this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
14 points (93.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35696 readers
1334 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Recent change in life circumstances, and now I'm trying to figure out how to be an adult about food. I want to focus on eating healthy. I have very little foundational knowledge, so I need ELI5-level content. I'd love some online resources that I could use to learn. In-person classes are not a great fit. Anyone have any recommendations?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tymon@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This can feel pretty daunting, but the wonderful thing about cooking is that its difficulty almost always scales with what you actually want.

If you have little foundational knowledge about nutrition and what a home-cooked meal actually, like, looks like, I would recommend taking a bit of a hybrid approach: pre-made meals from a service like Freshly, Factor, or Sunbasket, and home-cooking from scratch. Think of this like training wheels.

Freshly, Factor, and other companies like them offer really high-quality, healthy, tasty meals with fully accounted for nutritional and caloric details. If you did a 7 or 14 meal-weekly delivery, you could have at least one guaranteed meal per day that would be something you could study and easily replicate yourself.

Now, as for actual cooking:

Identify a few foods that you typically gravitate to. I don't mean something as broad as "japanese" or "mexican," but more specific, like "ramen" or "quesadillas." Believe it or not, you can make very healthy versions of both of those foods - you just wouldn't want to eat them every day.

Once you identify the foods that you love, you can start to plan what your week will look like. If you want to have, say, chicken with potatoes and some greens for dinner every night for a week, you could do the following:

  • Make sure you have at least one cooking sheet like this
  • Get some oven mitts
  • Get a sharp cooking knife (you don't need to spend more than 20 bucks on this)
  • Get a multipack of meal-size tupperware that seals tightly, like this
  • Go to the grocery store and buy cold-pressed extra-virgin olive oil (seriously, don't cheap out on your cooking fats, it affects literally everything and can make you hate cooking if you buy cheap shit) sea salt, black pepper, umami seasoning, oregano flakes, and your favorite kind of hot-pepper like cayenne or red pepper flakes

You can buy a 5-pound pack of chicken thighs for between $8 and $17 bucks, depending on where you live. This will make 7 dinner's worth of chicken.

Buy your favorite kind of greens, whether its broccoli, asparagus, kale, etc.

Buy a bag of russet potatoes. Don't peel them!

Buy some parchment paper. Put a piece of it on the baking sheet so it covers the surface. Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees.

Heat a skillet on your stovetop on medium heat, pour a little olive oil in, and wait until the oil starts to crackle a little bit. Put the chicken thighs a few at a time on the hot skillet and get them a little brown - we're talking two minutes either side. Do this for all the chicken thighs while the oven pre-heats.

Once the oven is fully heated, put the chicken thighs on the parchment paper on the baking sheet, lightly drizzle them with olive oil, and sprinkle some salt, pepper, and umami seasoning on them. Cook for 40 minutes at 375.

While this is happening, prep a second cooking sheet with potatoes and greens. Cut the potatoes into quarters, and mix them up with the broccoli or asparagus on another cooking sheet, also on parchment paper. Season them with olive oil salt, pepper, and whatever else you're feeling, and wait until the chicken is done.

Once it is, put the potatoes and broccoli in the hot oven and cook for 30 minutes at the same heat.

Let all of this food cool on the stove - do NOT put it in your fridge while it's hot - and then portion them out in the tupperware you bought. Eat that shit all week.

For breakfast, you're on your own. I've never mastered anything past protein bars and eggs, but that's a willpower thing.