Cook like an Engineer

Day 1305 of the heavy cream diet. Still not bored.

Disclaimer: if you’re a housewife or a grandma or someone else who cooks daily, you’ll find this post utterly useless. But I’ve met people my age or older (mid-millenials) who casually mention that they have NEVER COOKED IN THEIR LIVES. Like, not even an egg!

I think that cooking your own food is such a foundational step in.. survival.. (?) and daily life that everyone over age 16-18 should learn the basics.

If you’re going to experiment with your diet or eat healthy, cooking for yourself is nearly the only option: you have no clue what restaurants are really using to cook; the employees often times don’t know it themselves. With store-bought food at least you have the nutrition label, but there are enough tricks, loopholes, and fraud that I wouldn’t rely on that much either.

This post is for those people who somehow never got into cooking for themselves. (OH HI, MARK!)

What is “Cooking?”

I’d say that, technically, the word “cooking” means to heat something inedible until it becomes edible. But you might also make things edible without heating them (much) or (re-)heat things that were already edible, just to make them tastier.

So we’ll also include other related things like “peeling things” or “cutting things up.” In short, “cooking” here is just a catch-all for “preparing your own food.”

For the sake of this post, I am explicitly not interested in:

• Feeding your dog/cat/pet iguana

• Efficient/cheap/bulk/organic grocery shopping

• Making fancy multi-course meals designed to impress others

• Making ever-new meals that serve as “foodie” entertainment instead of nourishment

• Cooking for your family

Those are all cool & stuff, but it’s another topic. In this post I’m just hoping to relay the few skills needed to sustain yourself from regular, common ingredients. You can always get fancier later.

Cooking is really easy and takes very little time!

When talking to fellow millennials, and often other generations like boomers, it seems that 95% of them fall into one of 2 categories:

1. “Foodie” who uses food mostly as entertainment. Goes to different restaurants all the time, eats out all the time, likes food variety, sometimes (15%?) cooks fancy meals for himself/friends/family on a regular basis.

2. People seemingly intimidated by how complicated 1. looks, and who gave up on the idea of cooking for themselves. They go to the same restaurants all the time, eat out all the time, and order the same meal every time. Home-prepared meals tend to be packaged from the store: cereal, protein bars, sandwiches, or - if fancy - hardboiled eggs.

The thing is, if you’re not interested in the “foodie” variety & entertainment, preparing food to sustain your body is VERY EASY and VERY SIMPLE and takes ALMOST NO TIME. It’s also relatively affordable, but that’s for another time.

I’ve cooked most of my own meals daily for the last *checks watch* 20 years or so, and I rarely take more than 30 minutes a day including prep and cleanup like dishes.

Buying ingredients takes some additional time, but if your alternative is eating out, that’ll take even more time. Especially when compared to bulk shopping once every week or 2.

On top of that, if you cook simple meals, you can do other things while your food is cooking. I tend to check messages, read, and sometimes even write or work while cooking. You typically do have to check in every few minutes unless you’re doing a fire & forget meal in an instant pot or slow cooker, so it lends itself more to activities that you can get in & out of quickly without too much mental or physical context switching. I typically sit on the couch or at my desk, listening to the meal sizzle away in the kitchen, reading. Every few minutes I’ll get up, stir the pot, and then return to my book.

In that sense, time-actually-taken-away-from-all-other-things is probably closer to 5-10 minutes a day.

I’ll divide this post into a few chapters:

1. Meal strategy: how many meals a day, what times, meal prepping

2. Recipes: what to actually eat

3. Food prep: thawing, opening, peeling, slicing, cutting, portioning

4. Actual “cooking” with heat: searing, boiling, steaming

5. Cleaning up: washing dishes, soaking, drying

6. Equipment

7. Examples

Warning: this post is over 11,000 words long, and is my New Longest Post. Substack thinks it’ll take you 50 minutes to read it.

Meal Strategy

Now I suspect that many people who "regularly” cook for themselves don’t think about explicit strategy very much. But, even if you don’t have an explicit strategy, you’ll exhibit SOME pattern of what and when and how you eat.

I always fell into a “skip-breakfast” mentality once I moved out of my parents’ house and started cooking for myself. I’m just not hungry in the mornings, it’s easy enough to just make a coffee or 2 and go to work.

I was also always a “boring eater” eating the same meals over and over. In one anecdote, my college roommate commented that he thought I’d been eating eggs & bacon every single day for an entire month. I thought about it, and concluded he might be right: it just hadn’t occurred to me eat something else. I liked that meal so I made it over and over. Another staple in college was spaghetti with tomato sauce, sometimes with some ground meat or sausage mixed in.

In terms of physiological needs, there are a few requirements in terms of food:

• You need to eat enough

• There are limits on how much you’ll be able to eat in one sitting depending on what you eat: fat has 9kcal/g whereas protein and crabs only have 4kcal/g, meaning you’ll have to eat way more of them to get the same amount of stored energy potential.

• High-fiber/water also make food less energy dense (and therefore less… food)

• Your stomach volume & digestive system have rate limits on how much of certain foods they can fit/digest at any given time

There might also be social requirements:

• You work at an office and only realistically have 45min over lunch to make/acquire/eat food 5 days of the week

• You have a long commute or work very early, so breakfast might have to be super rapid, eaten in the car, or skipped

• You have weird shift work times that don’t allow you to use some stores or facilities that other people take for granted, because everything is closed

And, of course, personal preferences:

• Maybe you have allergies or food intolerances that dictate certain diet choices

• Your family or religion might be vegan or have other dietary preferences

• Something intuitive, like my general disinterest in breakfast, or some people’s preference not to eat too close to their bedtime

It’s fairly easy to just answer these for yourself and come up with a general plan of how you will eat, and therefore, how to cook. You can always make exceptions or change things, but it really helps to just be aware how you generally eat.

If this feels “restrictive” to you; trust me, you already follow a plan. You just haven’t written it down.

Most people follow something similar to one of these:

• 3 meals a day, some smaller/easier (like breakfast or just coffee w/ cream) and some bigger/more involved (like ground beef & vegetables cooked in butter)

• More of a snacking/grazing pattern, but typically still 1-2 real “meals”

• OMAD (one meal a day) or 2MAD: basically me if you discounted the coffee and ate a bigger main meal instead. Popular with keto/carnivore.

Macros & diet plans

Some of these are more compatible with certain styles of diets. For example, I’d expect it to be extremely difficult to eat OMAD unless your diet was heavy in fats. Carbs and protein just don’t have enough energy density: getting 3,000kcal takes about 5lbs of (cooked) rice. That’s doable in a day, as I showed in my ex_rice diet, but in a single meal, or even a narrow window?! On my rice diets, I was eating every 2-4h, typically 4-5 meals a day.

