Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Lots of people can't cook.
Options
Comments
-
Maximus Alexander wrote: »If you've about 4 hours in the evening between the time you get home from work and the time you go to bed, why would you want to spend a chunk of that preparing a meal if you don't have to? I mean, fair enough if you're an enthusiast, but otherwise it's like asking why everyone goes to a mechanic instead of changing their own oil.
Hi,
For someone not into food it's a very fair question. (not saying you're not into food btw
). It's the same with most things. I play golf and one morning when out very early we noticed a small fishing boat going by. I said to my partner, "Jees, that some hour to be going out fishing" and he replied, "He's probably thinking the same about us!" 
The attractions for me regarding cooking and food are:- I know exactly what I am eating. This is the top priority for me as I prepare all my kids' meals. They'll eat sausages and fish fingers the odd time, but by and large, nothing prepared/processed.
- Food tastes so much better than what you can buy prepared. Sure, it takes a while to get the hang of it, but starting small and building confidence is the way to go. Even only last week I made a side I hadn't done in ages - stick slivers of garlic into halved tomatoes, pop into an oven for 20 mins and you have something amazingly good. Prep time - 1 minute.
- Cost. Preparing food yourself is so much cheaper. I made pulled pork yesterday (sorry beer!) using a joint I bought in Tesco for a fiver. It feed 4 adults and 2 kids. Made it in my 23 euro slow cooker that used the same electricity as a light bulb turned on for 9 hours.
- It's a life skill. There are others to be sure, but I can't think of any (well maybe one
) that provides such an instant return on investment than cooking.
Loire.0 - I know exactly what I am eating. This is the top priority for me as I prepare all my kids' meals. They'll eat sausages and fish fingers the odd time, but by and large, nothing prepared/processed.
-
-
-
-
I completely get that people see spending a lot of time cooking as a waste if they are not enjoying it, and if they don't really taste or value the difference you get with more effort.
What baffles me is that some people don't realise that recipes can take time and the work that is put into them. A friend of mine once told me she cooked lasagne from scratch - meaning a Dolmio kit, rather than buying a ready-made lasagne. fair enough, this was a good effort from her as she normally cook nothing, but she actually didn't understand how it could get any more "from scratch" than that
:eek: 0 -
Advertisement
-
Hi,
For someone not into food it's a very fair question. (not saying you're not into food btw). It's the same with most things. I play golf and one morning when out very early we noticed a small fishing boat going by. I said to my partner, "Jees, that some hour to be going out fishing" and he replied, "He's probably thinking the same about us!"
The attractions for me regarding cooking and food are:- I know exactly what I am eating. This is the top priority for me as I prepare all my kids' meals. They'll eat sausages and fish fingers the odd time, but by and large, nothing prepared/processed.
- Food tastes so much better than what you can buy prepared. Sure, it takes a while to get the hang of it, but starting small and building confidence is the way to go. Even only last week I made a side I hadn't done in ages - stick slivers of garlic into halved tomatoes, pop into an oven for 20 mins and you have something amazingly good. Prep time - 1 minute.
- Cost. Preparing food yourself is so much cheaper. I made pulled pork yesterday (sorry beer!) using a joint I bought in Tesco for a fiver. It feed 4 adults and 2 kids. Made it in my 23 euro slow cooker that used the same electricity as a light bulb turned on for 9 hours.
- It's a life skill. There are others to be sure, but I can't think of any (well maybe one ) that provides such an instant return on investment than cooking.
Loire.
Nice post and that all makes total sense to me. I actually get why people are into cooking, I can see the value in it, it just doesn't do anything for me personally. In my own life where I tend to have too much to do (or that I want to do) and not enough hours in the day, it's just not important enough to me to put the time in.
Oddly enough, the other side of that is that I love food. I'm just more inclined to eat out from time to time to satisfy that craving. I'm also fortunate enough that I work in a place that has really good catering, so I tend to essentially have restaurant quality meals for lunch and am happy enough with something small for dinner, like a bit of pasta with pesto, a caesar salad, some soup and a baguette, or a quick stir fry. I wouldn't really call that cooking though!
