|
I tried Soylent. It made me fart. A lot. Really a lot. It was pretty unprecedented in my life, and I'm generally pretty gassy and have even had the bout of the vegetarianism thing where I pressure cooked and ate lots of beans. Right now, I'm "changing my relationship with food" but by cooking everything myself. I almost exclusively roast and steam things. So long as you can plan things ahead a little bit, on about a 45 minute horizon, this is actually very convenient. As it so happens, it's also very low carb. I've lost 12 pounds since this summer. (Of course, people vary a lot, so your results may vary.) Roasting results in complex flavors. You don't have to fuss with lots of ingredients. or undertake a lot of cooking steps. Instead, it just happens for you in an emergent process. We're programmers -- we should be excited by emergent processes. Likewise with steaming fresh vegetables. So long as you use fresh vegetables and do not overcook them, you wind up with lots of subtle and fantastic flavors. (Add butter to be decadent.) So basically: 1) Learn how to roast and steam everything properly
2) Go buy fresh produce once every 3 or 4 days
3) Be as efficiency minded in the kitchen as you are in hot code
I call this my "hyper lazy cuisine for programmers." If you do this right, you'll be able to cook 2-4 meals at a time with just several minutes of prep, a 20-50 minute wait, then several more minutes of cleaning up. (With roasting, foil wrap everything possible. Aluminum recycling is very sustainable, with industry groups planning to achieve carbon neutrality in the near future. And for you smarmy smarty-pants out there, gasification of the carbon electrodes in smelters can become carbon neutral through the production of electrodes from carbonized farm waste instead of coal.)(If you like bacon, and would like to do that "hyper-lazy," I'm planning on doing a blog post about, "Why you should make folding bacon a chore.") |
I would add:
4) Buy stuff that's in season
This can save a lot of pre-planning on meals, since by just buying one or two measures of several things (focusing on getting a variety of colors) you'll naturally have what you need to make a bunch of traditional recipes, which are almost always based around seasonal fruits/berries and veggies (i.e. you won't find a lot of recipes calling for both something that's ripe in Spring and something that's ripe in late Fall).
You can buy first, plan later. I find it to be nearly as easy as sticking to small set of dishes week after week, except that it gives you much more variety. Since what you bought determines the set of things you can make, it removes most of the time and stress associated creating new meal plans for every week and shopping to match them. A good middle ground between the two, IMO.
As a bonus, your food will taste better. AND it opens up the possibility of shopping almost exclusively at farmers' markets, which will make it taste better still. There's no, "oh, they didn't have any fresh X at the farmers' market, and the dish I'm making tomorrow requires it, so now I have to go to the grocery store too, even though I don't need anything else from there right now". Staples at the grocery store, fresh stuff at the farmer's market, make what you can with what you got.
This may be less practical in the Winter, depending on where you are, when canned and frozen stuff becomes important if you don't want to eat rice & beans and various stews for every single meal, but works well for the most part.