Learn to cook at least a handful of simple, cheap, fast meals. This will have more effect on your resolutions to “eat healthy” than temporary spurts of mega-motivation.
(also recognizing that spurts of motivation are temporary in general, do not rely on them for lasting change)
Also make a list of those recipes (including ingredients) and store it somewhere in the kitchen.
When you catch yourself repeating the same three recipes over again, just look at the list for a new-old inspiration. Do it before you go shopping, so you can immediately buy the necessary ingredients. (If you go shopping on your way home from job, maybe you should put the list online so you can read it before leaving your job.)
Related: Shop with a list. Do not buy anything not on the list. If possible, do not put anything on the list that doesn’t require cooking to eat.
(not having anything snackable on hand is a great way to ensure that you only eat when you actually need to. Most people won’t go out of their way to cook just to satisfy the “hrm, I’m bored, let’s eat something” impulse.)
not having anything snackable on hand is a great way to ensure that you only eat when you actually need to.
Preparing a snackable version of vegetables (e.g. clean a few carrots, cut them to small pieces, and put them into the bowl) and putting it next to your computer could be an easy way to make yourself eat more vegetables.
Objection: simple, cheap, fast meals don’t exactly need to be cooked. Wholemea rye bread has an insulin score of 56, better than fish, a satiety score of 154 and decent amount of fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index Put anything on it and call it a sandwich. The taste sucks, but it is a good-conscience meal in 20 secs.
Cooking has multiple definitions, I personally don’t consider a scrambled egg with onions cooking, or a grilled cheese sandwich or a salad, and I used to live on these kinds of stuff for years. If the bread part was wholemeal rye and you added vegs, it is decently healthy.
Yeah I know for some people this would be called cooking, but I think cooking begins at the level of the five mother sauces, this is not cooking, just hot food preparation.
For reasons I realise I don’t know[1], the primary meaning of “cook” for me is to make nontrivial changes to food by means of heat. (Consider the word “uncooked” as applied e.g. to meat and eggs.) So, for me, scrambling eggs counts as “cooking” even though it’s not exactly a difficult task. Other forms of food preparation shade gradually from not-cooking to cooking as the effort expended and the extent to which the food gets transformed increase. So putting together a sandwich or a simple salad isn’t (usually) “cooking”; grilling cheese on toast just barely is because heat is involved; making (say) ice cream is just barely “cooking” even if you do it without making a custard, because you’re doing something quite nontrivial to the ingredients (I guess applying cold is a bit like applying heat); etc.
[1] It looks as if the OED largely agrees (most of the senses it lists explicitly or implicitly give preference to the application of heat) and also doesn’t really know why (it says “cook”, v., is derived from “cook”, n., and says nothing more about the etymology of the former; the latter has always meant anyone whose job is preparing food, without any particular preference to doing so by applying heat).
Interesting! I realized now that I consider ice cream making cooking, because it is a higher skilled thing. My wife makes several no-heat cakes and I consider it cooking.
My mental image of cooking is stirring something with a wooden spoon, a something made from multiple ingredients. Probably because my ethnic culture is sauce-oriented.
I should also add that in my native language to cook and to boil are the same words and I never fully grasped the difference in English. So I would cook a soup but roast a chicken.
In English, to cook is to prepare food, especially by applying heat, but there’s no assumption of a particular means of applying heat. Boiling and roasting are both varieties of cooking (in both senses). So are zapping in a microwave, searing on a griddle-pan, grilling under an electric overhead grill, etc.
I think you could say the following: “When you make meringues, they don’t really cook in the oven, it’s more that they slowly dry out”. So maybe “cook” means not merely “to prepare food by applying heat” but something more like “to prepare food by applying sufficient heat to denature proteins”, the underlying idea presumably being something like “to heat food up enough to make it safe to eat”.