I don't think it's fair to imply, as a poster below you did, that people who don't cook are flavour blind. I recognise and adore good food, I'm just not that into cooking it. To use the motoring analogy again - I like nice cars but I don't build them!0 - I know exactly what I am eating. This is the top priority for me as I prepare all my kids' meals. They'll eat sausages and fish fingers the odd time, but by and large, nothing prepared/processed.
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
Hi,
For someone not into food it's a very fair question. (not saying you're not into food btw). It's the same with most things. I play golf and one morning when out very early we noticed a small fishing boat going by. I said to my partner, "Jees, that some hour to be going out fishing" and he replied, "He's probably thinking the same about us!"
The attractions for me regarding cooking and food are:- I know exactly what I am eating. This is the top priority for me as I prepare all my kids' meals. They'll eat sausages and fish fingers the odd time, but by and large, nothing prepared/processed.
- Food tastes so much better than what you can buy prepared. Sure, it takes a while to get the hang of it, but starting small and building confidence is the way to go. Even only last week I made a side I hadn't done in ages - stick slivers of garlic into halved tomatoes, pop into an oven for 20 mins and you have something amazingly good. Prep time - 1 minute.
- Cost. Preparing food yourself is so much cheaper. I made pulled pork yesterday (sorry beer!) using a joint I bought in Tesco for a fiver. It feed 4 adults and 2 kids. Made it in my 23 euro slow cooker that used the same electricity as a light bulb turned on for 9 hours.
- It's a life skill. There are others to be sure, but I can't think of any (well maybe one ) that provides such an instant return on investment than cooking.
Loire.
Cracking post!0 - I know exactly what I am eating. This is the top priority for me as I prepare all my kids' meals. They'll eat sausages and fish fingers the odd time, but by and large, nothing prepared/processed.
-
I completely get that people see spending a lot of time cooking as a waste if they are not enjoying it, and if they don't really taste or value the difference you get with more effort.
What baffles me is that some people don't realise that recipes can take time and the work that is put into them. A friend of mine once told me she cooked lasagne from scratch - meaning a Dolmio kit, rather than buying a ready-made lasagne. fair enough, this was a good effort from her as she normally cook nothing, but she actually didn't understand how it could get any more "from scratch" than that:eek:
My mother did a hospitality course once where one of the women really impressed them all by saying she knew how to make pasta.
The people running the course said that maybe she could bring in the ingredients and show them all how to make it. So she brought in a bag of normal dried pasta from Tesco :P0 -
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
I can cook as can most of my friends, in fact, in my experience it is the women who are more into cooking. We are interested to varying degrees, I have about three hours after I get home from work, so an awful lot of the time we either eat something fast, or we have to reheat something that was batch cooked at the weekend. My freezer is full of curry, pasta sauces, pies, etc. I prefer to eat freshly cooked stuff, but honestly, between normal housework, ironing, shopping, etc there just are not enough hours in the day, especially in winter.
One of my friends cannot understand this, but she is a teacher and has a significantly shorter day that I do so she happily spends hours in the kitchen every evening. I get my time at the weekend when we eat well on fresh food.
When I met my boyfriend, he could boil pasta and that was it. He can now cook anything from the most basic pasta sauce to a full roast dinner, he doesn't bake, but he has come so far and I don't expect miracles.
The big difference was that as a child/ teenager, I was in the kitchen when dinner was being made, I peeled, chopped, stirred and tasted from a very young age. He never saw his mother cooking and as a result, his three adult siblings think that a stressful dinner involves oven chips, bisto, tinned peas and maybe a piece of Donegal Catch or a frozen burger. They live off ready meals, take aways, sandwiches and cereal as far as I can see.
The thought of grating nutmeg, crushing garlic, ricing potatoes and searing steak are as alien to them as walking on the moon. They wouldn't ever think of buying a recipe book, none of them own a wok, if you handed them a butternut squash they couldn't identify it.
I really do think that the key to getting people to think that cooking is normal is showing kids how to do it from a young age. An active interest in food may or may not follow but self sufficiency (within reason) and confidence to try something new should be instilled in everyone.0 -
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
Advertisement