Home cooking: is it a luxury?

Hi,

In the final episode of, 'A Chef's Life,' Vivian Howard commented how home cooking is a luxury. The acquisition of ingredients and the time to execute, she considered a luxury.

I happen to work at home. Cooking for me is a creative outlet with the benefit of an interesting meal to contemplate and enjoy at the end. I have a stocked pantry and freezer, so I shop my larder to make whatever interests. If I am missing an ingredient, I will usually improvise or wait for another day when it is available.

My success is also my curse, because my family would rather eat at home than go out. Yes, I like to go out, too.

I lunched with another work-at-home warrior the other day, I brought up this concept of home cooking as a luxury. She agreed it was, which did surprise me. I think it was time devoted, when she could be working on something more financially productive. It is an exchange of how time is used.

In the LTH environment, we have plenty of homecooks. How do you consider your efforts?

Regards,
Cathy2

Working from home is a luxury most of us do not have. I leave my house just after 6 in the morning and arrive home close to 7. My wife's schedule is a little more flexible but she does not like to cook (she made pretty simple meals when the kids were at home). My cooking day ends up being Sunday and that's pretty inconsistent, depending on other commitments. So yes, for most dual-income people daily home cooking is not realistic.

spinynorman99 wrote:Working from home is a luxury most of us do not have. I leave my house just after 6 in the morning and arrive home close to 7. My wife's schedule is a little more flexible but she does not like to cook (she made pretty simple meals when the kids were at home). My cooking day ends up being Sunday and that's pretty inconsistent, depending on other commitments. So yes, for most dual-income people daily home cooking is not realistic.

Do most dual-income people work 13-hour days? My guess is no. Not saying people aren't overworked but they probably do have more time than that. Whether they choose to prioritize cooking with that time is another matter.

=R=

I don't see it at all as a luxury -- just normal, hell, a necessity. I grew up in a dual-income household, and we ate out maybe, what, once every two or three months. We couldn't afford it. Now, we can afford it, but I cook almost every single day, because I don't want to spend that kind of money on eating out. Granted, I do work from home now mostly, but even back when I was working in the Loop and getting home at 6 or 6:30, I cooked pretty much every single day. I try to budget $15-$20 per day for all meals of food for my family of four (two under 6 year olds) and I can't do that with eating out or takeaway.

Luxury? No. Therapy? Definitely. I don’t undertake elaborate, time consuming cooking projects on weeknights, but I find that the time spent coming up with and executing a plan for something I can make in about 30-60 minutes max is my favorite way to unwind from my job which never really stops.

Since moving to Valpo (from W. Lakeview) I don’t have the delivery crutch—it took some getting used to but I really look forward to getting into the kitchen and unwinding by focusing on food prep. And I’ve developed some pretty great recipes—my hubs and I both are really enjoying the results!!

I definitely see it as something of a luxury, especially now as a caregiver, on top of working, plus involvement in a few groups, as well as having friends who want to try the latest restaurant. I love cooking at home, but other than just whipping something up (which is necessary for survival), major efforts that require a lot of time and ingredients are relegated to a couple of weekends a month. Either that, or I sign up for a cooking class somewhere, which gets me out of the house and means I don't have to shop or clean up.

Of course, it depends on what you mean by home cooking. If you mean an actual, multiple element meal that you serve on a plate, then definitely a rarity. If you count cooking something using a kit from an ethnic grocery store or making tuna salad or just simmering a pot roast for a few hours, I guess one might say I do cook at home. But I often enough just grab salad greens at Aldi or even resort to simply popping the top off a can of soup and eating in front of the computer. Depends on how busy I am. But "real" cooking, at the level often described here, is not very common at this point in my life. So a luxury -- but a cherished luxury.

