Although I really enjoy cooking and consider myself to be reasonably accomplished at it, most of the time I’m too damned lazy to make the required effort. So the fridge is stocked at all times with meats and cheeses and condiments to make a variety of sandwiches on a variety of breads. 5 out of 7 nights will find me having some sort of sandwich (hot or cold) for dinner.
Also, I love Bush’s baked beans. I’ll zhuzh them up a bit, but I see no justifiable reason to go through the trouble of making baked beans from scratch.
My go to nacho dinner is to be classy and use the oven. Maybe throw some pickled jalapenos or refried beans on top if I have them.
The bachelor trick is… line a pie plate with foil, assemble the nachos, bake in the oven until it’s melty and hot, transfer the foil to a dinner plate, eat, and throw out the foil. No dishes! Ok, maybe a spoon because of the salsa.
I also mix breakfast cereal. I used to do it because I’m the designated “eat whatever’s left” guy, and I’d wind up with a quarter bowl of Life and nothing but Cheerios to fill out the rest, but now I do it all the time. I feel cheated if there’s only one cereal in my bowl.
Nothing shameful about that! I can’t remember the last time I bought anything leaner than 80-20.
I certainly don’t use bleach on my cutting boards. My wife simply doesn’t want any bleach around the house, and I ain’t gonna argue with her. I do have Star-San from my brewing days, so I can sanitize that way, and I do occasionally, but for the most part, it’s just detergent and warm water.
As for shameful culinary practices? I will occasionally use Velveeta for mac and cheese. In fact, I love Velveeta for mac and cheese, but it feels so overpriced to me, so I end up using dried cheese powder (which I buy on Amazon) and sometimes shreds of real cheese.
That’s probably my biggest sin. I mean, I “cheat” all the time with MSG and stock cubes to pump up certain soups and stews, but something like a plain chicken noodle soup cannot have any form of stock cubes or even boxed stock in it. When I make chicken noodle soup, I need it to taste like real chicken noodle soup, like what I grew up with, not something out of a box or the sharp taste of cubes.
What else? I’m sure there’s other things I’m shameful about, but I’m having difficulty thinking of it. Oh yeah, I usually prefer my green beans cooked to kingdom come – like simmered for hours until you can barely make them out – vs lightly steamed or otherwise shortly cooked ones.
A year or two ago, I remember admitting here that sometimes, when I’m making a second pot of coffee, I’ll just add new coffee grounds on top of the grounds from the first pot rather than dumping out the filter basket and starting fresh.
Judging by the outrage, you would have thought I’d confessed to stomping on puppies and kittens.
Years ago, I made a cabinet clearing “Chili” and made the mistake of mentioning that one of the ingredients I used was a handful of lentils. Not enough lentils to do anything with by themselves so I just threw them in with the other beans and meats. Now at work, for over fifteen years, there cannot be a mention of chili without someone bringing up lentils.
The smaller the legume the better. If you want to improve a recipe just replace the beans with a smaller size of bean.
I’ll add:
I love peanut butter, lettuce and mayo sandwiches.
The Totole “Granulated Chicken Flavor Soup Base Mix” with MSG I get at the Asian food store is great in mashed potatoes.
When I was in college my roommate my roommate and I used to dump a can of tuna into a bowl (actually, beakers I’d stolen from the chem lab) and add cider vinegar.
One of my cats jumps up on the counter when I open a can of tuna or chicken and licks the drained juice from the sink.
In American cuisine and nutrition fat appears to be making a come-back. Sugar is the new bugaboo and we appear to be heading towards an overreaction on that now, too.
When I was overseas in the Army I saw that the guys in my unit wouldn’t clean out the old grounds completely before making a new pot. So in spite of the “women making coffee” jokes I volunteered, and pretty soon people were asking, before they drew a cup, if I’d made the coffee.
I grew up not knowing that mayo and Miracle Whip were different products. I don’t eat a lot of tuna fish sandwiches but to this day if I make it myself it’s mixed with Miracle Whip 100% of the time.
I like to play around and try to come up with different sauces to try. Some are simple ( Sweet Heat is honey with red flaked pepper added that has been heated and left to infuse) and some are based on other people’s recipes which I’ve tweaked, but one thing is for sure: I just don’t have jars/containers to store them all in!
I read on here that you shouldn’t reuse plastic containers as poisons can leech into your food… so I’m always on the look out for empty glass jars with tight fitting lids ( an empty salsa jar for example ) . Scrub that baby inside out with boiling soapy water, do the same for the lid, and were good to go! Some day, maybe I’ll even get around to labeling them.
You want a crisp iceberg lettuce to breakup the mixture and add some moisture.