I just thought that I’d post that as a single bloke who’s cooking can only aspire to cheese on toast and things that can be microwaved that I am sick to death of takeaways.
As my cooking is so bloody awful I don’t bother much.
Every night kebabs, chinese, fish and chips, currys,pizzas, all the things that I used to love as an occassional treat now turn my taste buds to scorn mode.
God I’m sick of them.
Well I feel a little better getting that off of my chest, so farewell and adieu.
Delightful username/post combo.
When my husband was away in the army and I was too depressed to cook, I got sick of takeout, too. Thankfully I can cook, but there are so so many things you can learn to make that are no harder than opening a few cans and starting the microwave. Try “A Man, A Can, A Plan” or the “Cooking with 3 (or 4 or 5) Ingredients” cookbooks.
yeah i made pasta when i was like 8, just buy some cream buy some milk buy some mushrooms some bacon and you know whatever else you like. tip out as much cream and milk as you feel necessary and cook the bacon and other meat crap before you put it in the sauce. easy as. or i dunno go online and search some simple stuff like lorax said
When I was in my mid 20’s I had shift work. Often, I had nothing to do at 2am as everyone else was asleep.
I taught myself how to cook. I’m not great, but I can improvise just about anything. One of the best things that I ever did. I am known as the cook in the family.
For the last 19 years My wife and I have lived in a place where takeout/takeaway/home delivery just is not an option. I’d starve if I couldn’t cook.
Learn how to make the basics, really. Leftovers are GREAT.
On review…. You called yourself a ‘Bloke’. Are you in the UK? My understanding is that kitchens there are a bit small by my standards. Still, a nice meal can be made quite quickly. Last night I made lemon chicken, rice and had shredded cabbage on the side with dressing for my wife and I. I improvised. It was very good. And reasonably healthy. Took 20 minutes.
I like to cook. But I don’t know if that’s somehow ingrained. It’s like any other task. But with cooking, you experiment along the way.
On the theory that you’d like a little help improving your cooking repertoire, I’m moving this thread to Cafe Society, from MPSIMS.
Cooking is only as hard as you make it.
Start with a couple of basic flavors, work that up to a couple of simple dishes, and after some experimenting you’ll be making satisfactorily tasty meals in no time.
Try incorporating some extra ingredients into boxed stuff, like heating up a sausage and adding it to mac and cheese. Just mix shit together, it’s easy. Something I like to make is mix a pound of ground beef with a packet of onion gravy/soup mix, heat it in a pan until it’s cooked through, then toss in a package of (cooked) egg noodles and prepared brown gravy (from 2 packets). It’s essentially homemade hamburger helper.
Am I the only one that heard this post autotuned and read by Antointe (he of “hide your kids, hide your wife, cos they rapin’ ervrybody out here” fame)?
Has your blood pressure been checked lately?
You, sir, are obviously British. Amiright?
How about eating in the pub? Or get one of those oven meals from the supermarket?
Or learning how to cook. It’s really not that hard to achieve a basic level of skill that enables one to make a pretty adaptable rage of dishes.
Bugger cooking. Takes too long for one person.
Not if you do it right. Make a batch and freeze is the secret. Not cooking for oneself is a sign of sloth and lack of moral fiber.
Hey, I tip well.
So do I. 
Brown a lb. of ground beef and a small, diced onion in a pan with a little salt and some pepper; drain the beef, add a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a half can of milk (to make it ‘saucier’). This mixture freezes well, and is good served over buttered egg noodles. Once you get a little more adept with your cooking, you can jazz it up a bit by adding some diced bell peppers (any color), shallots, herbs, sliced fresh mushrooms, etc. This is really one of those “recipes” that you can get as elaborate with as you’d like. But at its base, it’s beyond easy! An added bonus is it’s cheap. Eating take-out all the time gets expensive!
It’s also good over buttered toast or mashed potatoes or rice.
As a general rule, add some chopped onion or garlic to just about any meat/poultry dish while it’s cooking. If you don’t feel like chopping, get some minced dried onion or garlic or onion powder, and add that. Onion and garlic are incredible flavor boosters for main dishes. Learn how to make a basic white sauce, which is easy, or just open cans of cream of mushroom soup, which is even easier. If you don’t like mushrooms, there’s always cream of onion and cream of celery and cream of chicken. One of these will probably taste good to you.
On your day off, spend a couple of hours making several servings of a main dish. Eat one serving, label and freeze the others if it came out all right. Soups and stews are particularly good for this. Or roast a chicken, eat one portion, remove most of the meat, stew the skin and bones and make broth. Freeze the broth in small portions, and freeze the meat in small portions. There are bags of frozen mixed vegetables, just heat up the broth and cook the veggies in it, and add some chicken. There are also cans of mixed veggies, but one can might be more than you’re willing to eat in one meal.
Peg Bracken wrote a couple of cookbooks, and one of them had a chapter on cooking for one. Lots of good ideas in there.
Another thing you can do is to buy a couple of pounds of ground beef (heck, for one person, even one pound is four servings). Brown all the beef up with some salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder. Freeze in a large zip-top bag. It’s really, really easy to take the bag out of the freezer, give it a good whack on the edge of the counter, loosening enough pre-cooked meat for one serving of something. Add this beef to spaghetti sauce from a jar (I’d suggest jar rather than can, because the jar can be re-closed and put in the fridge for more uses), add to boiled pasta, and voila, you have spaghetti with meat sauce. Use more of the beef to make tacos, mix into mac and cheese for easy ‘beefaroni’, use a small can of red beans and chili seasoning to make one or two servings of chili.
I’ll grant you, none of this is high-class cuisine, but it’ll get you fed without the boredom and expense of take-out every night. And as you master the very basic cooking techniques, you may want to move on to master more complex ones.
Oh, and as Lynn says, onions and garlic add a great flavor boost to just about any savory dish. I don’t know what might be available here but not in England, but at just about any decent grocery store here, you can buy poly bags of frozen, pre-chopped onions. These give you better texture/flavor than dried onions or onion powder, and the entire bag can stay in your freezer, to use as much or as little at a time as you’d like.
Canned milk = evaporated milk?