This. Not to mention, even with hand washing, shared bathrooms, and the people eating out and drinking are being cavalier about wearing masks. I know some people are starved for company, and food that you haven’t cooked yourselves, but this is plain silly. Yes, meet with people, but not in a place where there’s this much risk and people have thrown out their inhibitions.
And if you can’t cook, there are tons of websites that will tell you and show you how. For that matter, just go to food network, pull up any of Alton Brown’s recipes that are listed as easy, and you’ll have better and cheaper food.
You can just use Doordash, Grubhub, Ubereats, or other delivery services, or stop by and get takeout if you want ‘not cooked yourself’ food. I do that all the time, it’s not the same as the restaurant experience but you also aren’t that likely to die from it.
If it helps anyone else, you can borrow my mantra.
I’ve been repeating “It’s okay. I can wait a year…”
(My whole life was doing work in coffee shops, reading in cafés, and hanging out with friends in bars… but c’mon, people, quit being selfish)
In Pennsylvania, it is easier to get a liquor license tied to food sales than a plain old liquor sale license, but enforcement of this is spotty.
A friend of mine had a beer bar with a liquor license requiring the licensee to serve food. He “satisfied” the requirement (in his mind) by having bowls of free popcorn on the bar. Sometimes the same bowls sat out for days.
The liquor control board inspector issued a warning over lack of food. My friend bought a microwave, can opener, plastic bowls, and a case of assorted soups. He put up a sign that read, " We now have soup! Only $10 a bowl". The inspector was not amused.
Eventually he got slapped with a fine and realized he had to do something. He hired a contractor and put in a real kitchen, consulting with a local chef.
It turned out to be a great move. The chef stayed on and was given free reign to run the kitchen as he saw fit. Food offerings went from bowls of peanuts to poke bowls overnight. The business stayed afloat during quarantine thanks to take out food.
Spoken like a person who utterly fails to comprehend the phrase “I can’t cook”. It’s like a jogger saying “Why don’t you get out and run some! It’s good for you!” to a paraplegic.
There are certainly options for non-cookers, like ordering takeout or delivery like Pantastic mentions; also there are prepared and no-cooking-required foods available at stores. But for some people, cooking is not an option, obviously.
I will accept your comment if you confirm to me you have lost the use of at least one arm. Otherwise, I do not find the comparison valid. If you are disabled, then you have my apologies for my assumptions. If you don’t have access to a kitchen, I accept this as a valid reason as well, but you’d be amazed at what you can do with a hotpot and an electric skillet.
If you can’t cook for reasons based on lack of skill or talent, that’s just effort and practice. If you don’t want to acquire the skill, that is a choice, unlike your counter example of suggesting joggling to a paraplegic.
You continue to not know what you’re talking about. Congratulations. I’m not even slightly surprised.
Cooking is a skill. Ability with a skill is dependent on both training (often years of it) and base contributing factors. Persons who have been doing it for years, or all their life, constantly underestimate how much skill is involved.
I will concede that if I devoted a few hundred hours to destroying food, I might be able to create something that tasted like burned shit. You do realize that without somebody to correct your errors as you go effort and practice is as effective as playing darts blindfolded, right? Fifty destroyed meals doesn’t make the fifty-first one better. They just represent a massive waste of time and money.
And if you don’t have that trained-in knowledge of how to tell when something has been chemically changed to the right degree by look and smell and intuition, no amount of stupid youtube videos are going to produce anything palatable.
Also, I have the “disability” that when I’m doing something that is stupid and a pointless wasted of time, I tend not to pay a lot of attention. My mind wanders, and I overlook and skip steps. My body wanders, off in the direction of things that are not stupid. And that is how I left a pot of water on the stove to boil away - because “watching water boil” is not my idea of fun.
How I managed to turn that hamburger patty into a liquid, on the other hand, is a great mystery of life.
Okay, having calmed down and removed a near pit-worthy rant about bergbert, I wanted to ask if anyone who is Cooking-Challenged has been using any of the meal kit services during the plague? Apparently I have supernatural skillz, and thus no need of such things, but
seems to indicate they’ve been a boon to people cooking more while stuck at home. It seems like it might be a good alternative for those who like the OP who have gotten tired of their own cooking and frozen food. Since some of the prep work and planning work is done, it might be a good compromise if it’s available in your area.
It’s my understanding that those meal kits are actually designed for cooks like you, in that they provide you all the ingredients premeasured, and it’s up to you to put the puzzle pieces together. They’re meant to ease the preparation time, but you still have to cook the stuff - or so I’ve heard.
