It does not take very many tries to start cooking better than a restaurant. And the best part is you can make sure that only your favorite ingredients get in there.
After like maybe half a year of cooking for myself a couple times a week (instead of frozen food or like canned food) it’s seriously started to astound me how bad some restaurant food is.
I know take out is mostly for convenience, but if the problem is taste you’re in luck because the bar to clear for tastier food than take out is really really low.
For most things, I can make it as good or better than a restaurant because I can get better quality ingredients. The one thing I can’t seem to get to be similar is a burger to fast food burgers. I’ve used super high quality beef, I’ve used even lower quality beef, tried various seasoning combos, etc. I can make a damn good burger, but it’s nothing like the insanely addicting flavor of fast food burgers. IDK what they are doing, but it’s not just the quality of the ingredients you can see. The only place that seemingly just makes homemade burgers is In-n-Out. I can replicate that taste all day.
They put a drug in it to make you crave it fortnightly!
Probably a combination of sugar and msg in different parts.
I find fast food burgers to be pretty boring - the flavor is kind of flat, simple.
My homemade ones are great because I use a spice mix for burgers (a copy of one Williams Sonoma used to sell, that has things like Worcestersher powder, garlic, onion, thyme, mustard powder, etc).
I have heard, tho I don’t know if its true, that McDonald’s injects the beef patties with beef broth to make it taste meatier. I will say, working there, the pickles smell extra pickle-y and have a much stronger flavor than any store brand I’ve ever had (never made my own so can’t compare there). And they are also super bright green. Like almost neon. Their food also makes me feel full off a smaller portion of food than anywhere else, which I’ve questioned numerous times.
If anyone is doing weird shit with their food chemically, it’s McDonald’s.
Isn’t there something like 17 ingredients in their french fries?
Man, now I want a really juicy double smash cheeseburger.
I think this has more to do with what kind of restaurants you go to
It does not take very many tries to start cooking better than a restaurant.
Goddam it must be some lousy restaurants in your area.
My wife cooks really good food, and I love her food. But a proper restaurant with a proper chef, they are better than good, they are professionals and also professionals at picking fresh produce and good cuts to use.But I agree, it’s pretty easy to learn to cook a decent meal.
And the best part is you can make sure that only your favorite ingredients get in there.
It also means the food will have less variation. To appreciate good cooking properly, you need variation.
I meal prep for the week on sunday and make food for the week. Every week what I make is as good or better than the restaurant version. This week is Kenji Lopez’s cochinita pibíl with which I make tacos. It is very good and took me like 3hrs to cook over the weekend.
Yeah this is what I don’t get. Of course the first 2-3 times you try, it might be bad, but use your senses! Use ingredients you like, try adding a little something, look, taste, put more if you like, stop if you don’t. If the texture seems weird, try to correct it (add a liquid if it’s to dense, let cook if it’s too liquid). Get that feedback loop running!
Where the heck do you live 😁, I mean better than takeout okay but in general better than a restaurant? No way.
It’s impossible to get better at cooking than eating in a restaurant. Already the fact that someone else is making that food is enough to make it better than any food i have and will ever cook and I’ve been cooking since teenage years, nearly 20 years. Every single day. Fuck. Eating, cooking, planning, balancing, considering others, basically everything involving it is a rather annoying chore and it has to be done whole life.
No I’m not bad at cooking, average, I’ve just grown to resent this activity.I await the day we invent a food pill or at least one in all superfood or i can at least start eating current foods that claim to be all in one foods for every meal. Wife already looks at me weird when i eat my breakfast slop multiple times a day.
Ive refused to ever eat at an olive garden for goodness, goin on 20 years now because anything on their menu, I can make better
I started using “Chef’s Plate” a little more than a year ago. I love knowing that my food was not mishandled and is cooked to my liking every time. It’s convenient that I dont need much grocery shopping and the quality of my meals are waaayyyy better than takeout.
I have the opposite problem. I learn how to make something I like, then I realize “Oh shit, I don’t need this much lasagna in my life. This is going to kill me. I must seal away the recipe forever.”
I was getting real good at cakes, had to stop for my health.
Pasta is deceptive. A box of pasta, a pack of meat, 2 or 3 jars of sauce and all of a sudden you have 8 pounds of food…
Accidental meal prep, lol
I have been slim my whole life apart from that one year I perfected mac & cheese.
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Make Mediterranean salad, cannot eat too much of that stuff (and you can vary it wildly too).
Are there people who almost exclusively eat takeout?