Protein is even worse: 3,000kcal of chicken breast is about 5.5lbs of food. You could probably stuff that much down theoretically, but it’d be painful and inconvenient. Bodybuilders doing very high carolie chicken breast & rice diets are eating 6+ meals a day and planning their whole days around eating. That’s not very convenient for most people.

Fat, on the other hand, is very energy dense. You can easily get 3,000kcal from just under a single quart of heavy cream, or just under a pound of butter. If you only eat 80/20 ground beef (my favorite kind) you’re still getting enough fat that you only need about 2.5lbs of it per day - less than half of what the lean chicken breast requires.

Additionally, glucose clears out of your system in 2h in healthy (non-diabetic) people, maybe a bit slower if you eat a mixed or very big meal. Fats, on the other hand, can stay in circulation for 12-18 hours easily, providing energy the whole time.

As a consequence, people on fat-heavy diets like keto or carnivore tend to favor intermittent fasting/OMAD type diets. It’s much easier for them, and takes a lot less effort.

People who eat lots of starch or fruit, especially if high in fiber, tend to eat many more smaller meals throughout the day.

That’s just a limitation of the foods and our physiology. It’s really not very complicated, but it’s important so you don’t pick a “plan” that’s a bad fit for your diet, like “OMAD watermelon.”

Prep/cook/bulk strategy

For much of my career I worked at an office. I never had a crazy commute, but there were no cooking facilities besides a microwave there, and I only had about 45min of real free time over lunch. Parts of that I’d eat out like most of my co-workers. I never really brought prepped meals to heat up at work, although I tried it a couple of times. It just never felt very convenient to linger around the microwave and wait my turn.

After I started doing keto, most meals at local restaurants were no longer on the menu. Parts of that time I did OMAD and would only eat dinner, parts of that I’d just have coffee with cream over lunch (easy to bring cream if your office has a kitchenette with a fridge), and parts I would “assemble” (not technically cook) my own meals from packaged items available in the office snack bar: string cheese, boiled eggs, nuts (yes this is the part of keto where I regained 100lbs😬).

But there were plenty of co-workers who brought their own prepared meals from home and just heated them in the microwave.

Meal prepping

One great and popular strategy to deal with this is meal prepping. You just cook for an entire (work) week on the weekend, then take 1/5th of it to work every day. You can either fill 5 of those plastic lunch boxes right after you cook and keep them in the fridge, or you can keep a big pot/container in the fridge and fill up your reusable lunch box every morning (or the prior evening). If they have utensils and (paper?) plates at your office, you can just bring zip-loc bags.

If you’re really lazy and don’t care for variety, you can just meal prep for 7 days all at once and eat the same thing on the weekend. But for many people who like SOME variety, having 5 convenient lunches for the office and cooking from scratch the rest of the time might be a better option.

If you don’t work in an office but drive around, work on a job site, or similar, you can get a simple cooler to keep your food from spoiling until lunch. Honestly, unless it’s crazy hot in the summer, it’ll probably be fine even without a cooler.

Instead of actually cooking a prepped meal at home, you could also just buy packaged foods that are suitable and bring them to work. Cheese, boiled eggs, chocolate, candy, if you find a suitable variety, sliced bread. (Yes, I get that this is more “assembling” than “cooking” but hey it’s a step. I once ate pre-cooked rice for 2 weeks straight while traveling during ex_plainrice.)

Working from home

Once coronavirus hit, everyone I knew started working from home. This was an amazing benefit for me in terms of diet. Suddenly, I had access to my own kitchen while at work!

I was also way more flexible with my lunch break because I could put a pot on the stove, continue working and just stir every few minutes, and just generally had more flexibility schedule wise.

If you work from home, you have almost no limitations on what and when to cook. Lucky you, this is easy mode!

Conclusion

Pick your diet. I’m not telling you what to do here, if you don’t have one just write down what you actually eat on a day by day basis, and in which pattern. You likely already have a pretty regular routine.

Now take a look at your living/work situation. Are there meals you can’t easily prepare from scratch, e.g. during lunch at work? You need to figure out a solution to that: meal prep, fasting over lunch, or just bringing packaged convenience foods that accommodate your diet.

Recipes

This is probably the biggest lever you have. You can dramatically cut down on the effort, skill, & cost required to cook all your own food if you just keep it simple.

In terms of variety, everyone has different preferences. I have a friend who claims that he physically cannot eat the same meal twice a month (!) without gagging (!!)

I’m on day 1305 of ex150 today if you discount refeeds & the other experiments I’ve done. I’m not bored yet. Most people are probably somewhere in between.

If you look at which of your meals are pure nutrition and which ones are mostly entertainment/social, most people will probably find about a 70/30 ratio or higher in favor of nutrition. Let’s discount the fancy/social/entertainment meals because that’s not the focus of this post.

For your baseline “nutrition” meals, just pick something that’s simple, easy, and that you enjoy. I like fatty beef. I like heavy cream. I don’t really love vegetables, but adding some to beef makes it even more delicious and adds some texture and flavor. I like tomato sauce, so initially, ex150 was very heavy on tomato sauce (another friend called it “the sauce diet.”)

In fact, my beef-vegetables-tomato-sauce main meal was just the meal I had already been eating for years, scaled down. Having done paleo and keto before I began experimenting more seriously with my diet, “fatty beef & vegetables with some sauce” was already my staple. It was just pounds of everything instead of grams, heh.

(I later stopped using sauce and haven’t in half a year now, and got used to that easily.)

You can likely do something similar. Just note what you’re already eating 80% of the time at restaurants. It’ll likely be a pretty limited selection, unless you’re one of those “foodies.”

Maybe it’s your favorite pastry at the coffee shop for breakfast, your favorite sandwich for lunch, and your favorite take-out food for dinner. Maybe you have 2-3 favorites in each category.

Pastries are actually a bit complicated, but the rest is trivial.

Sandwiches are just sliced stuff on sliced bread. Find a type of bread you can buy that fits your diet (e.g. no seed oils, no flour fortification with “vitamins” would be my preferences). You can even make your own bread, but obviously that’s a little more involved.

Next, you’ll need roast beef or sliced cheese or whatever’s on your favorite sandwich. These you can also just buy packaged, but making roast beef is super easy as well, and it keeps very easy in the fridge. So you could just buy a roast once every 2 weeks or so, cook it, and slice it up to keep ready for sandwiches.

Next, let’s say your sandwich contains sliced tomatoes and some lettuce. The main limitations with these is that they don’t keep super well, a week might be a stretch in my experience. But you still likely only need to buy them 2x a week, as they do keep a few days easily.

Now you have all the makings of a great sandwich. Maybe you’ll want some sauce, too - and you’ll have full control of what goes into it, not like that soybean crap at the sandwich store!

For dinner, let’s say your favorite takeout is some sort of Chinese food. That’s almost easier: rice, 1-3 types of cut up vegetables like broccoli/peppers/onions, and some chopped up meat like chicken breast or beef.