Of course I’m using “‘cook’ means not merely X but Y” as shorthand for something like “a lot of skilled native English speakers, when they use or hear the word “cook”, are thinking about Y as well as X”. So what I really mean is that when I use or hear the word “cook” the following ideas are all somewhat active in my brain:
preparing food
heating things up
making food safe by killing bacteria and parasites
performing a skilled activity
making something particularly tasty
but for me there’s no very strong activation of, e.g.,
boiling as opposed to other modes of heating
stirring as opposed to other skilled cooking-related activities
I dare say that if I attempted to draw a stereotypical instance of “cooking” it would be quite likely to involve stirring a pot or pan, but it would be quite likely to involve someone wearing a chef’s hat and apron too and those obviously aren’t part of the meaning of “cooking”.
I looked a bit into the etymology. It is not helpful. Cook as a noun or to cook means the same thing all the way down to Latin coquus and to PIE *pekʷ-, with only the later having one more meaning: to ripen. Heat application is there all the way, but not really specifying how. I would suggest that probably people boiled or simmered more than they roasted in historical times, because, well, convection, that makes even hardest meat sooner or later soft without burning it, and does not waste nutrients into the grease falling into the fire. For example, if you have an old rooster, a soup or a stew is really the only option.
However, roasting seems to be a higher-prestige way—medieval nobility is commonly depicted feasting on whole roasted animals, not sure how accurate that is. Perhaps the prestige comes from the difficulty. Roasting a whole ox, which was a way inviting a whole town to party, is very, very difficult.
Back to practice: I recommend telling people “learn to prepare a few easy meals” this sounds less scary than “learn to cook”.
If cooking means heating food up until it is safe to eat, I couldn’t cook carrots or apples.
I would suggest that a word can mean different things in different contexts, and especially, a more general meaning and a more specific meaning. Saying that meringues aren’t cooking is a use of the more specific meaning.
Learn to cook at least a handful of simple, cheap, fast meals. This will have more effect on your resolutions to “eat healthy” than temporary spurts of mega-motivation.
(also recognizing that spurts of motivation are temporary in general, do not rely on them for lasting change)
Also make a list of those recipes (including ingredients) and store it somewhere in the kitchen.
When you catch yourself repeating the same three recipes over again, just look at the list for a new-old inspiration. Do it before you go shopping, so you can immediately buy the necessary ingredients. (If you go shopping on your way home from job, maybe you should put the list online so you can read it before leaving your job.)
Related: Shop with a list. Do not buy anything not on the list. If possible, do not put anything on the list that doesn’t require cooking to eat.
(not having anything snackable on hand is a great way to ensure that you only eat when you actually need to. Most people won’t go out of their way to cook just to satisfy the “hrm, I’m bored, let’s eat something” impulse.)
Exception: vegetables.
Preparing a snackable version of vegetables (e.g. clean a few carrots, cut them to small pieces, and put them into the bowl) and putting it next to your computer could be an easy way to make yourself eat more vegetables.
In my exprience, following this advice leads to me skipping approximately every fourth meal.
Edit: to my detriment.
Does it generally make sense to cook one meal at a time rather than making a larger batch?
the time savings from batch cooking do add up surprisingly quickly, especially when you include cleanup.
Not if the idea is to deliberately introduce trivial inconveniences.
Converge what you enjoy eating with what you can cook.
Objection: simple, cheap, fast meals don’t exactly need to be cooked. Wholemea rye bread has an insulin score of 56, better than fish, a satiety score of 154 and decent amount of fiber. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index Put anything on it and call it a sandwich. The taste sucks, but it is a good-conscience meal in 20 secs.
Cooking has multiple definitions, I personally don’t consider a scrambled egg with onions cooking, or a grilled cheese sandwich or a salad, and I used to live on these kinds of stuff for years. If the bread part was wholemeal rye and you added vegs, it is decently healthy.
Yeah I know for some people this would be called cooking, but I think cooking begins at the level of the five mother sauces, this is not cooking, just hot food preparation.