How do they afford it…?
By constantly complaining they’re broke.
I’ve lost count of the number of people I know tangentially who complain about not having any money yet talk about constantly ordering DoorDash for some cookies or other frivolous crap.
Funny thing is if they went and got it themselves they would save a ton. Sometimes the prices are almost double on doordash.
Quick and dirty analysis of Doordash prices over the last I don’t care. Doordash recognized that they had two markets. A captive market (people who are stuck in their houses for whatever reason, for example) and an elastic market (lazy people who want tacos, for example). Depending on the day, I’m a little of column a, a little of column b so no judgements here. It just looks more and more like Doordash decided to take advantage of their captive market since their elastic market actually responds to price shocks.
Thats interesting, I’m elastic, I’ll door dash when I’m lazy or don’t want to cook.
Yeah I have the luxury of time so I only doordash when my bike or my me is broken
My boss doesn’t even own silverware, he eats out 3 meals a day EVERY day.
Some people can afford it so they never cook.
My mother started using paper plates for everything except cereal and it bugs the hell out of me. I get it makes cleaning a tiny bit easier, but we already have good plates dammit.
My roommate started doing the same, it creates a lot of trash.
I’m not a fan at all of it too.
it’s so much easier (on the water cycle and ecology and bullshit) to make fresh water than it is to make paper plates. we’ve had some heated discussions about it in the family (she’s almost as stubborn as i am) but like, it’s her money what am i supposed to do
CEO of big market chain in Spain (Mercadona) claims people will not have kitchens by 2050. They started selling ready meals some time ago and are now expanding it.
I know people that don’t even know how to cook. They come eat 3+ times at the restaurant my wife works at. She even has nicknames for’em.
Yeah it absolutely baffles me as well. I tend to just cook for 4 days or something in one go. If I’m lazy I can even get pre-cut veggies, a pot is pasta sauce, some meaty and some pasta. It’s not that much effort and you could make enough to eat for days.
I was raised with the mentality that takeout or going to a restaurant was a luxury, which makes sense since it’s fucking expensive. And personally I feel like takeout is almost more of a hassle. You have to order on some site that is more advertisement than useful (or worse, call someone). Then you either have to wait till they bring it or get it somewhere, in which time you cannot really do much useful anyway, and on top of that its fucking expensive and often unhealthy.
Im more suprised people are ok with quality. Restaurants need to move inventory. You are never getting the most fresh stuff.
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Depends where you live too. In some countries it’s almost the same price eating out as cooking your own meals.
Yea. It’s baffling here in Canuckistan, the price is chicken breast is like $20/kg.
I love cooking, but I hate having to cook, and the considerable meal ticket[^1] I get from my job allows me to basically never have to cook.
^1: Extra money I can only spend on food, equivalent to slightly less than ⅓ of my salary
yep.
If you like to eat tasty food, you should learn to cook tasty food. There -is- a learning curve if you’re going in completely blind, but you’ll pick it up way quicker than you’d expect.
Absolutely a skill worth developing!
Start with soup. Soup is easy to get good at, and teaches you techniques that are critical for other dishes.
Then do sauces (which are just soups in a top-hat), inc making a roux.
With classical cooking techniquesyou turn boring steamed veg and grilled chicken into grilled veg and steamed chicken with a mushroom sauce.
I remember making a broccoli and cheese casserole. It was simple enough but I done gone and fucked it up.
The broccoli was chopped proper, the cheese was dense (more of a brick/ball than a sauce when I tossed it in the oven) and then I saw a cup of milk in my mise en place still sitting there. no wonder the cheese was… Bricklike?
I was very new to cooking. So I just opened up the oven in a panic and splashed the milk on top of the casserole. It was bad. The broccoli almost cooked, the milk heated up and evaporated a little, and there was this sense clump of cheese and exerting what goes in roux but milk.
It was poverty days, but I had to throw it out it was so bad. I made a bowl of cereal (dry, since the last of my milk was now broccoli) and went to bed. It’s important to know when you’re beaten.
Anyways, if there is a food you like a lot, it’s worth learning to cook. I almost have my gyro recipe finished (the secret ingredient is bacon)
It really is and has been over the years
I’ve been cooking good food for a long long time, I mostly shared this because one of my friends is quite early in his journey of learning to cook lol
Hey.
HEY!
You like food, doncha?
You’ll get better at it, just take it easy.
Ngl, for me, it’s the opposite. Cooking at home is actually better since you can try different recipes, mix some things up, and come up with something way more delicious.