Since you can use frozen, pre-cut vegetables for this, they keep much longer (in the freezer) and you can buy them in greater bulk than the tomato & lettuce for your sandwich. The meat you can buy in bulk and freeze as well, pre-prepping by cutting it up and freezing it portion-sized. That way you only heat a pan/pot, toss in your frozen stuff, and wait until it’s delicious. Same sauce thing applies as above: if you like sauce, find one that works on your diet and buy it in bulk. Sauces store nearly indefinitely unless you make fresh mayo.

So ignoring the breakfast pastry, what do you need in terms of ingredients for the whole week?

• 1-2 meats (say chicken breast and a beef roast)

• 1-3 types of frozen vegetables (broccoli, green beans, onions, peppers)

• Some fat like butter to cook your stir fry in

• Rice

• Bread

• A few tomatoes and some lettuce that you buy 2x a week instead of in bulk

• Optional sauce, but these last forever and you just need to buy them once in a while

That’s a very easy & simple grocery list, and nearly all of it you can buy weekly or less, except for the fresh tomatoes and lettuce. Doesn’t even take up a whole shelf in your fridge and just a bit of your freezer.

And if you pick foods you already like and enough variety for yourself, you could eat this daily & forever! It’s probably what you’ve been doing already, you just paid someone else to add soybean oil to it.

Food Prep

Food prep here doesn’t mean meal prepping your work lunches on the weekend, but simply preparing foods to be cooked.

This includes taking them out of the freezer/fridge to thaw. This applies to most animal products, since they spoil quickly.

Vegetables or fruits often need to be peeled and sometimes cut.

Rice needs to be rinsed, and beans soaked.

The main point here is that all these are super trivial and will become routine within days if you just eat the same meals over and over. Each food ingredient needs to be prepped a little different, and they have different “rhythms” and stages of being able to be prepared.

Meats

Meats generally need to be kept in the fridge (a few days to a week) or freezer (nearly indefinitely). If you’re buying your meats every week or shorter, no need to freeze anything. If you buy them in bulk, you’ll want to keep a few days’ worth in the fridge, and the rest frozen.

If you buy in bulk portions, that means you might have to split it up - it’s not convenient to thaw a 5lbs block of ground beef to just shave off half a pound for dinner.

Many meats come in package sizing that is convenient for this, e.g. 1lb rolls or bricks of ground beef. I eat only 150g of meat a day, and one of these 1lb packs lasts me 3 days. It’s no problem to keep meat sitting in the fridge for 3 days. Therefore I keep 1 of those 1lb packs open in my fridge at any given time, and when I’m down to 1/3, I take the next one from the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge. It’s usually thawed within 24h. If you forget to take it out, leave it on the counter over night (thaws much quicker) and it’ll likely be ready the next morning. Or, worst case, put it in a bowl with warm water and it’ll thaw out in 30 minutes.

Meats actually keep longer once they’re cooked. So you can cube (for stir fry) or slice (for sandwiches) for several days or even the whole week, and just keep it in the fridge as prepped ingredients.

For our sandwich & stir fry example, you can either cut them up daily before cooking, or you cook them once a week, cube/slice, and then just grab once you’re ready. Doesn’t matter much either way, just personal preference.

Dairy

Dairy is usually the same as meat, except you typically don’t need to cook it. I typically don’t freeze it, but just buy fresh once a week or so. In a pinch, 2 weeks in the fridge tends to be fine too, unless it’s raw milk/cream.

Starches

Starches (usually) need to be cooked to become digestible and palatable to humans. Some of them (wheat) need to be ground into flour. Rice needs to be rinsed. Beans need to be soaked, e.g. overnight. Potatoes need to be peeled.

The package will usually tell you what you need to do. If not, look up recipes online and they will usually tell you to e.g. rinse your rice, soak your beans, or whatever.

Once you’ve done it a handful of times with your favorite starch, it becomes second nature and part of your routine, and you won’t even think about it.

Starches often need to cook (or bake in the case of flour) for quite a while, so there are a lot of specialized tools like rice cookers or pressure cookers or bread baking machines.

Usually you can still just cook these with your regular cooking equipment, but the specialized tools will make it easier. E.g. a rice cooker or instant pot is “fire & forget” and you don’t need to babysit them. It can be worth it, but I’d just start out making things yourself to see how simple it really is.

Rinsing rice or lentils before cooking takes only a minute, you just have to remember to do it. Soaking beans overnight takes a bit more planning, but you can just get into a routine of just putting some beans into a bowl of water after dinner, and then they’ll be ready the next day.

Some starches last longer in the fridge than others. Rice, beans, lentils, and potatoes last a day or 2 in the fridge and taste fine. Eventually, they dry out and taste worse. You can pre-cook them for 2-3 if you keep them separate from other foods like sauces, which will turn them into a mushy slop.

Bread obviously keeps quite a bit if you keep it in an airtight container like a breadbox or a bag, without which it’ll dry out. Dry bread is edible and lasts quite a while, but doesn’t taste good. If you don’t bake your bread with oils, like most commercial bread using seed oils, it’ll dry out SIGNIFICANTLY faster. I’m talking 6 hours to 1 day if you’re not careful. Seed oil bread from the store lasts a week. There’s a reason people used to get their “daily bread” and not “weekly bread.”

Vegetables

Many vegetables can be eaten raw, some need to be cooked. Most need to be peeled, and, depending on the meal, chopped up.

I really like eating raw carrots and cucumbers, and foods like these are the basis of many salads (e.g. greek salad).

Almost all vegetables need to be cleaned unless you’re peeling the entire skin off anyway.

Just put all the vegetables for your meal (or batch) next to the sink and put a bowl or kitchen towel on the other side. Then, with the water running, take them one by one and wash them with water and scrub of any visible dirt. Put the cleaned vegetable in the bowl or on the kitchen towel to dry. Very easy.

Next, peel those vegetables you want peeled, like carrots or potatoes. Same technique, use a source pile, this time with a cutting board in the middle, and a “finished” pile.

Chopping up is the exact same, and you could either peel everything & then chop everything, or peel & chop each individual piece in one go. Largely depends on preference and how much you’re making at a time.

For our sandwich example, you’ll want to wash a tomato and some lettuce, then slice the tomato (cut off all the green stuff) and maybe cut up some of the lettuce so it’ll fit on the sandwich.

If you have leftovers, they’ll last for a few days in the fridge, just becoming a tiny bit more soggy and less crunchy, which is fine.

For the stir fry, just wash all the vegetables and cut them into cubes or similar size. Or, if you bought frozen vegetables like I tend to, you don’t need to do anything but take them out of the freezer.