Luxury is going out to eat. It isn't that hard to cook if you think ahead and develop some skill. Weekdays and Weekends differ of course due to time. My wife is retired, I work full time and I still cook most meals. I do things like buy ground turkey on sale and make Italian sausage patties that I freeze individually. Cook with peppers and onions add to a good role with a salad and you have dinner in 45 mins or less. Stop at the store on way home and get a slab of salmon and some broccoli. Make salmon in cast iron and steam broccoli, less than 30 minutes. I buy smoked pork chops and freeze them individually and pan fry, again add some type of veggie and you are chowing in under 30 minutes. Saute a mix of veggies (add any protein) and add to pasta with some spices in under 30 minutes. I make soup every Sunday morning. This is good for meals during the week of it freezes well. Etc.... Really not that hard to due during the week. If you plan a bit, it is not that hard.

It's a luxury. I take for granted that I have my seasoned cast iron skillet and other equipment, access to a car and working bicycle for easy regular grocery shopping, the knowledge of how to work with many types of fresh foods, and, most importantly, the time to do all of this.

This sort of article has been popping up more and more, pointing out the barriers that folks may not realize others have.

https://www.vox.com/2014/9/26/6849169/t ... oked-meals

Hi,

Going out to eat has a cost in time spent getting to and from as well as at the restaurant, indirectly the time spent to earn the money and, of course, money.

Recently, a friend's daughter was coming home from work desperate for a meal. The time spent making the meal she needed now was creating anxiety. I suggested perhaps having a meal ready to heat when she got home. When she was feeling a bit recharged, spend part of her evening preparing a meal for the following day. She seemed to like this idea. I hope she reports back on how it worked in real life.

Regards,
Cathy2

Cynthia wrote: If you count cooking something using a kit from an ethnic grocery store or making tuna salad or just simmering a pot roast for a few hours, I guess one might say I do cook at home.

Of course all that is home cooking! Especially the "simmering a pot roast for a few hours." When's dinner?

Binko wrote:

Cynthia wrote: If you count cooking something using a kit from an ethnic grocery store or making tuna salad or just simmering a pot roast for a few hours, I guess one might say I do cook at home.

Of course all that is home cooking! Especially the "simmering a pot roast for a few hours." When's dinner?

Well, it's cooking the first time, but the next five or six times, it's just defrosting.

Cynthia wrote:

Binko wrote:

Cynthia wrote: If you count cooking something using a kit from an ethnic grocery store or making tuna salad or just simmering a pot roast for a few hours, I guess one might say I do cook at home.

Of course all that is home cooking! Especially the "simmering a pot roast for a few hours." When's dinner?

Well, it's cooking the first time, but the next five or six times, it's just defrosting.

And that's all home cooking to me!

Cathy2 wrote:Recently, a friend's daughter was coming home from work desperate for a meal. The time spent making the meal she needed now was creating anxiety. I suggested perhaps having a meal ready to heat when she got home. When she was feeling a bit recharged, spend part of her evening preparing a meal for the following day.
Cathy2

Another idea is to invest in a small chest freezer. Many meals freeze well and the time to make 6 portions is hardly more than the time to make 2 portions. We do this regularly and freeze portions in quart freezer zip lock bags. Take a Sunday and you can make weeks worth of meals in 1 day. Just put a bag in the fridge as you leave for work and it is ready to heat when you come home.

If you get caught flat and didn't take a meal out of the freezer, 5-10 minutes at low power in a microwave and it is ready to heat.

^Yep. My wife requests leftovers for her work lunch, but quite often, I make enough to also freeze and stockpile as needed for lunch or dinner emergencies. (Or for when I make dishes for dinner that don't really work as reheat-at-work dishes.) I pretty much always "cook for an army." We have a second mini-fridge in the basement that helps supply the storage space (though our regular fridge's freezer probably has enough room, as well, if we just consolidate space and plan a little differently.)

It's very interesting for me to see people thinking of home cooking as a luxury, whereas for me (like Puckjam mentions), eating out has always been the luxury. Like, growing up, even something like take-out pizza was a luxury (and we literally never had that delivered. I have a small handful of memories of going out to Pizza Hut and bringing it back home, but that's it. As I got older, we would sometimes bring back home fried chicken or Chinese take-out on Sundays when mom or dad didn't feel like cooking, but that kind of extravagance didn't happen until I was in my teens.)

