If I want to contribute in #ossasepia, I will need time and health. At the moment I have neither. I am slowly gaining weight, mostly due to poor diet and lack of exercise. In this article I am going to address diet.
My wife is in law school. She lives in another city1. So providing income and food for myself and my daughter is all up to me. We eat way too much restaurant and frozen food. I can cook. I’ve made some great stews and chilis and such with the Instapot. I have baked halfway decent bread. I can prepare a decent steak. I can prepare delicious chicken thighs. But it takes time and planning, and it’s fucking to hard think of something healthy to prepare that doesn’t quickly become monotonous. And every time I want to cook something new that might taste differently I’ve got to go out and hunt down herbs that have expired or new spices, or lost spices that I haven’t used in forever. And I live in the US so that means if I need ingredients I have to drive somewhere which takes yet more time.
And there’s the problem of scale. There are only two of us and my daughter eats like a bird. Everything comes in huge portions, and I have limited space in my freezer. Not to mention that defrosting frozen meats takes extra time and care and planning. I often end up wasting a ton of money on food that came in too large a quantity, and that sits in the freezer forever because either I forgot about it or I can’t be bothered to think of something to do with it and defrost it the night before.
So my choices are either to learn how to come up with a weekly menu that is tasty, healthy, and not monotonous, or hire someone to prepare meals for the week. Since I
- need to get out of the habbit of manaloning and doing everything myself
- because I can afford it
- because I need more time and energy for work
I’m going to try to hire someone. I have gotten as far as posting a help wanted ad on Craigslist and will post future articles with progress on this front.
- Which is great, actually, but more on that in another article. [↩]