Or way more worse
True 😭 but yea i do research through gemini or youtube before experimenting.
I wouldn’t be caught dead using AI for recipes. That said, I will sit down and compare a few different recipes for something, and pick and choose what I think would be best, and experiment.
Once you have enough culinary knowledge, you can experiment more freely instead of being a slave to a recipe
Skill issue, obviously. I’m not a great cook and the food I make is better than 90% of restaurants.
This here. My stepfather was a chef so I got used to very good food and he was kind enough to teach me the basics. I wouldn’t call myself a good cook, but I can do maths and I can make way better food for so, so much cheaper than eating in a restaurant.
What’s your favorite recipe? Something quick and good?
Not who you asked, but I want to shill for spaghetti aglio e olio for a sec.
It has 3 ingredients. Pasta, olive oil, garlic. Fancy stuff will taste better, but the cheapest will taste fine. I use pre-minced garlic out of a tub when I’m really down bad and it’s still excellent. Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, maybe parmesan cheese if you have it, and sometimes I’ll throw in some frozen peas. It comes together in about 2 minutes longer than it takes to boil the pasta and can be really quite good.
I do this but with olive oil, garlic and dried tomatoes :) Tried it in some restaurant one time. Dead simple and really tasty.
Another dead simple pasta: mozzarella and cherry tomatoes. Just let the mozzarella melt with cooked pasta, add tomatoes. Presto.
Carbonara is also not much harder.
speaking of carbonara…
i have a slightly modified version of this recipe somewhere. it is delicious. we just haven’t been eating pasta much lately.
Carbonara is hard as fuck.
For one real carbonara needs some pretty exotic ingredients (guanciale and pecorino). On top of that it’s relatively easy to scramble the egg yolks if you aren’t super careful. Or make it super salty if you use too much guanciale / cheese.
I cook every day for the last 20 years and still my success ratio with carbonara is like 80%.
Aglio olio is impossible to screw up unless you dump a cup of salt on it or something ridiculous.
My local ALDI has guanciale from time to time and when it doesn’t I just use bacon. I would say guanciale takes it from 8/10 to 9/10. There’s difference but bacon does the job. Same with parmesan. I’m sure pecorino would be better but you can still make correct carbonara with the things you can easily find in most stores (at least in Spain).
I don’t have issues with scrambling eggs. I add a bit of pasta water (as you should) and heat it up slowly. I don’t remember the last time I fucked it up. And I ate carbonara made but different people and I like mine to most :)
It’s definitely not a “throw ingredients into a pot” recipe but it’s still fairly quick and easy.
I’m bad at recipes, I usually just throw some stuff in and add some spices, more if needed after tasting. This is fast in terms of cooking time, but takes some chopping. For two people, this makes 2-3 dinners or 2 dinners and 1 set of leftover oven breads. (Put the leftover sauve over bread slices, add some cheese, throw into oven until they look delish.)
Recent favorite; pasta with tomato sauce (Bolognese-type)
- 1 onion (whatever color, I like red)
- 2-3 carrots (more if tiny, less if huge)
- 2-6 garlic cloves (more if tiny, less if huge)
- about 15-20 cm of celery stalk (the green thing, not the yellow block growing underground)
- 2-3 tablespoons of tomato puree
- 2,5 dl of soy TVP (or about 300-400 grams of minced meat)
- 1 boullion cube (veggie, meat, chicken, idc)
- (1-2 tablespoons of nutritional yeast flakes)
- 2 cans of diced tomatoes (á 400 g, so about 800 g)
- 1 can on lentils (whatever color, I like red and also a can being~390 g)
- (2-3 frozen spinach cubes because is healthy)
- splash of soy sauce
- bigger splash of mild vinegar (whatever color, I use what I happen to have)
- 1 tablespoon of sugar
- all them herbs and pepper (oregano, basil, marjoram, black pepper, etc.)
Instructions:
- Dice onion, put into big pan or pot with a plenty of oil. You might need to add more oil later on.
- Dice all the other veggies and add them in once the onions brown a bit. Spinach too, if you’re feeling strong.
- Add in the tomato puree. Let it all heat up.
- Add in the TVP (or if meat, maybe cook meat in another pan so it can brown too?) Add the boullion cube and mix it all well. Now is time for the nutritional yeast flakes too.
- Rinse the lentils properly and add them in. Same for diced tomatoes and add some water into the cans and then the water to the pan/bot aswell. (About half a can of water per can.)
