I can cook crockpot dinners with 15 minutes total time (prep, check time, washing/cleanup), even though it takes hours to cook. This will prepare ~5 meals for both myself and my girlfriend that cost maybe 1.5 mins each to reheat later. At a total time of 30 mins input for 10 meals worth 5 dollars of saving each, that’s a cost of $100/hr.
That’s a ridiculously efficient use of time. Even if you’re a third as efficient and take 45 minutes prep (the 15 mins to reheat should be constant), you’re still running $50/hr, which is still excellent. The initial learning cost for crockpot cooking is very low as well.
Do you calculate this as 4 hours spent (fire time) or 30 minutes (your time spent)?
You can do similar things with stews, rice+stock dishes (gumbo/jambalaya/etouffee/paella), sous vide, and roasts/loafs. These are the easiest. Once you get better at cooking, you can expand and cook other dishes a similar way. As you get better, you spend a smaller and smaller fraction of time actually attending to fire.
Why do you think it’s bizzare? I don’ t hate reheated food, but the difference between food that’s just been prepared and food that was cooked, refrigerated, and reheated is really obvious to me. It’s huge.
I don’t think so—it happens with any fridge. What bothers me is that the food is drier (though that probably might be fixed by pouring water into it and stirring when reheating it), and the noodles/beans/grains of rice/whatever stick together (which I’m not sure it’s possible to undo even in principle).
How are you calculating time cost?
I can cook crockpot dinners with 15 minutes total time (prep, check time, washing/cleanup), even though it takes hours to cook. This will prepare ~5 meals for both myself and my girlfriend that cost maybe 1.5 mins each to reheat later. At a total time of 30 mins input for 10 meals worth 5 dollars of saving each, that’s a cost of $100/hr.
That’s a ridiculously efficient use of time. Even if you’re a third as efficient and take 45 minutes prep (the 15 mins to reheat should be constant), you’re still running $50/hr, which is still excellent. The initial learning cost for crockpot cooking is very low as well.
Do you calculate this as 4 hours spent (fire time) or 30 minutes (your time spent)?
You can do similar things with stews, rice+stock dishes (gumbo/jambalaya/etouffee/paella), sous vide, and roasts/loafs. These are the easiest. Once you get better at cooking, you can expand and cook other dishes a similar way. As you get better, you spend a smaller and smaller fraction of time actually attending to fire.
Preparing meals in bulk definitely seems like a much better investment of time than cooking individual meals. I’ll have to look into this.
Fridged-and-reheated food tastes so bad to me, I’d rather just eat low-end microwave-ready dishes.
This is sufficiently bizarre that I wonder if your fridge is inhabited by mold or something.
Why do you think it’s bizzare? I don’ t hate reheated food, but the difference between food that’s just been prepared and food that was cooked, refrigerated, and reheated is really obvious to me. It’s huge.
It’s not that bizarre that a preference would exist, but that it would put leftovers of nice food below “low-end microwave-ready dishes” surprised me.
I don’t think so—it happens with any fridge. What bothers me is that the food is drier (though that probably might be fixed by pouring water into it and stirring when reheating it), and the noodles/beans/grains of rice/whatever stick together (which I’m not sure it’s possible to undo even in principle).
So do you have this problem with things like soup or curry—wet stuff that doesn’t lose that much of its water content?
Not with soup, I don’t. And I’ve never tried to store curry in a fridge for later reheating.
Or maybe he is a supertaster of some sort. After all, some people can’t drink pop :)