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Hey lains, I want to start cooking meals for myself but I don’t know what to actually make. What’s something I could buy the ingredients for and cook for dinner tonight?

I would recommend you start off basic and understand how different ingredients affect taste. Just pick a simple food you enjoy and go from there. Here is a fairly decent website if you want to look for recipes. https://based.cooking/ My personal favorite food is mashed potatoes (skin potato, place in boiling pot of water, add a pinch of salt and tiny bit of milk. They are done when soft enough for butter knife to fall through. Drain water, mash (ideally with potato masher), and butter as desired). It goes best alongside some meat/cabbage.

>>9127 If you're kind of autistic like me and don't mind eating the same exact food every day, here are my cheap/healthy/sorta-tasty breakfast and lunch recipes that aim to give me a wholesome diet despite very little variety: Overnight oats: Combine 1 cup oats, 1/2 spoonful of sugar or 1:1 natural sugar substitute (e.g. monkfruit has no aftertaste), and 1 tsp cocoa powder in a container. Mix these dry ingredients, then add 1 cup milk and stir until it's well mixed. Affix a paper towel over the container with a rubber band, and leave it in the fridge overnight. In the morning, stir in another half spoonful of your sugar or substitute, and eat it cold. It's mostly tasteless but should go down very easy, and will be slightly sweet. Brown rice/black beans/broccoli: This is more of a meal prep thing that I make a large amount of at once. Get some brown rice and cook it in a rice cooker or pot. If you have a nice rice cooker, try out that GABA brown rice setting, otherwise, just use the regular brown rice setting or follow the instructions on the rice package for stovetop. Remember to wash your rice. If cooking stovetop, DO NOT open the lid before the rice is finished cooking. you'll let out all the steam and fuarrrk it up. When there are about 30 minutes left on your rice, start making the beans. 2 cans of black beans is a good ratio to 2 cups of dry brown rice, in my experience. Drain the beans and add a whole mess of seasoning, however you like them, in a small pot. I recommend minced garlic (saute this in the pan real quick before adding the beans), onions or onion powder, salt, pepper, extra virgin olive oil if you can afford it (research your olive oil to make sure it isn't cut with other soykaf), cinnamon, and brown sugar. add some cayenne pepper powder if you're into spice. you've really got to just feel out how much to season your beans. As you're cooking them, taste and adjust your amount of seasoning. Since you're adding them to unseasoned rice, you want them to be a bit too salty on their own. Simmer the beans in their own leftover juice on low heat, and stir when they begin to bubble. When they're hot and tender (taste them!) they're done. When there's about 15 mins left on the other stuff, dump however much broccoli you think is appropriate into a small pot. add 0.5-2 tbsp of butter, depending how much broccoli you're making. add water, but only so much for it to cover the bottom of the pot. You're steaming the broccoli, not boiling it. maybe 0.75 cm of water at the bottom of the pot is what you want. Sprinkle salt over the broccoli, put on the lid, and get the water on the bottom to a boil, then let it simmer on low. It's okay to take the lid off periodically to test the tenderness of the broccoli, to your taste. the steam will re-populate in a way it won't with rice. When you're done with all of that, let them cool (fluff your rice!), portion them out into containers together, and put whatever you're not eating into the fridge. When you're hungry just microwave one of them, and you have a meal of rice, beans, and broccoli ready for you!

>>9129 the reason I don't mention dinner, by the way, is that I'm on a university meal plan for about one meal per day. That's also where I get my fruit (mainly bananas, it's the only edible fruit my uni sells)

I've recently started cooking as well, and found the Wikibooks Cookbook to be pretty helpful. Curry and stir-fry have been my go-tos for the past couple months: They're tasty, quick, and impossible to mess up. You can use pretty much any ingredient, too. Just toss some veggies and fruits in a pan, and bam, you're done! Tofu or meat's a plus. As long as your masala/curry sauce/powder/whatever is good, you're in for a treat.

>>9128 That based.cooking website is so useful! Thank you for that link, I made something off there yesterday after you mentioned it and it was really great. I’ll have to try your recipe you mentioned when the weather cools down a bit! >>9129 Those sound like some really good options to have on hand, thank you! I’m definitely not above eating the same thing several days in a row so I think that’ll do well for me, lol

>>9127 bibimbap. korean rice bowls which are easy af dish that you just shove what meat and few veggies you have sitting around (or what is cheap) with a sauce or something. slap a egg on top and your good. a typical bibimbap for me is: Cup of rice Any meat/protein (i have pork slices sitting around) that i put with some soy, ginger (optimal), garlic and some sesame oil (try something to add a hint of flavor but not too much) capsicum into strips in pan as well cut up some carrot in small long strips and put it in a container with some salt, soy and vinegar of some kind and muddle them together and let sit for a little bit (adds a bit of freshness to the dish and takes like 2 seconds to get a slightly "pickled" flavor) if i have spinach i might shove in at times fry a egg or the method you like then assemble by putting rice in bowl and slapping them around in circle with sauces like spicy mayo or something if a lil extra is needed got a healthy and easy dish that takes not too long to do but yeah rice cookers are cheap and makes it easy if you like rice dishes as its easy cleanup with the main thing just being waiting. you should also learn some recipes to cook in the rice cooker itself as its a more versatile than most think

>>9129 >add sugar Do americans really need their goyfuel to not fall asleep in the office?

