On cooking

[robbat2]

I enjoy eating spicy food. The full gamut of spicy - from mexican to thai, and all the way in between.
Since I've moved away from my parents, I've been doing 90% of the food preparation (of the remaining 10% it's been more going out than Marissa cooking). That in itself however is not my problem, it's just that the real problem is more noticable because of how often I cook.

At least once a week, I try to cook something with a kick to it. However whenever I've been on my own, cooking spicy stuff for one has turned out to be on the edge of too spicy. On this front, I've got 3 things of leftover spicy food in the freezer - chilli-cilantro beef; lamb tandori; and tonight's thai green curry (beef).

Cooking for one has also been challenging, in that it's significently easier to get the quanties right with larger groups - to cook for one, you need smaller quantities of everything, and it just doesn't work right. Can anybody suggest tricks or tips on this?

Regardless of how many I'm cooking for, I find it takes 1-2 hours to prepare and eat most meals. How do resturants manage to get their prep time down so much (besides having the vegetables ready to throw in).

Hints? Tips? Recipies with quantities for a single person?

Comments

[morethanreal.livejournal.com]

For things I can freeze, I tend to just cook a regular portion. When I have time I'll make lots of side dishes and when I need food I get a combination of those things... Like a Korean-style meal.

I find that in general it's not too tricky to cut the quantities down although I've gotten many comments like "just one?" from the person giving me meat :) There are things I have to buy in large quantities and for those things I became very good at cooking it many different ways so I can finish it before it goes bad... Herbs like cilantro and parsley are a pain since they come in big bunches and you can't use a lot of it, so I started growing them. The Vietnamese herbs are annoying in the same way except I don't know how to grow them... grr.

Restaurants tend to do hours of prep before customers start coming in. Also the line cooks are really fast to begin with, and they tend to do only one thing (salad, grilling, frying, etc..).

[cielmer.livejournal.com]

Boneless chicken breast.

Then go to your grocer and ask if they have that Sweet Chili thai sauce.

Fry the chicken and in mid frying, apply the sauce either during or after you cook the chicken. If after, turn down the oven to 3 and apply the sauce on the chicken and place a cover over it, allowing the sauce to warm up with the chicken.

Noodles. What I do is I boil them then pull em out and fry em up quickly, then pull them out without and place them on the plate. I also would add that sauce to the noodles for added flavor/spice.

Then, just chop the chicken and place everything together. Voila.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

If I'm cooking for one, it just means two or three portions (sometimes more) go into the refrigerator or freezer, usually the refrigerator. This, in turn, means my cooking time the next day is cut down to a couple of minutes reheating time. But even setting that aside, an hour or two to cook and eat isn't unreasonable. 45 minutes used to be a typical total meal prep time, followed by 30 minutes to eat without bolting it down like a starving wolf.

Of course, I haven't cooked for one in a long time now.

[diafae.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who used to be a cook/chef, at one of the restaurants I worked at the service would start at 5pm, but we had to come in at noon to start prep. All our mise en place (food prepared to the point where all that was left to do was assembly/presentation and/or heating) had to be completed in advance of customers and we were often preparing more than one dish at a time - sauteeing mire poix for soup while cutting tomatoes into a bruinoise for bruschetta. There's also the fact that we were trained to do prepare food quickly, sometimes had chefs who would bark at us if we weren't ready on time/weren't working quickly enough (we had the fear in us) and there is rarely one person preparing everything for a meal (one person was sauce & grill, one vegetables and fryer, one pasta and roast, one dessert and appetizers and one organizing and finishing the plate).
When I worked at a banquet hall we would do prep days a head for an event, all to be finished a la minute.

To cut down time when cooking at home - always organize yourself beforehand. This is as simple as having every item prepared for cooking and in front of you beforehand (including kitchen tools) so you're not going back and forth between cupboard and spice rack. Multi-task and time your preparations so everything is done at the same time. Use some prepared foods where you can if you're really concerned about time. Expose more surface area of your food and it'll cook quicker - a paysanne (a thin 1/4 slice) of a carrot cooks faster than a cube of carrot. Look for dishes with shorter cooking and preparing times like stirfrying, broiling, that sort of thing. I can't think of anything else.
I also have the problem cooking for one. How do you go cooking for a thousand to cooking for one? My thanksgiving dinner could have fed 4 other people.

[amethest.livejournal.com]

Those are all great tips, though if you saw the size of our kitchen you'd know that the time to take things out isn't as big a problem as surface area to put them.

I was trying to tell Robin it's also partly a function of never having lived on one's own before. He keeps complaining how long it takes me to go shopping at the stores a ten min walk for our house. It's all about learning the shortcuts and figuring out how to be more effecient at it.

[starsandgarters.livejournal.com]

Well, for example, I tend to cook things like thai curry with coconut milk so you can always just add more and if it gets too soupy just drain off and store it -- you can make rice and add the juice and it'll be a cheap meal in itself. Always test when you're adding spicy stuff. And know that spicy things in particular lose their kick as they get old -- when you buy new, don't forget to test its potency before throwing in the usual amount.

It takes a long time because you are preparing quite complex dishes. I love to make complex foods. But sometimes it's just nicer to spend the time blobbing out in front of the telly and just cooking some noodles and premade sauce instead of a real put-on dish. Also, learning that when I make meals for myself I don't need a meat, a rice/noodle and a vegetable section every time was helpful. Also, I agree with the other suggestions about reheats.

[amethest.livejournal.com]

*thizzip* Thanks for making it sound like I do nothing around here!