Ask Lemmy

Cooking at home. The wife cooks "everyday" meals because somehow she is much faster than I am, I cook for special occasions (e.g. when we have guests),but she became so good over the years she also does that often.

We rarely (like twice a year) use convenience food due to allergies and quality and most of the time cook "from zero", so that's a bit more time consuming but still manageable.

Mealie or Tandoor help a lot here, as you can better plan your cooking and build a menu for the week. (E.g. "If I do this on Monday, I have ingredients B and broth left over/can easily do more so I will do something with B on Tuesday and Soup on Wednesday. Oh, when I do noodles for soup I can also do a bit more and make pasta for Thursday") Additionally it makes it easier to adapt new recipes - we do various European dishes,from Portugal to Romania, some African and Arabian ones, some Indian, some South-East Asian ones and some Japanese and a lot of Korean ones. (We both lived abroad for a long time when we were younger). Especially for these rather "unusual" dishes planning is required as we sometimes need to order things online. (As getting some things is hard in rural central Europe). Grocy helps with that.

Delivery or Take Away is a rare choice,not only because it's often inferior quality, it's also fucking expensive. I can literally cook for a workweek for the money greek takeaway costs here. While we would have the financial means it's simply, well, wasteful. In all aspects.

Eating out is something we rarely do. We both do have probably four times the "eating out" occasions due to our jobs than private ones. But when we do it, we plan it very carefully. It can be everything from a "hole-in-the-wall" in a sketchy backyard to a Michelin three star restaurant,but when we do it, it's never out of "we are hungry, let's go" and more a "we are interested in this and this, let's find a restaurant that serves this."(E.g. the last time we went out it was a Persian/Iranian restaurant that various Persian/Iranian friends recommended. It was absolutely worth it)

The funny side effect? The kiddo(s) have been to three Michelin star restaurants before they were three. They know how to behave in a restaurant. They only sometimes used to get angry when someone handed them the kids menu. K1 cooks African, Georgian, Romanian, etc. dishes on the same level as my wife and went to shop alone at the African store in town when they cooked for us. Which is run by a few very scary looking (but in reality very nice and very correct - they saved two girls from sexual assault a few years ago) Nigerian dudes that half the town js scared off. They drag their grandparents - which on one side were born behind the iron curtain and rarely eat out- into hole-in-the-wall backalley restaurants in Berlin, etc. This is one of the achievements I am really proud of.

People: Learn to cook. Seriously.