>>9141 its just nice, man. makes the oats go down easy do you drink coffee? that's arguably a much more common dependency. i don't!

>>9129 do you just eat oats raw? I boil them down and it results in a huge plate that takes me forever to chew and eat

>>9127 learn how to make pasta. It's super easy and versatile. Just boil water throw in the pasta then take out a single piece after like 5 min and every minute after till it has a consistency you like. You will get good at it fast. Then when you can fry up a chicken breast in a pan you can make like Chicken and Pasta which is an actually nice meal but still super simple. Great to experiment with herbs in too. Basil and Oregano are your basic go to herb seasons ofc.

>>9158 how is that more common

>>9164 every adult i know drinks coffee and makes jokes about how they're nonfunctional without caffeine most people can take a break from sugary stuff if they feel like it >>9160 they're technically raw but they're not hard to chew or anything, soaking overnight softens them.

hai does anyone know some good but easy to makes foods?? ive made a couple lately and theyre good and all but the same thing over and over can get a bit boring.

Personally, I like making my own hamburgers! I can change up the ingredients whenever I want and it's pretty braindead easy! I just go get like, a 6 pack of hamburger and some bread and whatever I want to put on it like eggs, cheese, Dijon mustard, etcetcetc. It's really easy to change up and it's not too tiring too eat once or twice a week. It's also fuarrking cheap too so that's a really good benefit too.

>>9166 We just had an "easy cooking" thread about a week ago https://lainchan.org/%CE%94/res/9127.html tl;dr: use https://based.cooking/

You can find a ton of recopies at https://based.cooking/ >>9166 Macaroni casserole aka makaronilaatikko/makaronilåda. >https://www.scandinaviafood.com/swedish-macaroni-casserole-recipe.php or https://scandicuisine.com/finnish-macaroni-casserole/ Eat it with tomato ketchup. In Finland, minced meat is used instead of ham. Lasagna or moussaka are also good options.

>>9158 >>9165 Ѕugar iѕ metаbolically unheаlthier for yοu than caffeine thοugh

>>9127 >>9163 I agree that learning to cook pasta is a great idea! I like to make an easy tomato sauce where i sauté a clove of garlic and a small onion chopped up. When theyre about brown i add around half a tube of tomato paste. After that, i add cream and pasta water depending on how thick i want the sauce to be. Water can also be used instead of pasta water, but pasta water has benefits like adding starch and salt to tie in with the pasta. If you want it to be more creamy you can add shredded parmesan (not mozerella, it will make it sticky) and/or a bit of butter. For seasoning i do nothing fancy, i just like chilli flakes, salt and pepper. The occasional cayenne pepper. Basil of course.

>>9165 most adults I know are like this. Most of them when they quit are actually a-ok/mildly off for a couple days. Its a common joke don't take it seriously. >>9141 >Do americans really need their goyfuel to not fall asleep in the office? comment should be the fact that you're adding sugar to basically sugar. Why not put some salt and fat in instead ? thats how I eat my oatmeal when I do every six and a half months. another easy suggestion: roasts big hunk o meat, whatever sort. put it in a pot, cook kinda slow and save the drippings for gravy. Get a thermometer if you're worried about cooking through. Best to cover it with fat so it doesn't get too dry inside. gravy recipie: let the broth cool so you can physically remove the solid fat from the top. place some of it in a hot pan with about equal volume of flour, melt and mix to form a paste. pour in the watery broth left over and mix thuroughly, allow to simmer till its thick. good with biscuits. biscuits: 1 cup of flour 6 tablespoon of butter 1 tablespoon of baking soda (at sea level) bit of salt less than a cup of milk or so mix flour soda and salt, mix in butter, breaking it apart but try and get flour into it well. once its well integrated, mix in milk carefully. get it to be doughy but not too doughy, and get all the flour mixture wet. can always add more milk, or add a bit of flour extra if its too wet. put on counter, flatten and fold a few times, and then pat to be about as thick as your thumb. cut out disks or other shapes, put on a pan and bake in a hot oven till the bottoms are light brown. just a few things from the top of my memory.

Spaghetti is super easy. Just boil the pasta, heat up the sauce, saute some ground beef or meatballs in a separate pot and you're good to go. Stir fry is similar, literally just veggies, meat, and rice.