The trick to this is you clean as you cook. Like last night. Everything was put in the dishwasher the moment it was done being used or washed by hand.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I trained myself to wash as I cook because otherwise I'll get distracted and leave the mess behind for days.
Cleaning as you go is the secret to making cooking fun, more or less.
I'm trying to teach my son this concept. He loves to cook, but he just dumps everything in the sink as he cooks, uses a new utensil for everything, etc. You don't need a new spoon every time you taste your spaghetti sauce.
It's even more fun to cook when you know a parent is going to clean up the mess after your Iron Chef fantasy.
If you find a way to teach this lesson let me know.
My wife loves to cook and is very good at it, but she's purely focused on the food. I try to clean as she goes behind her and she keeps shooing me away because I'm in way. However if I don't then she'll start getting annoyed that the sink is full. It's a delicate balance
I used to despise washing dishes. Then I opened a food biz, and spent many hours washing dishes and listening to audio books.
Now I don't mind washing dishes. There's something very satisfying about tackling a pile of dirty dishes and having them all shiny and clean at the end. It's very Zen.
It helps that with great experience comes great speed. When others look at a destroyed kitchen and see hours of drudgery, I know that it will be beautiful in 15 minutes.
ive worked food service and wish i could say the same. I'd be all over dishes of i had at least a full power overhead sprayer. preferably with a 3 compartment sink but what i really want is the sprayer. the sprayer makes dishes fun.
Yeah, a full three compartment sink set up is great. One of my lottery purchases when I hit the big one, will be a house with a professional kitchen in it, with a serious dishwashing bay in it.
I really love those commercial dishwashers that have a 90-120 second cycle.
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How do you do this without burning the food?
Better heat and process management. If I have 2 minutes to toast almonds, I won't be scrubbing a pan. But, if I have to cut veg and then saute, I'll do all my prep and then start cleaning between stirs/pan heating.
Also, I love getting all my prep out of the way and then starting cooking. I immediately have much better process management to clean between cooking activities
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OMG yasss
Kids: Can you make pizza. Sure go get one out of the garage. No we want your pizza.
Flattered/exhausted: yeah sure
Bowl to bloom the yeast, mixer bowl, mixer, dough hook, counter, cutting board, cast iron pan, convection oven, grater, stovetop, cooling rack, pizza cutter, other counter. Fridge space for 2 days cold ferment.
It's fucking good, but OMFG, I die a little every time.
that's why you cook the whole bag of pasta and put the rest in the fridge for the next day, make 1kg of beef for gulash or bolognaise... make at least twice the amount to have something to reheat. You can also put in zip bags and freeze if you want to have more days between eating the same thing
Look at this fancy pants with their high "moderation and future planning" concepts.
I make the whole bag, I EAT THE WHOLE BAG
Nah man. I do this and promptly forget about a Ziploc bag or two in the freezer for a few months. Finding a bag of chili that will be ready to eat in minutes on a day you don't feel like cooking or ordering out (again), is like Christmas morning.
Lol yeah, putting leftovers in my freezer is a sure fire way to ensure that I will never see that food again.
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I've been focusing on cooking more simply. the goal is fewer ingredients, less time and effort, more appreciation for simple flavor and quality ingredients
I do 1 pan dishes, whether the recipes like it or not.
Slowcooker, crockpot, or Dutch oven type recipes.
This seems to be the trick for great food as well. I'm not Italian, but every time I talk about food with an Italian they explain how few ingredients they actually use and how quick they can make dishes. It's more about qualitative ingredients than anything else.
Yes, most of the food I make is either prepared in less than 10 minutes or I know how long I can leave it unsupervised so I can leave and come back later.
90% of stuff I cook "from scratch" is made in one skillet or pot for this exact reason. When I was a bachelor, I would just eat out the pot or pan alot too. Fuck them dishes.
I have finally rediscovered my love for cooking. Here's what I do:
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Don't follow the recipe. The chef can't write and the writer can't cook. A lot of it is nonsense. If you think you know better, you do.
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Do whatever you want. Don't oversalt it or burn it and everything else can be fixed with more cookery.
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Don't cook for 2 hours unless you are having fun goofing around in the kitchen for 2 hours or are making a holiday dish everyone's been wanting all year.
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Learn all the shortcuts and try your own.
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Eat while you're cooking to see if it's the way you want it and use all those spices and sauces to see what they do.
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Easy mode: To make anything delicious, add salt, oil/fat, and acid. That will make everything but burned or oversalted stuff into edible. Also, pepper is somehow underrated despite being everywhere and in everything.
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Don't eat it in 10 minutes. You won't digest it properly and it will add to your stress rather than relieving it. Take your time eating; the people making you rush are the problem not the food.
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Bare minimum: when cooking always make enough for multiple meals (dinner and lunch).
Pro minimum: stay busy the whole time, cleaning and preparing tupper ware.
Goal: make at least 7 portions, fud 4 the week.
In my case they'll just rot in the fridge.
The heads or left overs?
The heads have been taxidermized and arranged in a semi circle so that I can have a conversation with them.
There's no space for them in the fridge anyway, as it's indeed full of rotting leftovers. And even raw ingredients!
Maybe try a slow cooker. If you find a few recipes you like and prepare what you can in larger batches and save some for next time (for example if it uses a collection of spices, measure out multiple recipes worth of all of the spices and store them (pre-combined) in spice jars), you can get the prep time down to a few minutes each time you want to cook it. Slow cookers have the added benefit of not having to worry about taking it out of the oven at the right time or whathaveyou - when it finishes cooking, it'll just keep your food warm until you're ready to eat it. This also keeps the washing to a minimum - it's just the slow cooker insert and your bowl + utensils. As an added bonus, you'll get multiple days worth of food out of one time cooking.
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This is why I have mastered the microwave. Once I get near that thing im basically gordan ramsey, minus the good tasting food. But food is food
Why are you taking 2 hours to cook every meal? Surely, you don't mean every meal every day, right?
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Make a week meal (bulk fajita mix is the go to for me) and then you just have something you need to reheat and you've only spent 2 hrs one day rather than 2hrs everyday. i usually end up making a couple meals on some of those days but there's no pressure to it since there's always something ready.
Freezer bags and Budgetbytes scaling features are your friends. FYI spaghetti sauce can be made in bulk super cheap and will stay in freezer bags for literal years.
Whenever I try meal prep, one of two things will happen:
- I get sick of eating the same thing every day, and the leftovers just sit in the freezer for years.
- I smoke some weed, get the munchies, and eat it all by day two.
I never have room in the fridge/freezer for this anyway. There has to be a better way.
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People ask why I triple every recipe. This is why.
pro tip: try cooking for 2 days or more at once
I’ve been like this for 20 years now.
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