heh!!
Breakfast, about 15 minutes, Lunch usually microwave left overs or a sandwich. Dinner I figure about an hour or more but I prepare enough for several days at a time so it would average out to be about 15 minutes.
Wow. That sounds like how I’d expect to eat if I were ever sentenced to a penitentiary. But you’re not that different than my brother. He eats a lot of the same meals every day. Of course, he goes crazy when he comes back to visit (he’s an ex-pat in Costa Rica). He binges mostly on Mexican food and US candy.
ETA: I have consciously worked on slowing down my eating over the years, but I still don’t think I could stretch it out for a full hour.* My sister worked for over 40 years in a hospital where she got 30 mins for lunch/dinner (she worked evening shift for years), and often that 30 mins got truncated. She learned to eat FAST. It’s a difficult habit for her to break.
- I have eaten at restaurants where a meal has lasted longer than an hour (once three hours), but that was with about 7 courses that were slowly paced. Also, with very comfortable chairs. My dining chairs at home won’t take a meal longer than 30 mins.
I come from a restaurant family, so my father taught me how to cook. We do one or two new recipes a week, which increases prep time, usually. And as elbows mentioned, prep time is different from cook time. My meatloaf takes a few minutes to prep then an hour to cook, usually with a baked potato and a frozen veg. But stir fry dishes may take lots of micing and dicing and very little cook time.
We still set the table, and when the kids were here we always ate with a family - and both our kids have dinners as a family also. We never have dinner in front of the TV.
Personally I’d only eat the same thing every night if my taste buds had been shot off in the war.
This made me LOL!
Variety is the spice of life and we enjoy trying different things. I also enjoy making many different things - cooking is a skill and a craft and an art all in one package and I like learning in general, so it suits me well.
It’s hard for me to specify a prep time for an ‘average’ meal because of that, and I often devote time to prepping/partially making more time-consuming dishes on days when I’ve got that time. So on one day I might spend a few hours to partially prep several things and then on the day I want to make one of those dishes, I take out what I’ve already done, pop it in the oven, on the stovetop, etc. and the whole meal is ready in 30 minutes.
While the prep part of cooking can be tedious (yes, a lot of stir fry dishes, while delicious, require lots of mincing, dicing, slicing and chopping, plus measuring ingredients for and mixing up the sauce), I find the alchemy of applying heat to ingredients almost magical. Think of how different a raw onion tastes from its caramelized counterpart. A roux becomes greater than its sum of ingredients. Adding butter to a sauce makes it glossy and rich. Thin things become thick, textures change, flavors evolve. I just find that endlessly cool. I think of making and eating food as more of an adventure.
I also come from a time and a culture where food = love, and someone taking the time to make something with their own hands and feed you is an expression of their affection and care for you. The time spent is an investment.
Isn’t this every culture?
It doesn’t seem to be the current American one, I don’t think.
I seem to have combined the worst of both worlds here. It takes me forever to make meals, but I don’t really like to cook. However, I do like eating good food and I like my family to have healthy food, and those things are rarely found together in a restaurant.
Part of the problem is that the three of us like very different foods, so it’s hard to find a compromise meal that everyone will like. Although I’m a vegetarian, I cook meat for the others; I make a real effort to be sure it’s cooked well, but that’s complicated because I’m not tasting it. If I’m cooking for just myself, I don’t mind doing it, but no one else is enthusiastic about my vegetarian meals.
There are reasonable and unreasonable preps. A few weeks back I saw a recipe for a delicious looking breakfast dish in the Times. Except it took like 2.5 hours of prep in multiple stages. I’m not making any breakfast dish that requires me to eat breakfast before I start it so I don’t pitch over onto the frying pan out of extreme hunger.
Either 15 minutes or six hours. There’s no in-between. I’m either making something quick and easy or something that’s going to take all day to prep and cook.
Last year I managed to do Thanksgiving dinner in three hours from starting prep to serving, which is a personal best.
I don’t mispredict my prep time, but only because I think it’ll take a long time already.
I wonder if some people are being a little… optimistic with their times. Just now I made the simplest thing that I think qualifies as a meal: a plate of nachos. I looked at the clock as I entered the kitchen and again when I left, hot food in hand and the kitchen in more or less the state I left it in. ET: 11 minutes. That’s a plate of chips, pre-grated cheese on top, some jarred jalapenos, nuked for 2 minutes, and sour cream and hot sauce on top. I wiped down the countertops while it was microwaving, and put the incidentals (sour cream spoon, etc.) in the dishwasher while it was nuking.