For reasons I realise I don’t know[1], the primary meaning of “cook” for me is to make nontrivial changes to food by means of heat. (Consider the word “uncooked” as applied e.g. to meat and eggs.) So, for me, scrambling eggs counts as “cooking” even though it’s not exactly a difficult task. Other forms of food preparation shade gradually from not-cooking to cooking as the effort expended and the extent to which the food gets transformed increase. So putting together a sandwich or a simple salad isn’t (usually) “cooking”; grilling cheese on toast just barely is because heat is involved; making (say) ice cream is just barely “cooking” even if you do it without making a custard, because you’re doing something quite nontrivial to the ingredients (I guess applying cold is a bit like applying heat); etc.
[1] It looks as if the OED largely agrees (most of the senses it lists explicitly or implicitly give preference to the application of heat) and also doesn’t really know why (it says “cook”, v., is derived from “cook”, n., and says nothing more about the etymology of the former; the latter has always meant anyone whose job is preparing food, without any particular preference to doing so by applying heat).
Interesting! I realized now that I consider ice cream making cooking, because it is a higher skilled thing. My wife makes several no-heat cakes and I consider it cooking.
My mental image of cooking is stirring something with a wooden spoon, a something made from multiple ingredients. Probably because my ethnic culture is sauce-oriented.
I should also add that in my native language to cook and to boil are the same words and I never fully grasped the difference in English. So I would cook a soup but roast a chicken.
In English, to cook is to prepare food, especially by applying heat, but there’s no assumption of a particular means of applying heat. Boiling and roasting are both varieties of cooking (in both senses). So are zapping in a microwave, searing on a griddle-pan, grilling under an electric overhead grill, etc.
I think you could say the following: “When you make meringues, they don’t really cook in the oven, it’s more that they slowly dry out”. So maybe “cook” means not merely “to prepare food by applying heat” but something more like “to prepare food by applying sufficient heat to denature proteins”, the underlying idea presumably being something like “to heat food up enough to make it safe to eat”.
Of course I’m using “‘cook’ means not merely X but Y” as shorthand for something like “a lot of skilled native English speakers, when they use or hear the word “cook”, are thinking about Y as well as X”. So what I really mean is that when I use or hear the word “cook” the following ideas are all somewhat active in my brain:
preparing food
heating things up
making food safe by killing bacteria and parasites
performing a skilled activity
making something particularly tasty
but for me there’s no very strong activation of, e.g.,
boiling as opposed to other modes of heating
stirring as opposed to other skilled cooking-related activities
I dare say that if I attempted to draw a stereotypical instance of “cooking” it would be quite likely to involve stirring a pot or pan, but it would be quite likely to involve someone wearing a chef’s hat and apron too and those obviously aren’t part of the meaning of “cooking”.
I looked a bit into the etymology. It is not helpful. Cook as a noun or to cook means the same thing all the way down to Latin coquus and to PIE *pekʷ-, with only the later having one more meaning: to ripen. Heat application is there all the way, but not really specifying how. I would suggest that probably people boiled or simmered more than they roasted in historical times, because, well, convection, that makes even hardest meat sooner or later soft without burning it, and does not waste nutrients into the grease falling into the fire. For example, if you have an old rooster, a soup or a stew is really the only option.
However, roasting seems to be a higher-prestige way—medieval nobility is commonly depicted feasting on whole roasted animals, not sure how accurate that is. Perhaps the prestige comes from the difficulty. Roasting a whole ox, which was a way inviting a whole town to party, is very, very difficult.
Back to practice: I recommend telling people “learn to prepare a few easy meals” this sounds less scary than “learn to cook”.
More likely from the fact that you roast meat and poultry which are expensive foods compared to grains and vegetables.
If cooking means heating food up until it is safe to eat, I couldn’t cook carrots or apples.
I would suggest that a word can mean different things in different contexts, and especially, a more general meaning and a more specific meaning. Saying that meringues aren’t cooking is a use of the more specific meaning.