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

[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.