On fixing quick and easy meals at home

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

I was recently talking to an older lady who is living with her daughter and her family. In the conversation I learned that the family eats out all the time. The lady said her daughter doesn’t like to cook. They usually eat at fast food places, but sometimes at regular restaurants. I suspect there are a lot of people who eat out all the time. Especially single people. Or married people if both husband and wife work. It is just the easy way to go. I remember when I was single I ate at restaurants all the time. For the first couple of years after I graduated from college I lived in a rooming house. There weren’t any facilities for fixing meals and I had no choice but to eat out. Then I rented an apartment and I could have started fixing my own meals but I was lazy, didn’t know anything about cooking, had never done it, thought it would be a lot more trouble than it really is, and just took the easy road and continued eating out at restaurants. I thought that learning to cook would be too much trouble. Especially cooking for just one person. Now, many years later, my wife and I never eat out. It has been years since we have eaten at a restaurant. We sometimes eat at a Subway using their “Two footlongs for $12.99" coupons but, except for that, we never eat out.

I believe that it costs 10 to 15 times more to eat at a regular restaurant than to eat at home and four or five times more to eat at a fast food place than to eat at home. Eating out is a very expensive habit. If you want to save money eat at home. I believe in saving money.

I ate out at restaurants until I got married at the age of 26. On the first day of our marriage my new wife informed me that she didn’t intend to cook! I was stunned. I thought it was the duty of wives to cook! I thought all wives cooked! (My wife is from an aristocratic Spanish family that had servants who fixed the meals.) After a little bit of thought about my new situation I decided to learn to cook. So now I am going to discuss how I cook. I probably spend less than five minutes fixing a dinner for the two of us. How do I do that? I have in the past fixed a lot of dishes, casseroles etc. but I don’t really enjoy doing it and now almost never do.

I grew up on a farm and my mother fixed all kinds of country type dishes, was a good cook, and I grew up eating a lot of meat and potatoes. My mother did a lot of frying, made a lot of pies and desserts. We ate well.

Another thing my new wife informed me of was that she had to avoid oil and fried foods — she had had a bad case of psoriasis when young and a doctor had advised her to stay away from grease.) So we never fry. What kind of meals can you fix if you can’t fry? You can fix casseroles but making casseroles requires time and work.

So how do I cook?

The most basic food we have essentially every day is rice. We use parboiled rice (I think it is healthier than regular white rice). I have a special method of fixing rice that involves just seconds of work (probably less than a minute).

1. I bring a cup of water to a boil in a small saucepan, add a half cup of rice, and bring the mixture to a boil.

2. I place the sauce pan on the floor, wrap it in a blanket, and leave it for about an hour (perhaps 45 minutes). It will cook by itself.

3. When I am about to serve dinner I put the saucepan with rice on a burner on low heat.

4. I check it after a couple of minutes by taking off the lid. When it is steaming it is ready.

There are many things you can make in an oven that involve only seconds of work:

Examples

● wash white potatoes or sweet potatoes and put them in the oven and bake them

● wash chicken thighs or drumsticks, put them in a pan, and bake them in the oven

● make a spaghetti dinner by boiling spaghetti for 10 minutes in boiling water and heating up canned spaghetti sauce

● make instant Ramen Noodles from purchased envelopes, adding a couple of eggs

● warm up canned corn, peas, string beans, pork & beans, soup or other canned item on the stove top

● put filets of fish in a pan and bake them in an oven

● make instant potatoes from a box

I put small packets of food in the freezer:

1. Cut up cooked ham, roast chicken, roast turkey, or roasted cuts of pork into small pieces

2. Create small packets with plastic wrap, each packet containing about enough for one or two meals

3. Put the packets inside labeled and dated one gallon freezer bags and put in the freezer

One can quickly create a dinner with rice, a packet of meat from the freezer heated in a microwave, some vegetable heated on the stove top and a tossed salad created from lettuce, carrots, celery, and tomato. It is really not much work at all.

My wife and I have an 18 oz cup of a vegetable/fruit smoothie for breakfast every morning. My wife makes it by blending yogurt, oatmeal, apple, orange, banana, carrot, sweet potato, and beet in a blender.

20 Feb 2025