Here are a few notes on food as someone who has a bit of trouble getting the brain to do the food thing. (it’s a work in progress - I’m slowly filtering some other notes into this document).
I don’t recommend following any of my information. I’m pretty bad at this and I’m not a dietician. Counterintuitively, trying to minimize the time expended on food seems to be an ineffective strategy. One of my colleagues spends many hours a week cooking food and is way more productive than I am. Also, I’ve had the active goal of trying to minimize food cost - and I’ve never managed to spend less than $(absurd amount * 2) on food.
There was a blog post I can’t find anymore about how there’s skill needed in “allowing yourself to be tutored”, and I think cooking is like that for me. I have an urge to rush in and use my whiz-bang databases to this new problem - but I haven’t been able to fully crack it yet.
One benefit of mealprep (which I haven’t made super good use of to date) is that it allows you to shift the timeline to when you have energy. For instance, if I try to cook dinner after I get home from work, I’m often sleepy enough (and it often gets late enough) that the dishwasher will be too loud, and then dishes start to pile up and things spiral catastrophically.
Office & backpack pantry
The non-perishable desk pantry is a godsend for me. It’s the lifeboat if I forgot to pack a meal, avoiding a lot of stress and me needing to leave work or use some other option (or skip the meal and get fuzzy and gray out…oops). I also keep some of these items in my backpack and always within arm’s reach of the workstation I’m at, which seems to reduce the friction for me to grab a small bite when I’m hungry rather than powering through it and getting fuzzy.
Some of these options might seem expensive at the register, but they’re a lot cheaper than the vending machine.
Beyond having items chosen to keep there, having a strategy to replenish the office pantry is pretty important. I haven’t got a good one yet, but I’m working on it.
Tuna
I used to choke down the cheapest canned tuna in water I could find. A tip from a uniquely high-quality recipe site is to shell out for tuna. Yellowfin in Broth and Oil is a fave of mine. Tuna is a staple food for me.
I keep a few cans at my desk.
For tuna salads or sandwiches, I typically use coleslaw dressing in place of mayo - as suggested by a few of the references below.
Fruit
- Navel oranges
- Clementines
These are easy to store! I keep the bag in the fridge and put two into a plastic bag in my backpack the night before. I find the smaller fruit are a little less messy; the oranges can spritz around a bunch.
Oatmeal
I keep multiple 1 kg bags of instant oatmeal at work. Makes a super-instant stopgap meal (with, I understand, a low glycemic index, which isn’t super important to me but I understand is good).
Couscous
-is another storable, instant-to-prepare food which is also quite calorically dense - I just use the work kettle to boil water, then put it in a bowl. You need to be able to put a lid on whatever container you use to cook it otherwise the diffeqs don’t work right.
Canned soups
This is great stuff - reasonably filling (though only a few hundred cals per can) and saves time and money if i forgot to pack a lunch on a certain day. Since it needs heating, though, not an instant snack. It’s also a little impractical to walk down the stairs at work with a brimming bowl of soup. Need to arrange for a can opener as well unless you get a pull-tab can.
Countless good options, I typically go for
- Italian Wedding (many brands carry this)
- Tim Horton’s Chilli
- Campbell’s tomato rice
Ben’s Original meal sachets
Soups were getting a little old, and besides it’s only a few hundred calories per can. Here’s another option, basically equivalent to ramen noodles:
6-month expiry date.
Ramen noodles
Nuts
Big jars or bags of peanuts and almonds or trail mix. I balk at the cost but it’s worth it compared to the vending machine.
Granola / energy bars
In many grocery stores here, there are two sections with bars; one with cheap peanut bars, and another with “meal-replacement” bars.
These tend to have more sugar than I typically like in my meals, but you can’t beat the convenience.
Other:
I once put a whole box of frozen pre-cooked breaded chicken strips in the work freezer. It worked great!
Books & Resources
The library is a great way to flip through cookbooks.
The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food you can make so you don’t die
Canadian Public Health Association, The Basic Shelf Cookbook, 2011
This is an $8 CAD cookbook; as far as I can tell it can only be purchased as a hardcopy - cheapest is directly from CPHA. I’ve only just started going through it but it has a pretty unique simplifying strategy.
