Mouseover text: And yet I never stop thinking, 'sure, these ingredients cost more than a restaurant meal, but think how many meals I'll get out of them! Especially since each one will have leftovers!'
Randall Munroe really hit the nail on the head with this comic and especially the mouseover text. There's this sort of cycle that I seem to follow when I try cooking, and I need to get my way out of it. It goes like this:
- Decide I should cook something.
- Thumb through my recipe books, find one or two recipes I like.
- Write down the ingredients for the recipes in a list.
- Go to the grocery store, stumble around for a while and eventually find exactly those ingredients.
- Go back home; at some point in time soon after, cook each recipe.
- Whew, that was a lot of work! Spend the next week or two eating junk again, until I decide I should cook something. (repeat)
Very similar to the comic; sometimes I too let the leftovers go bad (usually not). And every time I rack up a huge bill at the supermarket and think to myself it's justified because of the leftovers or the amount of food. Not to mention, that's a lot of work for just a couple of meals, and a long list of ingredients.
I love cooking fresh meals but that's just so much overhead and so time consuming! So I always resort back to Easy Mac, Ramen, frozen dinners and frozen pizza. Yuck.
How can I escape this cycle and cut down on the overhead? How can I focus on more than 2 recipes at a time without buying giant lists of ingredients and spending tons of money? Is it really worth the trouble or should I just chock it up to being a college student and wonder about the years ahead of me where I'll have much more time to spend cooking one meal at a time?