If there’d been a single non-prepared item in there, it would have easily doubled the time. Like if I had fresh jalapeno slices, I’d need to dig out a cutting board, a knife, run the knife through the sharpener a few times, rinse the peppers, de-seed them, slice them, toss the stems and such in the trash, stick the cutting board in the dishwasher, rinse/dry the knife and put away, and wipe down the counters again. Every step is short, but it probably adds up to 10 minutes.
You save some time if you’re doing a bunch of things, like dicing some potatoes or onions, but that savings only kicks in when you’re already spending a ton of time. I don’t see how to spend less than 10 minutes on a meal unless it really is just a bowl of cereal or something. Or you aren’t counting a bunch of steps (like leaving a sink full of dirty dishes and prep tools).
I think a lot depends on your idea of what constitutes a good meal, and how to prep it. For example we enjoy something as simple as baked potatoes and some veggies. Scrub and poke taters, toss them in the nuke. Does that take more than 1-2 minutes? Rinse and trim broccoli, put in pot with water on stove. Another 2? 10 minutes later spend a minute draining and plating (one of us gets the plate the taters were cooked on), and pulling butter and salsa out of the fridge. And the only dirtied pots are the knife, cutting board, broccoli pan and the strainer.
No, I was not including clean-up in the prep and eating time. But as a general matter we gravitate towards meals that minimizes mess. Such as using the grill whenever possible.
Microwaved potatoes are fine, but I prefer baked potatoes that are baked in the oven. I think the difference, though small, is worth the extra time.
I clean up and wash dishes as I go. Sauce simmering with an occasional stir? Was the cutting board and knife, dry them, put them away. When I plate the meal I have little left to clean up.
My gf is the opposite. She leaves a dirty kitchen in her wake when she cooks. (Then I do the cleanup after dinner)
I do like to cook but only make elaborate meals (and even then, not particularly complex, maybe a risotto or something) occasionally. Sat/Sun are usually my primary cooking for both of us days- those meals often involve grilling, roasting or something that takes a little longer than normal. Or, I slow cook something. This weekend, I made pulled pork in the slow cooker (10 hours) and it just took about 30 min to make the side dishes. I cook enough to at least make it to Monday or Tuesday with the leftovers then my meals mid-week , I cook just for myself so I can have good veggies and onions and foods that he is too picky to eat. Those meals still take about 20-30 min, I will make a stir fry or other veggie heavy dish or just do a sheet pan something or other. I do this for my own sanity because I cannot limit my veggies to corn and carrots my whole life.
When we eat together Sat-Mon or Tues, we do set the table and sit together though we do move the TV so we can watch it while eating. If we are both just doing for ourselves, he does still like to sit at the tv with whatever fast food he picked up but I will sit on the couch for those meals.
Breakfast: I & my wife just each grab something. Sandwich, toast, cereal, avocado etc. Minimal prep.
For dinner, it’s rather bimodal. If it’s a busy day, we’ll probably get some sort of take-out or microwave heatup, unless we have some leftovers.
On the other hand, if it’s a fairly free day with not much planned, I may decide to experiment with a new recipe. In which case I am willing to spend a few hours trying to understand it and do it properly.
I do have a repertoire of standard casseroles which need about 25 minutes of prep / fry, and then go into the oven for a couple of hours to meld.
Nope - it’s probably most of the cultures that people think of as “ethnic” but it’s not every culture.
Yeah, I have definite limits and some aren’t even time-related. I like deep-fried things, but I refuse to deep-fry because I just despise the mess and clean-up. I’ll do stuff like coq au vin, but usually gravitate to the simpler versions rather than the elaborate. The cooking process itself isn’t magical for me, just necessary to reach a successful result. It’s not the slightly onerous chore doing dishes is (I hate doing dishes, god bless the dishwasher), but I do much prefer the eating to the preparing. It’s just that I have elevated my standards just enough that the work is usually worth it.
Until it isn’t, as with deep-frying.
I think it should count. Like kayaker, I clean as I go when possible. But it means that if something is on the stove and I’m rinsing off the cutting board, that’s still prep time. Basically, all the time I’m in the kitchen (since I’d rather be pretty much anywhere else). And 2x if your SO is helping.
When I am in the mood to cook, I prefer meals where there’s a long gap I can use to clean up. Stews, InstaPot, sous vide, etc. are good here. Having to clean up after eating ruins the mood.
Has anyone considered time preparing meals for pets?
I feed our three dogs two meals a day. We all congregate in the basement. I prepare three bowls of kibble, calculating the amounts based on how active they’ve been and how their weight is going and adding some water. All dogs must sit and wait as the bowls are placed in position. Then I say, “OK, eat” and they dig in.
In addition, each morning I cook two beaten eggs, creating an empty omelette. This gets sliced up and divided among the birds and dogs. If I’m running late, Rocco (our parrot) will begin asking for his egg. My gf makes each dog do a series of tricks. After each trick they get a piece of egg.