The question boils down to the value of a given person's time vs money. The more skilled someone is as a cook, the more value they can assign to time spent cooking. I have invested a lot of time and energy in learning how to cook so I value the activity a great deal. I also have invested in equipment like time delayed rice cookers, time delayed ovens and a water pot that keeps water at boiling to shorten my cooking time on rushed weeknights. I also get my groceries delivered more often than not. Between my work and child care related obligations, I'm looking at a 1.5 hour window on a typical weeknight to cook, eat, clean up and prep for the next meal. It's a tight window and I simply cannot make it work 5 nights a week. So for me, home cooking is a luxury and ordering in is a necessity, not the other way around.

Funny -- but I wasn't thinking of home cooking vs. eating out, but rather actually preparing a meal vs. just opening a can -- which I do with some regularity. I'm a good cook, I just don't have as much free time as I'd like.

Cynthia wrote:I just don't have as much free time as I'd like.

That's really the luxury part.

spinynorman99 wrote:

Cynthia wrote:I just don't have as much free time as I'd like.

That's really the luxury part.

Indeed.

lougord99 wrote:Another idea is to invest in a small chest freezer. Many meals freeze well and the time to make 6 portions is hardly more than the time to make 2 portions. We do this regularly and freeze portions in quart freezer zip lock bags. Take a Sunday and you can make weeks worth of meals in 1 day. Just put a bag in the fridge as you leave for work and it is ready to heat when you come home.

If you get caught flat and didn't take a meal out of the freezer, 5-10 minutes at low power in a microwave and it is ready to heat.

Not only is having a small freezer a time saver but it is a budget saver. I was looking for some pork for posole last month for a pot luck and I bought a 8# pork sirloin roast for $0.88/lb. Half the pork went for the pot of soup; the rest of the roast was roasted and shredded and placed into the freezer in 6 - 8 oz packages which equates to a six meals for two.

A lot of the stress of cooking can be reduced by preprepping portions of the meals in advance - Mise en place. When you get home, much of the meal is ready to put together. The other thing that I will generally do to conserve energy (as well as reduce the heat level in my kitchen) is to prepare several meals at the same time.

My hacks are pretty simple too.

I prep veggies in bulk -- wash, thoroughly dry and chop/prep things I know I'll use throughout the week that won't discolor or soften--mushrooms, onions, non-leafy asian veg, celery, green beans, broccoli, etc.

I also make a pot of rice at the beginning of the week; always cook beans in bulk and separate into portion sizes & freeze; make and freeze portions of Instant-pot-cooked chicken; and a bunch of similar time savers.

Speaking of the Instant-Pot, I find that i can make a lot of really delicious dishes using the pressure cooker function--from Thai and Indian curries to meat/bean dishes, to taco meats. Throw in frozen meats, sauce ingredients about 60-90 mins before I want to eat--cook some veg or make a salad just before I'm ready to sit down to dinner--done!

I also have a freezer full of Sitka Salmon Co. fish & shellfish--so putting a couple of pieces of salmon in the fridge in the morning that I can cook in 10 mins max and then put on top of warmed up rice, with some quick steamed or sauteed veg and pre-prepped sauce to top (again, every couple/few weeks I make chimichurri, a yogurt based sauce, sesame vinaigrettes, etc. and have them in the fridge ready to go).

So most of the work is in deciding what to defrost or throw in the IP and what other ingredients I'll use. And I definitely think we eat better now than we ever did when we were ordering in all the time. But if your alternative is opening a can or a frozen microwave dinner or a bowl of cereal (my husband would do this most days if I wasn't around, I think ), then I can understand why this is a luxury. And that's understandable too.

