In case you were wondering, canned food first became popular in the early 19th century. During the Napoleonic wars, the French sought a cheaper way to preserve food, since it’s hard to conquer Europe if your soldiers are starving.People soon realized that preserving food in tin cans was much easier to transport than jars, and canning in its more or less modern form has existed for over one hundred years.Interestingly enough, it took 30 years after the invention of the tin can to invent the can opener. If you, like me, are invested in surviving the zombie apocalypse, I suggest you look into canned foods: canned foods have been proved edible up to a hundred years old.
I know we should all eat healthy and do the French thing and go to the market every day and cook our dinner with fresh ingredients grown organically and locally, but when you’re a lazy person on your own that is just not going to happen. For example, spinach: spinach is awesome, but it also goes bad 2-3 days after you open it, and when you only eat one meal at home a day it is next to impossible to eat a half a pound of spinach in three meals. Trust me, that’s a lot of spinach. As mentioned above, I am lazy. I like meals that can be made in one pot, preferably with cheese. I’m not going to be making a salad every day, not least because salad is not a real food, and it tricks you because you think you’re being healthy and then you end up eating a mountain of lettuce covered in fatty dressing and you’re still not full and feel like a cow chewing cud. So I have jumped on the canned/frozen veggie bandwagon. If you’re going to cook it, and cover it with cheese, and then put it in your fridge and reheat it for a week it doesn’t really matter in what state you bought the vegetables. I also love that my bread is full of corn syrup and preservatives. It can hang out in my cabinet for 2-3 weeks and not go bad.
One of the things I have noticed about the real world is that if you don’t buy food and/or cook you will go hungry and starve,and no one will care because you live by yourself and it would take people a couple of days to realize that you had starved to death, in which case you would be eaten by your cats (another excellent reason why I don’t own a cat). I know that the dining hall at school always got a lot of flack, but, looking back, that shit was awesome. You could get what you wanted without having to pay real money (only fake money, which magically reappeared in your account every quarter because your parents were kind and generous) and eat unlimited pizza, and they had a fro-yo bar. A fro-yo bar! Fro-yo is wasted on the young.
All things considered, I am a moderately ok cook. I can follow recipes, and some day I will end up making an omelette that actually stays in one piece. I am constantly afraid that I’m going to give myself salmonella every time I cook chicken, so I always end up eating sad, overcooked rubbery chicken. I don’t enjoy cooking all that much–but I love eating, and cooking is how one get ‘m also lazy, and don’t want to waste money on takeout: You can cook your own dinner in 20-30 minutes in the same time it takes for delivery to come, plus you don’t have to wear real pants.
I quickly figured out tat the most time efficient way to cook is to cook one big thing on Saturday or Sunday, and then eat that for the whole week. This is amusing to me, because at home, when I was an ungrateful. selfish child, I would always be displeased whenever we had leftovers. Dude, leftovers are awesome. You only have to do the dishes once, and dinner can be ready in the 2-3 minutes it takes to put them in the microwave.
Another excellent invention is the crock pot. Crock pots are key if you are incredibly lazy and only want to cook once a week. You put stuff in, turn it on, come back in 4-6 hours and voila, things vaguely resembling food turn into dinner. Modern technology at its finest.
I got a Martha Stewart cook book for Christmas, and I made the white-bean chicken and sausage cassoulet, only I didn’t have a dutch oven and made it in a casserole dish. It turned out awesome. And not to brag, I also make a mean shepherd’s pie: the trick is to substitute wine for chicken broth. And I’m just going to pretend that that was intentional, not because I forgot to buy chicken broth and had wine in the house. Martha Stewart is totally in on the wine for cooking thing: pretty much every one of her recipes requires white wine. And white wine, unlike chicken broth, can keep more or less indefinitely and also has many other uses (you can’t drink the leftover half a cup chicken broth).
I think it’s a sign that I am officially an old person in that I think my next major purchase may be a cast iron skillet. You can make mac and cheese in a cast iron skillet! You can put a cast iron skillet in the oven! And some day, maybe I’ll have a garbage disposal and a decent sized kitchen. I did transform a shower caddy into a spice rack, but then an ardent suitor knocked it off my wall and I had to rebuild.
The spice rack will return. And I will conquer the Martha Stewart cookbook, though I may have to skip the recipes that involve a pressure cooker, because honestly, at this point in my life, a pressure cooker seems a bit excessive.
In Case You Were Wondering. . . 
10 comments