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the really crazy thing about cooking is that once you practice it enough (for all the gamers reading this: "grind enough exp") your threshold for wuat counts as a low effort / depression / I Dont Really Want To Cook meal rises steadily and you can feel yourself becoming the kind of person whose "chill dinner" takes 1h45 and involves three pans

broghini

ok but how do I get there from "assembling a sandwich is too much work"

silverjirachi

As someone who went through this and struggles with chronic pain and fatigue, add 1 thing semi regularly. And I do mean just 1 thing.

When I first moved out most my meals were instant ramen. Then I started adding 1 egg to that ramen to get a little protein in. In a couple months, 1 egg became two. Then it was 2 eggs and 1 chopped green onion. Then a couple months later I was adding carrots and other vegetables. In about two years I was able to skip the instant ramen part altogether and now use chicken broth and noodles and I’m basically making a ramenesque soup from scratch when I’m craving ramen. It took 2+ years total of just gradually, one at a time, adding one ingredient. Over a period of months/weeks.

Start with where you’re able. If a sandwich is too much, maybe try just a piece of bread and some meat or cheese. Focus on where you can be gradually introducing more nutrients into your body. 1 slice of deli meat. A couple weeks later, that plus 1 slice of cheese. Then 1 vegetable. Maybe they don’t all make it into sandwich form and that’s ok. But if you keep what’s the most basic and simple for yourself and slowly add 1 thing that’s not too much of a hassle, over a couple months you might start toasting the bread before putting cheese and meat on it. Then one day there’s more vegetables. Years down the line you might find yourself owning a panini press or slicing your own bread.

Most of us will never be gourmet chefs and that shouldn’t be the goal. You might not ever get to the point where you own a panini press. But the more important thing is that you’re finding ways that work, for you, gradually, in order to make your meals more nutritious. The expectation to cook a full, unique meal every night for dinner is a relatively new phenomenon and completely unrealistic for most people. Having the same 3 things you can make consistently and keep on rotation is plenty fine, especially if you get to the point where you can mix it up a little bit by adding ingredients in the method stated above. Feeding yourself should be the #1 goal, getting more nutrients in #2, and stepping it up to the next level #3 when you have the capacity to. Like with a lot of things, it’s really just about consistency. Start with where you can be consistent. If that’s 1 meal a week you cook yourself and the rest is hot pockets, but you can do that 1 meal consistently, then that’s where you start. Then when you have that down, maybe try two (of the same) meals a week, or ask what you can add to your hot pocket to make it a little better for you. (Some vegetables on the side for instance).

Don’t try to jump in from 0 to full course meal all at once or you’ll overwhelm yourself. Building a meal outward from bread and butter over a period of weeks is incredibly possible. No two peoples’ timelines will be the same, but it is entirely possible and that success will look different for everyone, and that’s also ok. As long as you’re feeding yourself, that’s what’s most important.

broghini

this is so helpful. too many times when I ask how to do something, people tell me to "just do it" like I'm supposed to already know what steps to take. and I almost never know what steps to take. someone actually telling me is so refreshing

kedreeva

For me, it was a matter of simplifying the process as well. Like, there's some merit to acquiring tools meant to reduce prep time/effort. If I had to hand chop an onion and mince garlic every time I wanted to cook, I would literally never cook anything that needed those and practically everything I cook needs those.

But this thing does all the work. I can quarter an onion half in like five seconds, and have it chopped into small pieces in 15 seconds by slapping this bad boy on the hood.

Pre-prepared foods can help, too. Jarred minced garlic isn't quite as good as fresh imo, but saving myself 15 minutes of peeling garlic and mincing it by hand means I actually use it and cook stuff because I don't have to mince garlic by hand, so it's worth it. There's even whole cloves like this now, if I want to mince but not peel, or if I need cloves not minced.

I also think that like... Finding actually simple recipes (difficult, but possible) helps. I just recently had to sift through a ton of recipes to find just one that was simple enough pickles for my taste. I just wanted to pickle some cucumber. Nothing fancy! I picked up cucumbers and dill at the produce market and wanted pickles. But every recipe I was finding had all these extra steps and ingredients that made it seem like so much work and complicated. But it wasn't! When I finally found a bare bones recipe, it was "put water, vinegar, salt, and sugar into a pot, bring to a boil and cool, pour into jars with cucumbers and dill, refrigerate 1-2 weeks" and I added garlic, because I had garlic. It didn't need to be more complicated than that. But everyone was making it seem really complicated and if I had to do all that crap I would never have made pickles.