I try to cook from scratch most of the time, but I find it is easier to do in the summer time when I eat a lot of salads or boil water for sweet corn. During tomato season starting the middle of August, I also fix a pasta dish with fresh tomatoes probably three times a week. I boil some spaghetti, and while I am doing that, I cut up some tomatoes and some fresh basil, and then I add a half a tablespoon on olive oil and crush a clove of garlic. I then add some grated Parmesan. I don't have a family living with me, and so I don't have to deal with other family members that get tired of eating the same thing all the time. In the winter time I do unfortunately eat some healthy frozen dinners or burritos, but when I do cook soup, a pot of it lasts me four meals. I also eat some chicken sausage and occasionally some salmon burgers.

I love Tabatchnick frozen soup which they have on sale B1G1F right now at Jewel, and if you ever go to the Kosher Jewel on Howard, they still have Jewish new year calendars which contain a coupon for $.50 off of a package of their soup. I just picked up some of the coupons two weeks ago, and they had tons left near the front entrance and the produce section. I don't go out to eat that much because it is too expensive and it is hard to find anything healthy to eat. I can get something healthy to eat at Panera bread, but a meal there costs me $10, and I can eat at home for a lot less. Hope this helps, Nancy

Hi- I forgot to mention about mashupomom's hot holiday deals Facebook group. It originally started out as a holiday deals group, and now it has expanded to deals all year long. She posts a lot of Amazon subscribe and save deals, and a lot of Amazon and Best Buy deals. She also posts Aldi and Jewel deals as well as stores such as Pete's. She has an Aldi's Facebook group as well. You have to ask for permission to join her group.

Rachael is really big on Aldi's, and on Wednesdays on her hot holiday deals group she does a meal plan for the week for Aldi's. She does dinners for six nights for four people, and she buys all of the food at Aldi's, and she usually does not spend more than $60. All of the dinners are easy to prepare too. She does a lot of sheet dinners where she has chicken drumsticks, potatoes and carrots and puts it all in a pan to cook. I don't use any of her recipes because it is too much food for one person, and plus she eats more meat than I do, but she has a lot of fans of her program. She includes recipes for all of her meals, and I think most of the meals can be cooked in 30 minutes. She also has a website where she just posted about how she decides what to include in the dinners. Here is a link to her website.
https://www.mashupmom.com/are-your-reci ... xEFsKdOYHg

She has people that like her recipes, but wish they were keto or low fat or something else, and she explains how she comes up with the menus. Hope this helps, Nancy

I rent an apartment, so installing a chest freezer is not something I can do. But we had one when I was a kid, living with my parents, so I know they are useful.

Some of the quick options look like fun -- if I ever have 30 minutes again. (Though the 30 minutes never includes clean up, and that's part of the issue.)

For myself, I think at present, I prefer making cooking a recreational break in a crazy week, and not adding it to the list of things I have to fit in on a daily basis. I'll still mostly be eating at home -- unless I'm at the nursing home with mom -- but will be relegating "real" cooking--the kind of satisfying, multi-phase cooking so often featured here-- to the luxury category, and just be grateful that so many pleasant things do come in pop-top cans or the freezer section. And there is always instant ramen.

Because it seems likely that others are harried and looking for ways to cut the amount of time spent grabbing a bite to eat on a busy day, I thought I'd share one of my favorite "open a can" options -- because I just made some and am sitting here enjoying it as I type.

Two cans pumpkin (or one large can -- and NOT pumpkin pie filling -- just plain pumpkin)
One can coconut milk
One quart (I use the boxed stuff, but if you have something better on hand, that would be great)
A couple of heaped tablespoons of Indian garlic/ginger puree (something I always have on hand)
A few dashes of curry powder (to taste)
Dump it all in a large pot and heat through. Enjoy.

Takes maybe 5 minutes. Makes a lot, so I'm set for a few days. Only clean-up is the pot and the bowl and spoon I'm using to eat it. Plus, a few days from now, the storage container that the leftovers go into.

Also, a lot of my "cans" are actually those retort pouches in which one can get a decent range of Indian specialties. Because there are people all over the world who are running out of time.

But also worth noting is that I'm single and live alone. This is not a recommendation for folks with families (well, except maybe the soup -- can't imagine anyone not liking that, unless they hate pumpkin).