I’ve never availed myself of these services, of course, so I could be wrong about what they are.
[Enjoyable story redacted]
IIRC VA has beancounters who look at percent of sales. But no idea where I heard that and I could very well be full of shit.
This is correct.
But I’m baffled: can you not cook a hamburger patty in a pan? Boil an egg in water? Fry eggs? Cook a pork chop in a pan? Put a potato in an oven for an hour? None of these take any knowledge or skill. Hell, you can put an entire chicken in an oven for 1 hour and it’s cooked. I’m just thinking of all the things my dad learned to cook for himself when he got divorced, after never having made a piece of toast or anything ever his entire life.
The meal kit service isn’t generally for people like me. I prefer to pick my own ingredients and have my own customized dishes. It’s generally for people who want to get into cooking but find the challenge of doing all the shopping and measuring too much work OR have all the basic skills but don’t have the time to do the shopping. It is normally semi-prepared. I have friends that used meal services in the past that fell in the second category.
Begbert2 indicated he was uninterested in cooking but my comment was pointed at the OP who said his cooking was lousy (but hopefully not to the point of making a liquid ground beef mixture), and others who might be lurking in the forum who want a middle ground between going out and being at risk, or eating another frozen dinner.
If you couldn’t cook before Covid 19, what’s the difference after Covid 19? All the same restaurants offer pickup if they wanna stay in business
That’s absurd. Cooking is a skill that takes lots of practice to develop. But there’s plenty of takeout available that’s a LOT safer than eat-in, as well as frozen prepared meals in the supermarket.
It’s been perfect for people like my son. We taught him the basics of cooking as a child, but pre-pandemic he didn’t have a lot of spare time, and didn’t have a repertoire of “dishes my wife and I like that I know how to make”. So he got to experiment with lots of different menus and styles at a minimal effort.
I am entirely certain that if I were to make any of the things you mentioned they would be burned to a crisp, dried out dead, turned to rubber, or possibly liquefied. I cannot tell how cooked anything is by sight, smell, or hearing, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from every bit of cooking I’ve heard of, seen, or attempted, just sticking something in and walking off for a set amount of time never works - you have to monitor that stuff and use your senses to smell when that chicken is ready.
Plus, let’s be frank here, I’m no hurry to get myself burned or set my apartment on fire. My stove hasn’t been turned on in well over a decade, and my family suspects that if I did turn it on it would promptly burst into flames. So all that stuff that requires playing around with burning hot metal implements and such? Which is to say, everything you’ve mentioned? No thanks. Going to a bar and having people cough on me sounds more appealing - and safer.
Ah, fans of The Sims, are they?
It may have more to do with the fact that some of them were convinced I store cardboard boxes inside the stove for some unknown reason. I have since disabused them of that bizarre notion (I may not cook, but I’m not stupid) but remnants of the idea may still be influencing their thought processes.
That said, while there are no boxes in there, there’s probably enough dust that I wouldn’t be surprised if turning on the elements resulted in a fire.
There are plenty of things that can be cooked just fine using time. Even more can be determined to be done with a meat thermometer or simple common sense. You’ve just decided that it takes ‘hundreds of hours’ and special high-risk training to cook anything, so you’re not going to do it. It’s clear that you’ve decided that something many twelve-year-olds learn with no or minimal adult supervision is beyond you, but the barrier is your decision, not the inherent difficulty of cooking. If you just said that you don’t want to cook, I wouldn’t pay it any mind. But this ‘cooking is too difficult and I haven’t spent the hundreds of hours risking life and limb to learn it’ story doesn’t do you any favors. People, especially men, who insist that they can’t (as opposed to ‘don’t want to’) cook when they aren’t suffering from a major physical or mental handicap just look very, very bad to an awful lot of people.
I’m not really that concerned about “looking bad” to people whose opinions I don’t respect.
But as we’re discussing this, let’s put all the cards on the table. Cooking is a waste of time. The cost/benefit ratio for people who can cook reads a fail to me. Many of them would disagree, and that’s fine; people are entitled to their opinions and their own strange hobbies. And the more people you’re cooking for at once, the more cost-effective it is. And of course if you’re being paid to cook it’s not a waste of time; it’s paid time.
None of that applies to me, of course. Cooking for me is a complete waste of time. And that’s before taking into account that I would reliably produce crap. Expensive, ruined crap, time after time, wasting time, money, materials, and then having to go get some actual food to eat anyway afterwards. (Preferably not at a bar.)
But yeah, all you people wagging on about how cooking is super-easy and takes no effort and you never had to learn or watch people doing it - you look very, very bad to me. (You’re crushed, right?)