Recipes I actually plan to use from this
- Chunky Vegetable Soup
-
- erm, going to the store, this has a lot of ingredients.
- Lentil Soup
- Potato Leek Soup
- Mixed Bean Salad
- Pasta and Beans
- Tofu and Vegetable Rice
University of Nebraska–Lincoln - Food
Soup kitchen mealplans are often good inspiration.
/r/mealprep
Frugal Vegan: Affordable, Easy & Delicious Vegan Cooking
I’m not really vegan, but it’s got some good recipes. On a suggestion from m’goodfriend Stuart (read via Kindle, durn).
Other books I haven’t gotten into too much:
Jack Monroe - A Girl Called Jack: 100 delicious budget recipes
The Complete One Pot: 400 Meals - America’s Test Kitchen
15 Minute Freezer Meals: 65 Recipes for Freezer Meals Made in Less Than 15 Minutes of Active Prep Time
I have found Kagi to be an effective search engine for recipes.
Notes on specific ingredients
Rice
Even though it’s supposed to be the easiest thing to cook, much to the amusement of my colleagues and friends I have consistently been unable to cook a single serving of plain white rice, despite owning three different rice cookers. I am not a clever man.
Parboiled rice is awesome (also known as converted rice). It’s a lot more forgiving to cook - the water-rice ratio can be off and it’ll still be edible. I understand it’s also reasonably healthy as the high-glycemic index portions are removed in the pre-boiling process. It’s usually sold in little bags or boxes but you can find 8 kg bags of it on the lower shelves of some stores.
Canned vegetables
There’s a canned veggie mix that some stores carry that’s worth keeping on hand. On the whole, I think I’ve had more luck with “instant meals made from three cans put together” than with mealprep, but they’re both good strategies.
Ground meat
I have taken ground beef fully out of the rotation in favor of ground turkey, because a large amount of grease comes off when frying, even extra-lean beef, which is tedious to keep soaking up and draining off. Ground turkey doesn’t seem to have this problem and is about the same price. Turkey has a solid amount of Vitamin B12 as well.
Inexpensive way to get good calories. I fry it in a pan or skillet.
Ground meat seems to be difficult to evenly cook once frozen. I’ve found it much more convenient to cook immediately after buying, then freeze, or just keep in the fridge for a couple of days before cooking.
Beans
To decrease cognitive load, I’ve gone for 6-bean blend for every recipe calling for beans (+ lentils).
Some stores carry a “Seasoned Chickpea blend” with some herbs that is pretty nice even on its own.
Beano (tablet mixture of a few enzymes, mainly \alpha-galactosidase) is worth the money.
Eggs
I’m eating so many eggs. I can scramble 10 eggs at a time in a small pan. Covering them in grated parmesan partway through makes it decadent.
Mealprep notes
Thawing
A strategy for thawing meals (especially soups &c) just in time for eating is important. I’ve been taking them out of the freezer into the fridge overnight, but they’re typically still frozen inside - then I spend 10 minutes pacing in front of the office microwave.
This is a big problem with cooking huge batches of e.g. soup or stew is that it has to be frozen - and it seems to be challenging to thaw so anything with such a high water content.
Mealprep is sort of qualitatively weird and different from regular meals in a specific way which I’ll pin down and elaborate on sometime.
Storage
Having an excessively large stock of clean containers means even if I’ve forgotten to run the dishwasher I can still prepare some meals.
Important to think about how your container size will affect your portion control. I think I accidentally starved myself by switching to a smaller container. Upgrading from 4 cup to 8 cup bins made a big difference.
This probably seems obvious but - making a strong emphasis on cleaning used meal prep containers, plates, etc, as soon as possible makes the job a lot easier - containers get a bit gross after more than a couple hours without being cleaned and this just makes the job take longer. I throw all the containers on all the racks of the dishwasher and I haven’t had any issue.
Having scrub brushes at the work sink makes this easier.
Appliances
I have one single induction burner and the glass-ceramic electric cooktop from my apartment.
Pros of induction: everything gets to a boil very quickly and I can move on with cooking (brain happy). Also, it’s hard to forget it on. Cons: 1800 W is not enough power for a large pan, so the batch sizes are inherently limited. A single burner also means cooking insidiously doesn’t pipeline well (can’t cook pasta + fry).