The Mediocre Chef Center for Adults Who Can't Cook Good and Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too
Welcome friends, loved ones, colleagues, and Haylen. (Happy birthday, btw.)
Our goal with this post is to offer cooking shortcuts, wise words of wisdom, and some quick and easy meals that taste good and require minimal effort. Because let’s be real, we are all busy people and cooking a good tasting meal can take a lot of time and be complicated. But it doesn’t have to be!
Whether you are the human embodiment of laziness like our friend Haylen, or you just don’t have time to be making extravagant meals from scratch all the time, we want to help you out.
A text from Haylen. (You said it, not us, bro.)
We’re also here to tell you that you don’t have to eat out for every meal or be miserable and drink Solyent/other meal replacement shakes. Sure, those things are fine in a pinch (treat yo’ self to takeout every once in a while), but if you want to save money and eat healthy, then cooking for yourself is the answer.
To make it super simple, we’ve assembled the following Mediocre Chef Approved Cooking Shortcuts™.
Cooking Shortcuts
Take Advantage of Small Appliances
There are multiple kitchen appliances on the market that can also save you time and make feeding yourself a little bit easier. Below are a few of our favorites:
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Air Fryer (Trevor uses the Ninja DualZone Air Fryer)
Great if you’re cooking for one person
Faster preheat time and cooking time than an oven
Won’t heat up your entire house like an oven does (nice during the summer)
Makes crispy and crunchy food (unless you overcrowd the basket/pan)
Easy to clean
Uses less oil than deep frying
Instant Pot (Brittany uses the 6 Quart Instant Pot)
Includes a saute feature so you can brown meat and veggies for more flavor before pressure cooking
Can cook food from frozen
Great for speeding up the process of time-intensive recipes, such as making broth/stock
Can do more things than a slow cooker (rice, eggs, yogurt, etc)
Feels like you could blow up your house if things go terribly wrong somehow 💣
Slow Cooker (Brittany also has this 7 Quart Crock-Pot)
Throw everything into one pot, select a temperature, set a timer, and walk away
Minimal cleanup
Great at tenderizing meat
If you want to brown meat or veggies before slow cooking, you’re going to need a separate pan
If you don’t have a lot of cupboard space, having one of each of these is quickly going to make it so you don’t have room for anything else. Choose one or two!
Honorable mentions: food processor (chop and combine ingredients super fast), stand mixer (if you bake a lot), and a rice cooker (never mess up rice again).
Buy Pre-Prepped Ingredients
Buying pre-chopped veggies and pre-marinated meat will definitely cut down on some of your prep work. The downside is that you are paying extra for someone else to do the work for you. If you can afford the pre-prepped ingredients, go for it.
Pre-prepped ingredients are a great way to save time, but don’t lean on them too heavily or you won’t gain the skills you need to gain confidence in the kitchen. It’s also way cheaper in the long run to do the work yourself.
One exception: rotisserie chicken. Often this is cheaper than buying a chicken and roasting it yourself, and you can do a lot of things with a rotisserie chicken. 🍗
Mise en Place
Our friend Haylen is super smart and already knows about this method. Mise en place translates to “putting in place”, which is preparing all of your ingredients ready before you cook. This is important for meals that come together fast, such as stir fry!
If you do mise en place for meals where there is time between steps to prep the next thing you need, it’s going to take longer to put together your meal. For beginner cooks, it’s totally fine to get all of the ingredient prep out of the way first! Once you’re more confident in the kitchen, you can prep things in between steps.
Plan Your Meals
Knowing what you’re going to eat is half the battle. If you don’t meal plan, it’s very likely that you’re going to stare blankly at the contents of your fridge while thinking that you have nothing to eat. Then you’ll get hangry and end up ordering from SkipTheDishes.
Meal planning also includes making your grocery list so you don’t buy things you don’t need at the store, and waste less food. It also allows you to shop sales! Is ground beef cheap this week? Pick it up and plan to cook recipes that use ground beef.
