While I intend to keep exercising and watching my weight I’m going to eat what I want to. My friends with the healthiest eating habits are all dead. I am starting to think genetics and luck is more important.
Excellent point regarding "all dead", I'm sorry to say...
It’s true that cooking at home uses a lot of dishes, but we’ve gotten very efficient at it. I tend to cook larger batches so we eat plenty of leftovers, sometimes freeze leftovers. I’m usually cooking just twice a week, occasionally 3 times. Steaming vegetables makes little mess. I use the instant pot, grill or smoker for plenty of it, cleanup is not so onerous.
Man, I can relate! When I retired, our division of labor included KP duty for me because my wife does most of the cooking - and she’s a fantastic cook! I do all of the cooking in our outdoor kitchen, though - smoking and grilling. I also have a portable induction burner out there for fish and anything else that we may choose to cook outside and avoid the smell inside.When my wife cooks, the kitchen ends up looking like something exploded and the cleanup is brutal
Doing dishes... I don't mind, mopping up after her is not so fun.
True, but when you have a job, you end up eating out at least a couple times a week, even when you are pretty disciplined on the brown bag. That basically doubles the cost of the meal, so eating well when retired may be a bit more expensive but likely not a huge cost over food while you were working.
Thinking ahead and re-using are the key to reducing clutter during cooking. I can cook the same menu with half the amount of things to wash than DW. You can't take the engineering out of an engineer. I still remember the teachings of the best engineering class I took which applies to a lot of non-engineering things: Production management.
I didn't realize that this is a thing. DW uses way more tools than I do when I cook. Too many gadgets when a knife and a skillet would take care of most of the cooking needs. She also doesn't understand the clean as you go method. Still, hard for me to complain since she does do most of the cooking.When my wife cooks, the kitchen ends up looking like something exploded and the cleanup is brutal
Doing dishes... I don't mind, mopping up after her is not so fun.
Not sure about kale, but a cup of quinoa and black beans, covered with crumbled bacon, and a few eggs fried in the bacon fat is pretty darn good. Add a layer of your favorite real dairy cheese.
I guess someone likes it!
Spinach is much milder and has many of the same benefits as kale. I start every day with a smoothie that includes a fistful of fresh spinach (along with a carrot and celery stick.) The fruit (1 banana, frozen cherries and frozen blueberries), along with almond butter and almond milk provide enough flavor that I don’t even taste the veggies. It’s delicious and nutritious at the same time!
Okay, I’m curious. You like collards (tough), mustard greens (soft but pungent), and turnip greens (?), but not kale? What is it about kale you don’t like?I can’t stand the taste of kale. Our grocery store used to have a large selection of handy pre-washed greens including collard, turnip, mustard, mixed, etc., but now they carry only kale.
Oh we love spinach. But sometimes I just want to make a big pot of collard greens southern style, and I miss the big bags of prewashed greens. It’s so quick and easy in the instant pot.
Oh something about the flavor, even the smell, just ugh! It’s a real turn-off.
Interesting, as kale has no smell to my nose. Mustard greens, yes, a little. Spinach has a more distinctive smell to me than kale. Maybe it’s one of those things our bodies respond to individually like cilantro?
I've been making Indian cuisine for 30 years. There are a lot of shortcuts. Recently I found a website which describes making various Indian dishes using a base sauce and customizing. He said it's more like what we are used to in restaurants rather than "authentic". So I made a a bunch of the base sauce and froze quantities which allow me to make several meals such as lamb saag, chicken tikka masala and others with much less time and effort than following the "authentic" recipes do. The website's name is The Curry Guy. Much of the work can be done ahead of time.
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One of our issues is we can make better, cheaper most of the time. The prep and clean up does add to the work side. We also spend more to have grown and or preserved foods VS buying cans at the store. Growing a garden and canning the stuff was in the days of old... and 1st learned helping my great grandparents on the farm. But being we have 5 generation pictures of the last 3 generations...