- Splash the soy and the mild vinegar, then add the sugar, herbs and peppers. Taste, add more if needed. Possibly might need some salt too, don’t know how much salt anyone likes.
- Boil some pasta (choose whatever shape you like or happen to have at hand) and taste the sauce again before eating.
- If you let the sauce simmer longer it’ll be better but sometimes you just gotta eat.
My grammar might suck, I can barely do understandable recipes in my own language. I won’t take offense in further questions.
It’s all clear, thanks :)
I get the “throw some stuff in” style. I do the same for lentils or beans. Just throw everything into pressure cooker (do sofrito first, of course), you can do the quantities by eye with a bit of experience. Get super tasty results every time.
For tomato based pasta I just use tomato sauce they sell here. It just tomatoes and olive oil, tastes amazing. Add some black olives, onions, garlic, capers and you’re done :)
I think the store tomato sauce is perfectly fine, especially since it saves time. I do it from scratch, or from scratch-er really, just to save few more cents hah. I should learn to use olives and capers… Maybe for the next one! Pressure cooker would be handy too, but I already have a blender and an airfryer and there is only so much closet space, you know?
Thanks also! :)
Sounds more like the restaurants in your area are dog shit. I’m not a bad cook or a good cook. The few recipes I make are usually good. But it sure as hell isn’t better than 90% of the restaurants out there… More like maybe 10-15%.
I don’t have stats on all the restaurants in my are but restaurants in Spain are usually pretty good. I like my food better than all the cheap and fast options and all the medium level options which I estimate are 90% of the places. You can easily find higher level places with really good food and they can have things that are better than my cooking. I know what I like and I make food the way I like it. Restaurant food has to be really good to beat that.
I’m the same way with my cooking though I do have somethings I’m rocking at (comfort food in particular lol)
My favorite is when I bring a “boring” dish to a potluck and it gets cleared out in quick order.
I’ll never forget my nephew when he was 5 saying how he hates sweet potatoes, and when he tried mine (after some coaxing) he became a fan. Nowadays (oh god it’s been almost 7 years!) he’s more specific and willing to try new foods even if they’re normally ones he doesn’t like, if they’re prepared by someone else that is.
Yeah a good spicy soup does not take that much effort, and i live in a one room apartment (😭) and my kitchen has exactly one stove top (also 😭).
Also south asian spices is a must.
But it is a dog, it will literally eat poop!
Also calling it an it due to a recent meme.
One of our dog ate poop, but didn’t eat chicken, dogs’ tastes are weird.
Whose poop?
How the hell can you afford to not cook your own meals??
I only eat out like once MAYBE twice a month anymore.
That shit’s expensive!
[off topic]
Best cookbook for a beginner is “The Joy Of Cooking.”
Breaks everything down, even boiling water.
Eventually, you get to ‘Wow! This was made by ME?’
It’s straight up bliss that first time it happens!
It’s a process. Eventually, you’ll figure out what you like and you’ll have a reliably stocked pantry to whip up a meal you’ll enjoy on short notice.
Right now, I’m going pretty basic: rice + beans + veg + cheese + olive oil + spice–most. everything made ahead of time, before I get hungry.
Agree. I consider myself a very good home chef. I got there by screwing up many, many meals, learning what I did wrong, then covering them in enough sriracha to hide the taste of whatever abomination I just made because I was still broke and had to eat it. Eventually the abominations started becoming edible and even tasty, and the sriracha went away
Coming out of atrophy hurts. The longer atrophying, the more it hurts, the harder it is, the longer it takes. So get out of atrophy as soon as possible. Gently. Now. Gotta start from somewhere, sometime, and that somewhere is right here, and that sometime is right now. Yeah, you’ll likely be sub-par, but that’s the karma of losing it from not using it. Mendwards! What’s cooking next today?
https://forkandpan.com/honey-garlic-steak-bites-with-rice/
https://forkandpan.com/jeera-rice-cumin-rice/
I’ve only made this once, and it wasn’t that great. But, I’m going to try again and I have a few tweaks that’ll hopefully make it better.
Also, something I recently learned is to spend the extra money at the fancier grocery stores for the produce and meats. You really do get what you pay for!!
Hell yeah!
The journey of learning to cook has so many awesome things in it!
Just wait until you jump into baking, that one also has so many awesome stops in it!
Do it more often, it will get better.
![Home Cooked Meal [Teddy]](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/6c568f33-16a6-43f9-a043-8c760c83421b.webp){kind=link}