All the cool kids are meal planning. Do it. ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■)
Try Meal Prepping
Meal prepping is great if you have a few hours on your days off to devote to it. Admittedly, it isn’t for everyone, but it can save you time in the long run, as long as you don’t mind eating the same stuff each day. We’ve tried meal prepping several times with varying degrees of success.
The main problems with meal prepping a week’s worth of food are:
Not everything is a good candidate for meal prepping as some ingredients don’t last for very long once they’ve been cut or chopped (potatoes and avocado we’re looking at you)
Reheating stuff in microwaves can be nasty (microwaved steak, anyone? 🤢)
You’ll be eating the same stuff every day (unless you prepare a dozen different variations, but at that point, why?)
If you’re interested in giving it a shot, r/mealprepsunday is the OG meal prep source. You’ll also need to invest in some good quality, reusable containers.
Subscribe to a Meal Kit Service
Meal kits often have meals that take an hour or less to make, and are great because they include the exact amount of ingredients that you need, so there is no food waste.
Sometimes you might get a recipe that requires a bit of multitasking, however, this is much easier to do because many ingredients are prepped ahead, so you don’t have to use your knife skills a lot. No matter how much meal kits like to advertise that they are cheaper than buying groceries, they really aren’t. Convenience = 🤑🤑.
Brittany likes FreshPrep, but she has also tried Goodfood (they also have recipes for the super lazy people called Easy Prep Meals). Most meal kits have promo codes available, so if you’re signing up for the first time be sure to take advantage of those!
Come Up With a Time Plan
If one of your issues is multitasking, it’s a good idea to figure out a time plan for your meals. This sounds complicated, but it’s not. Simply figure out what time you want to eat at and then work backwards from there.
For example, say you want to eat at 7:00pm and the recipe says that the lasagna (or whatever it is that you’re cooking) takes an hour to cook in the oven. Then the lasagna needs to go in at 6:00pm. If you figure it’s going to take 45 minutes to prep and assemble the lasagna then you need to start at 5:15pm andpre-heat your oven around 5:45pm. Easy as that!
For some of you this may seem obvious, but for others this may be a mind = blown moment. If you struggle with time management in the kitchen, give this a try.
Wise Words of Wisdom
Most cooking shortcuts cost money. Again, we would like to reiterate that convenience = 🤑🤑. Some of these shortcuts will help with laziness, but if your fundamental problem in the kitchen is a lack of skills/experience, then a lot of these will only reinforce your lack of skills. This is what we might call a negative feedback loop. 🤓
You don’t have skills in the kitchen, so you don’t want to choose any recipe that requires any amount of skill, but then your skills don’t get any better, so you don’t want to choose any recipe that requires any skill, but then your skills don’t get any better… Do you see where we’re going with this? This is likely something that many people who aren’t good in the kitchen are suffering from, our friend Haylen included.
Just do it. You won’t get better if you don’t try.
Also, check out Internet Shaquille’s video below — he talks all about the cooking skill that can’t be taught. (Spoiler alert: it’s intuition!)
Easy Recipe Ideas
Here are some links to our favorite recipes that meet Haylen’s criteria. 🙄 🤞
Haylen’s Requirements:
Keep it under an hour. However, this can be longer if it includes cook time.
No babying. This means no constant stirring, and having to watch food to make sure that it doesn’t burn.
No multitasking. Having to prepare something while something else is happening is too hard, because I can’t keep up. I prefer to do all the prep first and be able to throw it in when it’s time. (prep first, ask questions later)
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Enough said.
One Pan (or One Pot) Meals
Less dishes? Yes please. Put everything on a pan (or in a pot) and cook it! Super simple.
Salads
Salads get a bad rap, but they shouldn’t. They can be filling and delicious! They’re also a great way to practice your knife skills.
Depression Meals
Not super healthy, but minimal effort.
Instant Ramen (upgrade it if you’re depressed but not super depressed)
Cheese, Meat, and Crackers
Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwich
Poutine (this gravy is decent)
Frozen Cheese Pizza + Add Your Own Toppings
Kraft Dinner (or Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for our American friends)
We hope these recipes gave you the kick in the ass that you need to try and get better in the kitchen. Haylen, if you think these recipes are hard, then you need more help than we can give.