One note on thawing: I mentioned that the 1lb packs of meat take about a day to thaw in the fridge. If you’re using pre-cut vegetables, you don’t need to take them out. That’s because thawing things (or changing their temperature in general) is hugely influenced by surface area to volume ratio. A huge ball or block of meat is just about the worst shape to thaw out. Hundreds of tiny, pre-cut bits of vegetables are the best shape.

Just put any remaining vegetables into a ziplock bag if you want to refreeze them. Uncovered stuff in the freezer will get freezer burn and turn into mush (also true for meats).

If you cut your stir fry vegetables fresh and have leftovers, they store just fine in the fridge for a few days, too.

While you could get away with only cooking & cutting/slicing your meats just once a week, I’d maybe do 2x a week for vegetables, because they tend to lose their “crunch” over time.

Fruit

Fruits are typically the same as vegetables, except you usually don’t cook them. Peel them if required or you want to. Wash them otherwise. Cut into desired shape and they’re ready to eat. It doesn’t get much simpler.

Congrats, you’ve now prepped all your ingredients for either a single portion or maybe even a week’s worth of food! Wasn’t so bad, was it?

If you’re unclear on any specific food prep technique, just search on Youtube. “rinse rice” or “chop tomato” will yield infinite results. You don’t need to be as strict or meticulous as all those professional chefs on Youtube, because you’re just cooking for yourself or your family, and not impressing any food critics.

You're gonna have the meat slop with irregularly cut vegetables. New York Matinee called it "a playful but mysterious little dish". I think you're going to love it.

Actual Cooking

Ok, frankly I started out writing this post as “The Physics of Cooking” because that’s always fascinated me. Then I thought I’d go a little more broad, and here we are 4,400 words later, and I haven’t started on the actual cooking part.

Cool! We’ve bought our ingredients, we’ve prepped them, we’ve taken them out of the fridge or whatever. Now we’re ready to finally do the thing - add some calories to the raw food to heat it up! Remember folks, CICO is the the first law of thermodynamics: can’t cook food without carolies!

There are tons of different cooking methods out there and I won’t cover them all. I’ll just mention the ones I use the most and that seem most common:

1. Searing/shallow frying

2. Boiling

3. Deep frying

4. Steaming

5. Baking/air frying (same thing)

6. Slow cooking/BBQ

Methods of heat transfer

Before we get into the specific techniques, let’s briefly look at the different methods of transferring carolies from your pan/pot to your food. There are generally 3 methods of heat transfer:

1. Contact: steak meets pan metal

2. Convection: hot air meets steak

3. Radiation: infrared radiation hits & goes through steak

These all contribute to cooking food in various ways, depending on the method.

Contact depends a lot on the material you use: that’s why cast iron pans are great for making steak. Metal can get extremely hot and emits a lot of radiation, which gives you both a great sear in a short time, and cooks the food through. That’s why people make steaks in cast iron pans and not thin sheet metal: the thin pan will burn your food on the outside and leave the inside rare. That doesn’t even work well for black/blue steaks.

Convection is the main heating method used in air frying, and to a degree traditional baking (the oven also emits some radiation). It’s a very inefficient method of heat transfer, because air doesn’t have a high thermal capacity. (By the way, check out how Calories are really a property of thermal media lol.) Water has better thermal capacity, oil even better, and metal is really, really good. That’s why we mostly cook with metal cookware. Different metals have different thermal capacities, which is why you’ll see some pans with aluminum cores or even entirely made out of copper. Iron and steel are definitely good enough, though.

The advantage of convection is that it can give us a very even heat transfer across surfaces not touching a pan: you can have a whole loaf of bread or a cake or cookies bake evenly without having to press every surface against a hot pan. It’s also a dry cooking method, which allows for nice crispy/crunchy crusts in bread, cake, cookies, or steak.

Ok, on to the actual cooking techniques.

Searing/shallow frying

I’ll consider these the same because most people, including me, add some fat when searing. Searing means using heat (calories!) to cause the maillard reaction in food, which makes the surface of the food crispy, brown, and delicious. I think it’s the proteins that undergo this reaction, which is why it’s mostly associated with meat.

Some people call this “browning meat” and I assume those people also drive a “red car” and live in a “green house.”

You can technically sear “dry” without fat, e.g. when grilling or just using a very hot pan with no cooking fat. But adding tallow or butter 1. makes the food more delicious and 2. makes the searing process much easier.

Some things you practically need fat to sear, whereas something like a fatty steak provides its own cooking fat if your pan is hot enough: the fat just renders out and turns into cooking fat.

(Now that I think of it, is boiling “contact heating with water instead of a pan” or “convection heating with water instead of air?”🤔)

Fatty steak or ground beef sear just fine with almost no fat added to the pan because they bring their own fat. If you try searing chopped vegetables in a hot pan without any fat, you’ll have a bad time - the parts touching the pan will burn quickly and stick to the pan, and the rest will be cold.

This is because air is such a terrible medium for heat transfer, and 99% of the heat transferred will be through contact where the vegetables are touching the pan.

That’s why we add fat (hopefully not any of those sneed oils!) when cooking many/most meals. Fat has quite a high thermal capacity and will heat up, and it’ll transfer that heat efficiently to not just the parts of your food in direct contact with the pan, but anything touching the hot fat. This is “shallow frying” which is different from “deep frying” because you’re not submerging the entirety of your food in the fat. The fat just helps transfer the heat (and often tastes good).

Fat also helps your food not stick to the pan, because it’ll undergo the maillard reaction quickly before having a chance to get stuck to the hot surface.

The best strategy is to put some butter or beef tallow into your pan and wait for it to heat up. It can be tricky to tell if beef tallow is hot; once it’s melted from solid into liquid, it doesn’t change its appearance between being lukewarm or scorching hot.

Butter contains about 20% water, so you’ll want to cook out that water before it can fully heat up and make for a good cooking medium. I add butter and wait for the bubbling to stop, which means that the water is gone. It takes a little longer for the fat to heat up fully, and butter does eventually turn brown and begins to burn. I usually wait for that burning to begin before I put the meat in, but if you go a little early it’s just fine.

If you don’t wait long enough for your fat to heat up before you add your ingredients, it’ll probably turn out pretty fine too. It’ll just stick to the pan a little more and you might have to scrape more when cleaning up.

Does it matter if your pan is hot before you add your cooking fat? No. It makes logical sense and you can easily test it: put butter in a cold pan & turn the heat on, vs. letting the pan heat before adding the butter.

Since both the pan and the fat will be mediums of heat transfer, you’ll need them both up at temperature. The calories generated (or rather transferred, BECAUSE CAROLIES CANNOT BE DESTROYED PER THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS) by your stove and going into your pan don’t change depending on when you put the butter in.

In fact I much prefer adding fat to the cold (or warming up) pan instead of a hot one: heating butter too quickly will cause the water in it to instantly vaporize and explode, which gives you those nasty “fat splatters” that fly all over your stove, or can even hurt you if they land on your skin.

