like 4 seasons of menus, broken into halvies, maybe 8 kinds of seasonal menus. So, like there's a time of year the pork is about 4x cheaper than chicken, or when ham and turkeys go on sale near holidays, ribs near national cookout kinds of holidays and so forth. The winter squash vs summery fruits, and that that kind of thing. So, with experience, you'll be able to walk through a supermarket and think "oh this week the ribeyes are $7/lb and look at those ripe tomatoes!" and then you have a rubbed pan fried steak that you serve with a baked potato and sauteed veggies, and then again on the next night, on top of a thai salad with lots of lime, tomatoes, red onion, basil and maybe a little peanut dressing you whipped up on the side. Next night you're using that basil for something italian, and the tomatoes finally roasted as a side to your full english breakfast-as-dinner idea. That's how I do my shopping. But, before I got a bit thrifty, I made disconnected recipes with leftover ingredients, and they forced me back to the store, and I changed it up each day. I'm tried now, so I try to just shop once a week, and when it runs out, I might dine out a couple times, and then when rejuvenated, you do some inspired shopping. I alternate world flavors, mexican followed by italian followed by something else, but the mood for cold food vs hot food vs make ahead, alternates too. I usually bleah at the same thing twice in a row, so I immediately freeze sections of dinners to reheat when I'm in the mood again or to take to work when I'm in a rushy morning. When a single person, who takes work lunches cooks, it isn't a bad idea to do a sunday roast, and morph it into lunches and dinner for the next two nights, and then thaw the next meat idea. I love roasted veggies from one night's dinner turned into a cold pasta or rice salad, added to couscous or layered into a sandwich.
Angel Williams
OP, I gotta say chicken isn't the most forgiving for a beginning cook, especially if boneless. Brown is flavor, as are bones and leaving the skin on.
One of my favorite chicken dishes: overnight marinated skinless bone-in chicken breasts. Saute some garlic and garam masala, cayenne, remove from heat to cool, add lemon juice, lemon zest, grated ginger, and stir in greek yogurt. Pour over chicken in baking dish,cover and park in fridge. Just move dish to oven the next night, and serve with pilaf, cilantro, and vegetable of your choice.
Another chicken breast dish I do can be done in the oven as well, and kind of a dump dish. You marinate chicken in lime, paprika, olive oil and crushed garlic. Bake just until browned, and to pan add can of whole tomatoes, valencia rice, spent lime halves, white wine (or water), and several chopped onions. Cover until rice is steamed. The rice gets so much collagen and since it's pearl rice gets sticky as risotto. The limes bake their little bitterness kind of like preserved lemon when roasted and done. I serve with garlic bread. Delicious and healthy. Even better the next night, and you can pull the meat off and add it to the rice when reheating.
