So much this. I can’t remember the last time I had a huge pile up of dishes that I didn’t clean while something was simmering or whatever. By the time my meal is ready, everything is clean or there’s one pot that might need to soak while I eat.
I really think this is one of the secrets to successfully keeping up with household chores as an adult. After I started focusing on cleaning up when I could while cooking and saw how much easier it made my life later, I started noticing stuff that’s quick and easy to put away/clean while just walking through the house on my way to do something else. Doing little things all the time instead of saying “Oh I’ll clean that up later” and leaving everything as a big project was a switch in mindset that’s helped me a lot.
Cooking is not worth it if you live alone; limited fridge/freezer space and stuff being sold in larger quantities than I need means most of the ingredients won’t get used fully and I end up throwing away something anyway or have to eat it for three days straight.
Cook 4 or 5 chicken filets on Sunday, 2 cups of brown rice in the rice cooker, bag of frozen veggies.
Lay out 6 containers in each put about 100g of Chicken into each, 100g cooked rice in each, and about half a cup of frozen veggies in each.
Put all the containers in the freezer. Take one each day for lunch, microwave for about 2 to 3 mins.
All up that’s like $15-$20 for lunches or morning tea for the week.
Yeah but then I gotta eat the same thing every day, and I prefer to have a varied diet.
Do the same thing every Saturday and Sunday with a different dish each time. Viola now you have a rotating menu. The food will be good in the freezer for quite a while.
I have like a “babys first playschool refrigerator/freezer” thing that basically belongs in a camper, but I make it work. The key for me is to cook things kinda “basic” as in limited, generic, seasoning and then spice it up how I want when I’m ready to eat it so it doesn’t get boring. Then as others mentioned you cook all in one day. I make a chicken dish in the slow cooker that lasts a week in the fridge, so you shouldn’t need a freezer for your weeks worth of food.
I buy a family pack of chicken and separate a few breasts to stick in my tiny ass freezer that doesn’t even have room for a normal size ice cream tub, I freeze a few rolls, and anything else like vegetables is generally canned so I don’t need to worry about waste.
You save so much money when cooking for yourself!
It’s worth it if pick a day each week to make a couple recipes, then portion out and freeze them.
Even better is getting together with a friend or family member to meal prep.
A small format chest freezer doesn’t take up much space and holds a ton of food. A 5 cu. ft. one will hold a month’s worth of food ( about 175 pounds) for one person in a 2 ft. by 2 ft. footprint while sipping electricity.
That’s the thing: it’s a choice with pros and cons. On one hand there’s an up front expense, you need to invest time in planning, shopping, cooking, and you need to find/make space to store food.
On the other it quickly pays for itself, it’ll bring your food costs way down, and you can make better tasting/healthier meals in lieu of exclusively eating out or ready to eat meals. You can still use the later for more variety: you’re just saving money by doing it less.
One mini fridge should be plenty of space to fit about a weeks worth of meal prep for one person. I know this for a fact.
It may not be an option if you’re severely restricted on space but it helps if you make enough to freeze a couple extra portions of food and eat them weeks later. Generally when you are cooking for yourself it’s healthier than processed or restaurant food and it’s cheaper. I tend to gravitate to international markets where they have bulk bins of vegetables so you are able to just buy a single carrot, single potato etc. Cooking in slightly larger portions and shopping that way really helps to reduce waste for myself.
Or make the other people who ate help clean up.
so stop cooking dinners for the queen? if i’m lazy i can whip up food in like half an hour and i’ll just make 2 portions of it so i have for later too
boil some spaghetti, fry some meatballs, whip up some powder sauce, done.
If you spent 2 hours cooking hopefully you made enough for more than one meal.
For me, 2 hours of cooking would be like 2 weeks worth of food, unless I’m smoking something, of course.