In short:

1. Put pan/pot on stove

2. Turn on heat

3. Add some butter or beef tallow

4. Wait at least until it’s melted and swirl the pan around to spread the fat evenly over the surface

5. If it’s butter, also wait until the bubbling stops and maybe until it begins turning brown in some places

6. Add your ingredients

7. Cook until your desired level of sear is achieved

8. During cooking, use a spatula to stir your food if it’s small pieces (chopped vegetables or ground beef, this is why it’s called “stir fry”) or tongs to flip big pieces over (steak)

How much butter or tallow should you use? There’s no exact answer, but at least enough to cover the entire surface of your pan/pot. That’s often less than a tablespoon, but I use significantly more because I like butter. If your meal is no longer “searing on top of the pan” but “drowning in butter” then you’ve reached “deep frying” and you might want to scale it back down, unless that’s your intent.

When is your food “seared enough?” Depends on the food and your personal preferences. The FDA recommends you cook foods enough to kill harmful bacteria in it. Especially chicken & pork spoil easily and you should cook them through. Beef can often be eaten raw, even ground beef if it’s recently ground and high quality (see: steak tartare). Vegetables: until they get nice and crispy and have some burned flavor, if you ask me.

Personally, I sear the crap out of my food: my ground beef is nearly burned and crispy, and my vegetables are on the verge of turning into charcoal. I just love that texture & flavor over the bland “lukewarm grey beef & floppy vegetables” you’d get if you turned off the stove 2 minutes early.

If you sear beef & vegetables enough, you won’t need any spices or salt - your food will be extremely delicious just from the maillard reaction.

People be out here mailing lard.. smh

Besides mostly meats, which you cook to desired temperature to kill bacteria, searing is mostly for flavor and texture. You could boil or steam your ground beef & vegetables and I’ve done it. They’re perfectly fine to eat and contain the same nutrients (maybe more cause you didn’t turn any into charcoal). They just don’t taste nearly as good.

Sub-category: Steak

Steak is a little trickier, and technically so is fish. Besides just the total amount of heat calories transferred into the steak, it also matters how fast you transferred them.

This is why you can’t cook a rare steak with a nice crust over low heat: the heat transfer would be low & slow, and your entire steak would be cooked through and grey before the outside would get to a nice brown crust.

You therefore need relatively high heat, and many people also bake their steaks to get the outside nice & crusty (because it’s a dry, even heat).

Fish is kind of the opposite: you need to limit not just the amount of total heat transferred, but also the rate of heat transfer, aka cook it on relatively low heat. If you go too high, it’ll just fall apart immediately. In this sense and many others, fish is the opposite of steak.

For a great steak, you’ll want a thick pan that gets very hot (cast iron/carbon steel/certain stainless steel pans) so you can get a nice contact sear but also strong radiation. It sounds like you’d want to minimize radiation and use a thin sheet metal pan, but in fact you’ll just burn the few tips of the steak resting directly on the pan, and none of the heat would reach the other 95% of even the steak’s bottom surface.

Equipment wise, using a pan vs. a pot actually makes a difference for steak. Since a pot has higher sidewalls, any moisture or steam escaping from your steak will stay in contact with the meat longer, and you’ll end up partly steaming your steak, which makes it grey & not particularly appetizing. That’s why a pan with low walls is better, the steam can escape immediately. This doesn’t matter for ground beef, vegetables, or other things you want to cook all the way through.

You don’t need to add butter or tallow to sear a steak, but I still like adding butter. The steak will obviously leak rendered tallow during cooking, but the butter proteins and lactose sugars burn into a nice, brown crust.

If you cook a steak over a fire, you’ll notice most people actually cook over the hot coals, not the flames for much of the duration. They are cooking almost entirely with radiation: the hot coals have crazy high thermal capacity and are emitting a lot of radiation. You can finish it with a sear over the flame, but it’d probably burn if you cooked entirely over the flame.

Boiling

Boiling is most often used for starches (pasta, potatoes, rice), legumes, or vegetables. Because boiling submerges the food entirely in water, it cannot reach a temperature higher than the boiling point of water (212°F), upon which the water will turn into steam and fly away.

The advantage is that you cannot burn your food with water. The disadvantage is that you cannot sear it, either: the maillard reaction typically only occurs at 280-300°F or higher.

Some people think that this makes boiled food healthier, because you’re not turning any of your meat/vegetables into nasty, evil, carcinogenic charcoal. Maybe they’re right, or maybe they’re just conflating bland food with healthy food. I’m not going to find out.

But one nice thing is that boiling food is relatively fire & forget. You have to make sure your pot won’t boil over, but apart from that it’ll approach and stay at a certain temperature until all the water is eventually steamed off, but that will take up to an hour depending on your heat and amount of water. It’s very forgiving, whereas a pan on high heat might totally burn your food if you forget it for 2 minutes.

Boiling will get your food heated beyond the safety (for meats) and digestibility threshold (starches, legumes) evenly and safely, but it does take a long time due to the low maximum temperature of the water.

Because of this, it’s common to first sear food and then boil it, e.g. stew meat. This way you get a nice delicious sear, and then you cook the food all the way through with some vegetables, allowing the flavors to mix nicely and evenly and soften the potatoes or vegetables or whatever else you have in there.

Boiling is also pretty good at doing high volumes of food at the same time: a pan allows only as much heat transfer as the surface of the pan. A big pot might fit on the same burner as a pan, but you can fill it all the way up with water and then cook 10x the amount of food in it at the same time. Because of this, boiling is pretty common in feeding lots of people, or for “poor people food.” You also don’t need a crazy high heat source like for searing a black & blue steak, it’ll just take longer for the water to reach the boiling point. And you don’t need a high quality pan with a thick floor, pretty much any metal container will work.

Of course boiling is a very moist method of cooking: there are lots of things you can’t make with it. Boiling cookies, bread, or cake wouldn’t work out very well. On the other hand, many food ingredients come dehydrated (rice, legumes, those bagged camping meals) and you’d need to add water to them anyway - perfect!

Sub-category: Simmering

Simmering is technically just cooking, but it’s an important point that I think deserves attention.

As you add heat to the pot of water, it’ll approach boiling temperature. It cannot go above that as it turns into steam.

How much heat you add (low/high heat) will change how fast your water will reach that boiling point, but it can’t push it over. But once your pot is boiling, how much heat do you need to KEEP IT boiling?

The answer is: almost none. You only have to counter the heat constantly lost to the environment as you unwillingly heat your kitchen.

Because of this, you’ll see most recipes for pasta, rice, or legumes recommend that you bring a pot of water to a boil, and then turn it to low heat and let it simmer. Often with the lid on, because that’ll keep more heat & steam in.

Simmering is just the act of letting the water cook your food for some time, without any further increase in temperature. It requires very low heat from your stove and a little bit of an intuition or feel depending on your stove, pot, amount of water/food, and so on.