And if it is just a can, it would probably be Progresso butternut squash soup or Campbell's Wicked Thai. Because sometimes, when deadlines close in, just opening a can and carrying it to the computer is the only possible option. (Or when mom was in the hospital, and I was there every day.)

Then, when the deadlines are past and I have a break, that's when I pull the cookbooks off the shelf and luxuriate in creating the kind of meal one might actually dare to mention on LTHForum. (Hoping to do Poulet au Vinaigre next week, from Simon Hopkinson's lovely little book Roast Chicken and Other Stories.)

So I think the response to the question at the top of the thread actually involves a lot of considerations -- like defining home cooking and luxury, as well as considering life situation. On LTHForum, when I read "home cooking," I'm thinking of the epic meals so often described here by our many talented cooks. That is definitely a luxury.

Cooking at home doesn't seem like a luxury it just seems normal. I do have friends that cook nothing and buy all premade food out, mostly they don't always eat out but they bring it home and eat it. I alternate between eating out, and bringing food in, cooking, and eating leftovers. Its getting hard for me to cook with my arthritis which is now in my back so its not fun to cook anymore. I like my cooking though so I would miss it if I just ate food from somewhere else. I think my perfect point is to make something home cooked two or three days a week and the rest is eat out, leftovers, or carry out stuff.

No.

Cynthia wrote:B
One quart (I use the boxed stuff, but if you have something better on hand, that would be great)

I'm assuming this is some kind of broth, but you might want to explain what your quart is.

Stew chock full of veg, potatoes and root veg, light on animal flesh with a loaf of crusty bread. Beans, greens and see though bone-in rind-on pork chops with a side of cornbread. 49 cent leg/thigh chicken with a pile of white rice, veg and loaf of butternut. Feed the family well, cheap and daily. Not a luxury.

Blow out LTH/Instagram worthy meals are a luxury. Lots of room in the middle.

One of my favorite meals (lately) has been a bowl of fresh cooked Kagayaki short grain rice, dab butter, dash soy, dusting Maldon, scooped with toasted nori strips. Tube of wasabi at the ready. Seems a luxury but goes for about dollar and scant time to prepare.

Note:
Do NOT buy Kagayaki over the internet or from delivery its outragiously expensive. HMart carries, most likely Tensuke and Mitsuwa. If Kagayaki is out of stock another brand will do just fine. (Don't let noted rice aficionado Deesher know though)

Interesting rice roundup:
Guide to Rice

Puckjam wrote:Luxury is going out to eat. It isn't that hard to cook if you think ahead and develop some skill. Weekdays and Weekends differ of course due to time.

I agree 100% here
If you have a family (of 4 or 5 ) usually for me, the cost difference is enormous!
I can cook most normal weeknight meals in <30-45 min at a very reasonable cost.
When we all go out to dinner
OH MY!!!
Even getting take-out, Boston Market etc can be much pricier than home cooked,
and is much more caloric as well if you're trying to eat healthy...
So while I truly ENJOY eating out, and will do so again at some point in the future,
cooking at home is cheaper, healthier, and for now, safer too.

Since Covid, we've actually done a lot of take-out, as the wife is cooped up in the house all day working, while I effectively take care the kids, hang out outside with them, do household chores, etc. (I'm a photographer, mostly weddings, so my peak season work is just zero now.) At any rate, she's a data scientist, so she's stuck in front of the computer every day for up to 12 hours, and needs a break to go out. On average, just going to Italian Beef/hot dog places and the occasional Thai (Cida in Countryside and Spicy Thai Lao in Burbank), we spend about $30-$35 for a family of four. Above, I mentioned I typically budget $20/day for all three meals for all four family members (the littler ones are 6 and 4). So, cooking from home saves us about $500 or so a month (actually, probably a little bit more, maybe more like $600, as I'm not including breakfast and lunch in the calculation.) We've transitioned to more cooking now that normalcy is starting to return a little bit, and only get takeout twice a week. But there was a period there where I had Italian beef sandwiches like five days in a row. Eventually, we'll be back to our normal of eating out/getting takeout maybe two or three times a month.