So if you're struggling, take something you have to do and are struggling with and 1) ask if there's a tool/method to make this task easier, 2) ask if there's a pre-made version of ingredients or even a base item, and 3) ask if there's a simpler recipe.

For example your Sandwich is too much- 1) there's not really a tool to make this easier but 2) there are some frozen premade sandwiches/burgers that you could always thaw/heat and later on add something to and 3) like the person above said, you can just eat the ingredients, you don't have to put them into sandwich form. It's basically a charcuterie board at that point, and if you 2) keep some eating-ready nuts on hand you can add a handful of those and maybe later on 2) fruit that doesn't take prep like grapes (or very little prep, like an apple you can 1) cut with an apple slicing tool), and now you've gone and turned "a sandwich is too much" to "fancy little dinner involving sandwich ingredients." For less effort than a sandwich.

So that's where I started. Figuring out what part was holding me up and sneaking past it with tools and tricks.

biglawbear

Buy the pre cut fruit and veggies. Just do it.

Spending $5 on a bag of broccoli florets I'm actually gonna use cuz I can just dump them on a pan and roast them is better than buying a $3 head of broccoli that is gonna go bad because I couldn't be bothered to cut it up

madgastronomer

When you're at the point that you want to start applying heat to things -- ie, "cooking" in a simple sense, like you want to turn that cheese sandwich into a grilled cheese sandwich -- go buy How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman (or, if that seems too intimidating, How to Cook Everything -- The Basics by Bittman; if you prefer videos, Bittman's The Minimalist show is archived on YT), which is a first-principles how-to-cook book, not a cookbook (which almost universally assume you know how to do certain things).

derinthescarletpescatarian

Sam Handwich.

sufficientlylargen

If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.

zooperdoopers

I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)‌

sufficientlylargen

Oh, wary dell vone

zooperdoopers

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.

Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))

thinkedem

Where can one support the Pikiwedia, to further ruin the banes of actual information (also known as genai chatbots)?

zooperdoopers

if anyone wishes to support pikiwedia i would instead donate to the wikimedia foundation !! they are doing far more to fight for a free and unslopped internet.

also, i directly use their free (!!!!) api. pikiwedia relies directly on the wisdom and hard work of millions of wikipedia authors. protect this amazing source of collaborative open source knowledge for the many, many obvious reasons, but also so that pikiwedia can continue to scrongle it.

doodlewizardry

@justcakethanks what does wednesday mean on a foreign planet, question?

Transcript / description in alt text!

natjennie

they're gonna figure it out one of these days, I just know it.

(@justcakethanks the ewc have taken over my brain)

aceofarts

So ive been kinda obsessed with the eridian welcoming committee trend going around,

eclipsedrawsthings

I think the best thing out of the many, many, many stellar qualities of the Eridian Welcoming Committee meme/trend/collaborative gag-a-day comic strip is the fact that it’s basically impossible to guess what the punchline is going to be for pretty much any strip

I’m caught off guard by whatever message the EWC landed on every single time and it always hits like a freight train

Eridian Welcoming Committee my beloveds

milf--adjacent

Nothing in the rule book says a dog can't play basketball. There are a couple rules against trans women, however, so she'll have to leave.

eschocat

Pee changing color depending on ur hydration is very intuitive game desigm

loredwy

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

would-you-punt-them

now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense

jeaninelatragedia

holy shit.

frustratedasatruar

You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.

Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.

ivy-michaels

We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

anoraktrend

Linux is a very good and powerful alternative.

ivy-michaels

transarsonist

reminder: you cannot Personal Choises your way out of an Intentional Structural Problem

yurigirldick

Fun fact! School Chromebooks block Linux. It's not an easy alternative. You are missing the point

sabba-tumbling

As a historian and a woman, Stratt probably lives with the deep seated dread that comes from knowing we've always been one bad decade away from losing everything.

She knows whose safety will vanish as tension rises, whose rights will be rescinded first with the crisis, she knows what will be done to women and girls caught in the midst of wars and that even if the Hail Mary succeeds the harm that'll be perpetrated in those long cold years is something that cannot be undone within a century.

I think she's terrified.