For example, when I cook rice in my pot I need to turn the heat so low after reaching a boil that it’s below the “Min” point on the stove dial. But it turns out you can turn it even lower, to where you can barely see the flame, and that’s more than enough. If I leave it at the “Min” mark, the pot boils over. Your stove might be different.

Sub-category: pressure cooking

The only difference is that pressure cookers allow the water to reach a higher temperature without evaporating into steam. This works because the boiling point of water is actually dependent on its pressure: 212°F is just the point it happens to be around our normal atmospheric pressure (this changes slightly with elevation).

A pressure cooker will pressurize the water, allowing it to get to a higher temperature. It also traps the steam, which will be significantly hotter than the water, which adds more higher-temp heat transfer.

Because of this, you can cook basically anything you could boil in 45 minutes, but it’ll only take 10-15 minutes in the pressure cooker. Pressure cookers will do rice in 3 minutes instead of 15.

Instant Pots and similar electronic pressure cookers do the same thing, they just manage it for you so it’s easier.

If your routine includes a lot of boiled foods like rice, beans, lentils, potatoes, or stews, a pressure or instant cooker is a great investment.

The electronic ones are nice too because they’re fire & forget: put the ingredients in, walk away. They won’t burn or explode if you leave them on the stove overnight, they’ll just turn off or switch into “keep the food warm” mode.

Steaming

We just talked about steam, and how it likes to fly away from you and it’s very, very hot.

Warning: DO NOT put your hand into a jet of steam, e.g. that coming out of your pressure cooker when it’s depressurizing. The steam is extremely hot and you might end up in the hospital with 3rd degree burns. If you think boiling water is hot, steam is MUCH, MUCH hotter.

Steaming is a time-honored way of cooking things. It’s very similar to boiling in that it’s a moist heat. Since steam is a byproduct of boiling water, it’s often used in conjunction: while you’re boiling something in a pot of water, you can put a basket of vegetables above it and the steam will cook them through.

Many pressure cookers and rice cookers will come with a little basket that allows you to do exactly that. You can also just put a few cups of water into a pressure cooker, put the basket in, and steam your food without anything actually boiling beneath.

I’ve personally never steamed food except tossing in some vegetables into the rice cooker. I just don’t see the point; I don’t like soggy, limp vegetables.

It’s very popular & common in Asian cuisines, and that makes sense given that it goes well with rice cooking.

The “white rice with some steamed vegetables and sauce” thing just isn’t my favorite, I’d much rather cook the rice and a stew and add them together. But I thought I’d mention it because it’s quite convenient and common.

Deep frying

Deep frying is just cooking, except you’re cooking in fat instead of water. Fat has a much higher boiling point than water, allowing you to cook the food at much higher temperatures.

That’s why almost all deep-fried foods have the same uniform golden brown crunchy texture & look. It combines the even cooking of boiling with the high temperatures & maillard reaction of searing.

Despite the fat being liquid, at least when you heat it, deep frying is sort of a “dry” heating method because there’s no water (it’d just boil out). Hence the crunchy texture, and the fact that you can e.g. deep fry donuts but not boil them to a crisp. (Bagels are actually interesting here, I think those are boiled, not baked? Not a big bagel guy.)

Because you will be saturating your entire food in high heat for quite some time in the fat of your choice, the choice of fat obviously matters A LOT.

It used to be common to deep fry in beef tallow, but that got changed to mostly seed oils once those were invented, because they are cheaper.

Almost any fried food you buy these days will be boiled in nasty, highly oxidized seed oils. That’s why fried foods are among the most unhealthy food in existence, which is even acknowledged by mainstream nutrition science.

They’re just really confused as to what it is about cooking a potato in oxidized soybean oil that makes it unhealthy… maybe it’s the heating part?🤔Surely not the seed oils..

I haven’t personally deep fried anything in beef tallow, but “tallow fries” is a big trend now. If I have more success swamping in the future, it’s definitely on my list to do a tallow fries or tallow-fried rice balls experiment.

One thing I like about deep-frying is that it’s such a troll move. If you argued “seed oils are unhealthy, I lost weight eating white rice & steamed broccoli” mainstreamers would roll their eyes and say you cut out “junk food” and “ate clean, healthy, whole foods.”

But if you lost weight by eating nothing but tallow fries & tallow chips & tallow donuts, it couldn’t be the “junk food” or the “carolies” part. The only variable you changed was the frying fat.

Baking/air frying

Baking and air frying mostly use air convection for heat transfer. Air is a TERRIBLE heat conductor, which is why it takes forever to heat anything in an oven. There is also a little bit of radiation, especially in more conventional metal ovens, maybe not so much with air frying.

The advantage is that it’s a dry, uniform, even heat, so you can bake things and give them a nice crust. Some people like air fried steak, I never thought it was very good.

The main reason for conventional baking is that you have to for certain foods: pastries, bread, cake.. baking is pretty much your only choice. Some people make bread in a dutch oven, which heats mostly by radiation. But try that with cookies.

The main reason for air frying seems to be convenience: air fryers are cheap, ubiquitous, easy to store away, and relatively quick as they don’t have as much volume to heat up compared to a big, conventional oven.

Personally I hated air frying and I got rid of my relatively fancy air fryer. I thought the food never tasted particularly good, I don’t bake much anyway, and the cleanup process was always a huge pain if you cooked fatty foods like steak. The fat splatter just gets everywhere, and unlike a pan, the surface of the air fryer’s inside is extremely hard to clean.

That said it’s convenient for other foods, popular, and it’s relatively fire & forget and might be a great candidate for food prep or just cooking up something while you’re busy elsewhere in your house.

Slow cooking/BBQ

These are sort of special cases in the rate of heat transfer department, similar to steak searing. Slow cooking is just cooking on low heat for a long time, and BBQ is typically made with a dry heat (smoking, which is flavored convection), but similarly slow & low.

The main difference is that you can cook things this way and make them edible/palatable that you largely wouldn’t if you just cooked them normally. Heating something for a very long time makes certain parts of the food softer, like the cartilage that makes tough cuts of meat tough, or certain vegetables.

If you just took a tough piece of meat and seared it like a steak, it would be, well, tough. You can grind it down into ground beef or you can slow cook it, which will yield a delicious piece of BBQ.

Besides that, you can slow cook pretty much anything you can regular-cook or pressure-cook; it’ll just take longer. Slow cookers, like instant pots, are convenient and largely fire & forget. Because the temperatures are so low, it usually doesn’t matter if you overcook your food by a couple hours, and many modern ones even have an electronic shutoff and switch to “keep warm” mode after a certain period.

I sort of wouldn’t use a slow cooker for anything besides BBQ-type meats that need the low & slow. I used to do that a lot when I still ate pork, and would make pork ribs every other weekend or so (cooked ENTIRELY IN TOMATO SAUCE).

