I swap the meat out between chicken and beef, but I cook once every 8-12 days. The secret is the spicy mayo/teriyaki sauce with homemade fried rice. Oh and that jar of blueberries, that is my first attempt at basic fermentation!
I know this is a post from three weeks ago, OP, but I hope you can still answer. With that said, I am baffled! How on earth do you cook only eight to twelve days? Can I learn that sorcery too? How do you do it?!?! It would be a game changer for me if you could please walk me through your process.
I only eat one cooked meal a day. I make a couple slices of toast in the morning and have been making quick guacamole and chips in the evening or just eating rice.
I cook 4lbs of meat in a dish, plus 1.5lbs each of green beans/broccoli/cauliflower in another dish, and 8 ears of corn in a dish. I also have a rice bowl for the oven that makes two Cups of rice. I cook all of that at one time for 1h 15m. I eat the rice for 2-3 days before frying the remainder and adding a few packs of instant microwaved brown rice.
The trick is to mostly eat the rice and break down the extra ingredients by hand into small pieces before reheating in the microwave. Sauces make a big difference too. That is how I can keep it feeling fresh enough that I do not mind the repetition. Like my fried rice is better than anything I have ever had from an American style Chinese restaurant. I make it complex and strong in flavor with sweet onion, green onion, lots of garlic and ginger, carrot, frozen green peas, soy/oyster/fish sauces, and brown sugar. A mix of white and brown rice help with texture and getting the eggs just right helps. I also add some of my cooked chicken, and the stalks of my cooked broccoli and cauliflower. I can do all of this in around 35 minutes just throwing most of it into a food processor. This will last and remain edible for a week or more. My rice takes me around the same amount of time as the whole bake does.
With sauces, I like to mix spicy mayo and teriyaki sauces 1:1 plus a little extra Worcestershire or fish sauce. I have also been working on an onion sauce of my own. I have used sriracha or teriyaki by themselves too.
I’m not super picky about what I eat though. Before I was disabled I was once very overweight but lost all of it while riding and eventually racing bicycles. I treated food differently back then; like a means to an objective. I appreciate good food, but my purposeful mindset and objective goals oriented approach may be more challenging for someone of a different background. I have no desire to eat anything processed or flavored by a chemistry lab, so my expectations may be very different than some people that expect such flavor drugs. Everyone that has tried my cooking seems to love it and ask for recipes, but your results may vary.
What a thorough and thoughtful answer. Many thanks for taking your time to explain in such an easy way.
I struggle with feeding myself correctly for various reasons and having a system like yours looks like it could help me a lot. I am already working closely with a dietitian and a psychologist but the day-to-day hassle overwhelms me and having an actual person do it successfully gives me hope.
So again, Internet stranger, thank you for sharing.
What do the fermented blueberries taste like? It’s sound interesting. I looked it up and all of the recipes stated that it would not taste anything like regular blueberries, but never said what it could be considered like.
Can I ask how this particular meal works with your limitations? I have strategies I've had to implement too, so I'm always interested in how others manage.
I have ultra rare thoracic spinal (between the shoulder blades) issues from that time I fought 2 SUV’s in a death match on a bicycle. I killed them both but they almost got me. They mostly fought each other but my contributions were not insignificant. \s
I was folded over backwards, thus why my damage is in a region around the ribs. Posture is my problem, as in it feels like I am lifting weights the moment I am upright. It doesn’t matter if I am sitting or standing, being upright at all is a problem. I start degrading quite a bit within a few minutes, but I am in pretty bad shape after 1 hour. Anything longer than 1 hour generally starts impacting my sleep and that can take many days to weeks to recover from. If I push continuously and ignore it all, I’m stupid AF, totally unstable, and a mindless zombie that can’t sleep for more than a couple of hours per day.
All that said, it takes me ~30 minutes to make chicken, veggies, and white rice. I eat the plain rice for a couple of days before I make fried rice with the rest. The rice takes me 35-40 minutes to make. This means I have far less opportunities to push myself or create problems because I am limiting how much I must do while upright for the most number of days and can usually set up so that I’m in decent shape when I need to cook.
I have a tendency to get hurt by random small things like if I turn my head left or simply pick up something funny. There are all kinds of little interrelated (feeling) issues primarily on the left side of my spine. I only have a little more than half my range of turning my head left. Initially I had damage from the base of my skull and C1 all the way through T8, so I’m quite the basket case. Like, I can lift heavy things some times, but others, a light bag of groceries will cause something in my back to shift and I can’t sleep for weeks. I’m trying to minimize these ridiculous injuries for the most part. Like I tried working and faking it for 3 years, but I was a zombie and still dysfunctionally incompetent. I’m managing the rollercoaster ride to make the ups and downs as tolerable as I can.
I tried major pain killers at one point too, and while I’ve been very healthy the whole time, the opioids made me intolerant to dairy, so this is my dairy free solution too.
Oof. I have a different musculoskeletal problem with a far less interesting story behind it, but functionally a quite similar limitation that also prevents much... verticality. I completely hear you on the mindless zombie complications too, it's fucking awful. I'm sorry we have both found ourselves in this shitty boat!
The meal makes good sense. 30 mins is a fair bit though, so I can see why you space it our that far.
If you ever feel like something a little different, maybe one of my tricks might help you. I order delivery... but I extend it out by nuking potatoes and frozen vegetables. A potato the size of my fist takes 3 mins 30 in my microwave, broccoli and spinach similar from frozen. The tinned tomatoes I buy are also a "heat up and add flavors" quick option because they're not watery.
One curry from my local Indian place that has way too much sauce turns into 3 meals with a much better nutritional balance when I dump any or all of those in. They're done before the food even arrives, i don't have to watch an appliance with a flame, or clean much, and the cost per portion reduces to something sensible.
opioids made me intolerant to dairy,
TIL that's a thing. I just have to ration mine to a ridiculous degree at a low dosage or i get the more common peristalsis problems in a very unpleasant way.
I’m managing the rollercoaster ride to make the ups and downs as tolerable as I can.
Amen. And I wish you the best of luck in doing so.
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