But these days I don’t do that, because I don’t eat pork any more and I’m too lazy to slow-cook or smoke a brisket or a beef rib. I also just don’t eat enough meat any more, it’d take me a week or 2 to make my way through a beef rib. Ground beef is so much easier to portion up into any amount you want.

Implementing your plan: pick your cooking methods

Remember the plan you made, about which meals you’d eat throughout the week? It’s a good idea to pick methods that fit your plan, of course. If you chose 5 meals that each require a different cooking method, then you’ll have more work to do: you can’t just do one thing more or longer or with a bigger pot.

Boiling, slow-cooking, and pressure-cooking all lend themselves to bulk cooking, which means they’re great for prepping a week’s worth of food, but not so great for cooking just one small meal every day.

I tried prepping and I honestly missed the ritual of cooking.

Hence I’ve settled on searing/shallow frying; my 1 meal a day is cooked in a small saucepan in 1-2 tbsp of butter. Because I only eat 150g of ground beef and some vegetables, it takes no time at all to heat up the pan, sear the crap out of it, and be done. It takes me about 30 minutes to prep, cook, eat, and clean up each day, and about half of that time I don’t have to actively do anything, although it’s better to be close to a hot pan or your house might burn down.

If I were doing a rice/bean/potato HCLF diet, I’d probably set an instant cooker once a day, maybe even overnight. That way it’d be easy enough to always have warm food around.

If you wanted, you could make a giant portion and just bag most of it for the rest of the week. Easy to take to work and heat up, or even eat cold.

For our hypothetical food plan of sandwiches with roast beef for lunch, and stir fry for dinner, we would choose:

• Sandwich: Sear & then slow/pressure cook your roast once a week (then let it cool down and slice it)

• Stir fry: You can either just shallow fry some cubed chicken/beef and chopped vegetables every night, like I do. Or you can make bigger portions at a time and just store leftovers in the fridge. You can do a few days’ worth to easily a week of this at a time.

Cleaning up

Sweet, we’ve cooked our food! I’ll skip the part where you eat the food, because you presumably know how to eat food or you’d be dead by now.

Cleaning up is an important part of cooking. Luckily, it’s just as easy as prepping & cooking itself. Maybe easier!

No matter what prepping or cooking methods you used, the solution is likely going to be hot water & dish soap. Even if you burned something pretty bad or it stuck to your pot, more hotter water for longer will likely get it off.

Once my meal is finished and I’ve transferred all the food to my plate, I put my saucepan into the sink, put a few drops of dish soap into it, and then fill it with hot water. Then I let it soak while I eat. When I come back, I do all of my dirty cookware & dishes together. By that time the saucepan has had 15 minutes to soak in hot dish soap water, which will significantly soften & loosen anything stuck to the bottom.

When you cook with lots of saturated fat like butter or beef tallow, you need pretty hot water. That stuff is solid at room temperature. If your water heater or kitchen faucet doesn’t produce reliably steaming hot water, one method you can use is to just heat the water on the stove - in the pan or pot itself.

This method is popular with camping, where you don’t usually have running hot water.

Just put some water into the pan/pot, put it back onto the stove, and turn the stove on. The water should cover any stuck/burned food still in there. Once the water is up to a boil, turn off the stove. You can just let it sit and cool down again, the heat will do its magic in the meantime and soften/loosen the stuck bits.

Besides heat and dish soap, friction is an effective cleaning method. I use a kitchen sponge, but those nylon brushes work as well. If the rough side doesn’t get everything off & our pot clean and shiny, you just need to add more hot water and let it sit for a bit longer. It should just immediately wipe clean off.

I like the yellow/green scotchbrite sponges as they last a long time, but the other ones are usually fine too.

Pro tip: after using your kitchen sponge, squeeze the water out of it and store it in a way that lets remaining water drain out, e.g. in one of those sponge holders. That way it won’t rot and will last much, much longer. If you leave your sponge in the water, or soaking wet on the bottom of the sink, it’ll rot in a matter of days or a week.

After getting your cookware nice & shiny, dry them off. I like to shake off any obvious collected water over the sink, then wipe everything dry with a kitchen towel, then set it down to air dry. Make sure the surface you set items on can take moisture, or it’ll rot or warp over time. Most kitchen counters are designed to be moisture resistant, or you could just place a kitchen or paper towel under the parts touching the surface. A dish drying mat is a good investment, as is a hook for your kitchen towel so it can have a chance to dry.

A few hours later, I’ll put everything back where it belongs. That way the kitchen looks nice & neat and is ready to cook the next meal.

Equipment

While the “foodie” crowd & Instagram posers would want you to believe that you need a crazy amount of pots, pans, knives, and what not, you can actually cook with only a handful of items.

Being sort of a minimalist, I cultivate a very small but nice amount of cooking equipment that is flexible enough not just for my daily ex150 meal, but also almost everything I do during my refeeds.

I own the following cooking equipment & use it daily:

• Saucepan (for cooking/frying)

• Silicone spatula

• Kitchen scale

• Santoku knife

• Cutting board

• Plate

• Spoon

• Cup

• Scissors (to cut open bags of frozen vegetables)

• Zip-loc bags (to store leftover portions of ground beef/frozen vegetables)

• Kettle (to heat water for coffee)

You can cook amazing meals in just 1 pot if you add thing 1 at a time. You don’t need more than 1 knife if it’s a versatile one. I used to have just a paring knife, but it’s a little small for cutting steak or other bigger food items during refeeds. Now I have a santoku knife, which is small enough for easy daily use, but big enough to cut anything short of a giant roast.

Even during my refeeds I only use the one saucepan. I can even make enough stew to last me several days. It also cooks rice just fine, I’ve never had the rice burn when making it just in a regular pot. It’s nearly impossible to do wrong.

The only thing is that I have to store either the stew or the rice in a separate bowl, because I obviously can’t make both in the same pot at the same time. Then I mix them on the plate when I’m ready to eat. Mixing liquid into rice tends to make it soggy, so I don’t store them mixed.

The following I do own, but rarely use:

• Cheese slicer (for refeeds)

• Stick blender (used to use this daily to whip cream, but I haven’t whipped any in months, I just drink it these days)

• Stainless steel milkshake cup (used to whip my cream in this, now it just holds the blender)

• Can opener (for cans of tomato sauce/beans during refeeds)

• Fork (only really use this when I make steak every 3rd refeed or so)

• Knife sharpener

Recently, I’ve started making my own bread during refeeds. For this I’ve used a friend’s bread machine that he let me borrow. If I were to do a month-long bread experiment, I’d buy my own bread machine.

If you’re interested in the specific things I have, I’ve written about many of them (pot, knife, spatula, and more) in the past: Gear post 2, gear post 1, gear post 3.

The kettle has changed; I just use a cheapo metal one from Walmart on the stove now. I still drink the G7 instant coffee. I think pretty much everything else is the same, too.

If you’re gonna cook most of your own meals, it’s a decent idea to invest in some solid cookware. If you keep it simple & don’t buy sets of 19 knives and 7 pots & pans, it won’t break the bank even if you get nice quality stuff.

My All-Clad saucepan was $130 if I remember it right, but it looks like new after over 3 years of literally daily use and performs amazingly. A pot/pan is really a good place to invest some money, you’ll notice the superior cooking performance and it’ll clean up nicer, too.

On knives, I’m almost the opposite: you can sharpen any knife to any desired sharpness, some just won’t keep the edge very long. As long as you don’t get the shittiest quality possible, I’ve never noticed any benefit of an expensive over a regular knife. Butchers use extremely cheap knives and just sharpen the heck out of them all the time.

Examples

Just to round it out, I thought I’d give two examples. The first is how I actually cook my food on ex150 every day, and have, mostly unchanged, for over 3 years now.

The second example is how I’d do a rice-based high-carb/low-fat diet. This is based on a few rice/bean stews I’ve done over the last few of my monthly refeeds, although I’d change how I do it slightly if I were to eat like this daily, and those changes are reflected here.

ex150

Upon waking I run to the kitchen and heat some water in the kettle on the stove. Hot water + instant coffee + cream in the cup = delicious creamy coffee. I stir it with one of those matcha blender things. Typically I drink 2 of these, but sometimes it’s 3 or even 4.

For lunch, these days, I just do the same thing again. Usually 2 more coffees. So far, no real “cooking” has taken place.

For dinner, I actually cook:

1. Put saucepan on stove, turn stove to medium heat (meal is so small high heat is not needed)

2. Put 1-2 tbsp of butter into the pan

3. Let butter melt, then swirl the pan around to cover the entire bottom in butter

4. Let all the water cook out (you can tell by the sound, the sizzling stops and the pan goes oddly quiet)

5. Take zip-loc bag with pre-portioned ground beef balls of 150g each out of fridge. I rip the beef off in tiny pieces and drop each into the pan evenly.

6. Wash beef-covered hands, seal zip-loc bag, put it back in the fridge.

7. Go do something else in hearing range, intermittently come back and stir ground beef until it’s evenly almost burned. Usually I read or reply to messages on my phone.

8. When meat has reached desired maillardness, take zip-loc bag of frozen vegetables out of freezer and pour very vaguely estimated amount into pan. Stir briefly, then put lid on top. The trapped steam will thaw the frozen vegetables very quickly.

9. Once steam is visibly escaping from under the lid, take off lid (careful hot!) and set it in sink to cool off (cold water helps.. remember thermal capacity!). Meanwhile, stir vegetables from time to time so they can almost burn evenly.

10. Once both meat & vegetables have reached even, almost burned status, turn off stove and let everything cool down. Because there’s a lot of butter & beef fat liquid in the pan now, letting it cool down will allow those to solidify and soak into the meat & vegetables a bit better. The meal will still me nice & warm, don’t worry.

11. Dump meal onto plate, put pan into sink w/ some dish soap and fill it with hot water. Let it soak while eating commences.

12. After finishing the meal, do dishes & dry them immediately.

13. A few hours later, when everything has air dried, put dishes.

My food prep is simple: I usually buy the 1lb packs of ground beef and random bags of frozen vegetables. The 1lb beef I just cut into rough thirds. Sometimes I see a great deal on a bigger (say 5lbs) package of beef. In that case, I’ll pre-portion the beef into ~150g balls and put 4 at a time into a zip-loc bag. At any given time, I have 1 bag of beef in the fridge ready to use, and all the other ones go in the freezer.

Vegetables I just keep in the freezer. When I open a new bag, I pour that day’s vegetables into the pan and the rest into a zip-loc bag that goes back in the freezer.

These days I don’t weigh the vegetables, it’s just a generous pour. The beef I still weigh pretty accurately (within ~5g of 150g), unless I cut a pound into thirds, which will average out anyway.

HCLF

This is hypothetical, but here’s what my rough plan is for when I’ll eventually do a longer-term (3-6 months) high-carb/low-fat diet. (By the way, if you’re an experienced HCLF person, feel free to leave feedback on this!)

First, the rough parameters of the diet:

1. White rice & legume (beans & lentils) based

2. Some beef (150g again? Or slightly less? Not sure how fatty it can be to count as “low fat”)

3. As with ex150, vegetables for flavor

4. No sauce

5. No cream or creamy coffee

I will likely buy an instant pot. I hated the last one I had, but maybe I’ll get lucky this time and I’ll get a decently put together one lol. Maybe I’ll try a different brand electronic pressure cooker.

For starches and especially legumes, fire & forget pressure cooking is just hard to beat. In addition, I’ll have to eat way more meals every day on this diet - no more cream, remember!

That means whatever effort cooking a meal will take, I now have to do it 3-5x per day instead of only 1x, or I’ll have to cook in big batches.

The instant pot makes things pretty easy with starches, and can probably cook up a day’s worth in a single cooking session. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to cook white rice & beans in the instant pot at the same time; their cooking times are just too different.

But rice only seems to take 15 minutes, so it won’t be too bad to run the instant pot twice in a row, once per day. Worst case I’ll buy a rice cooker, too, so I can run them at the same time. Vegetables can be cooked with either, you can even steam them in a rice cooker.

Because there will be more meals spread throughout the day, I’ll likely pre-sear at least a day’s worth of ground beef once a day. Maybe even for several days or a week.

While cooking ground beef + cleanup once a day is easy & quick on ex150, doing it 3x or more per day would likely get old quick.

This way, I’d still cook once per day: sear my ground beef, cook lentils or beans and vegetables, and cook rice. I’d just eat it spread out over the day instead of drinking cream.

Conclusion

To conclude, and definitely not just to get this post over the 11,000 word mark (!), I think everybody should not only know how to cook, everybody should cook.

If you’re not making your own food pretty much from scratch, you don’t know what’s in it. And in modern America, what’s in it is soybean oil.

If you’re not looking, they’re putting soybean oil in it. That’s the sad reality.

Learning to cook is easy, and once you have a routine, it’s trivial and quick. Certainly quicker than going out and eating at a restaurant, or getting takeout.

It’s much cheaper, too. And, usually, it tastes much better.

Not knowing how to cook your own meals is like not knowing how to drive. It’s an essential life skill, and lacking it makes you dependent on others, likely (in the modern food environment) to your detriment.

I hope I could convince you that it’s not that difficult, and not that much work, Mark. (That’s probably not your name, I know.)

Brief update: I’m almost 2 weeks into ex150nosauce+ACV-6, and just woke up to another all-time low of 207.15lbs this morning. We’ll see if it plateaus again or if it keeps going down.