heh


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celechii
@celechii

watching cooking youtube videos and being crushed by how involved so many "basic" and "simple" recipes are in their ingredients or the tools they use to make things, so looking up "depression cooking" and having my will to live return from watching a 93yo woman who has almost the same name as my late grandma just throw onions and potatoes in a pan with oil, sliced hot dogs, a bit of red sauce, and lil water to get a meal to feed a whole family


celechii
@celechii
This post has content warnings for: eating disorder venting.

StrawberryDaquiri
@StrawberryDaquiri
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in reply to @celechii's post:

it's infuriating how hard it is to find actual simple recipes since so many recipes that are absolutely not the fuck simple like to put "simple and quick" in there for SEO bullshit reasons. i've learned a lot of cooking over the past 4 odd years (guess when that started) and i've learned that most recipes you find online are overcomplicated bullshit

nowadays i can usually cross reference multiple recipes to try and get a set of lowest common denominator ingredients and steps but jesus christ i shouldn't have to be a recipe sleuth in order to come up with these

right?? like god damn it'd be so cool to have recipes or cooking videos that describe vaguely how you make things with like a breakdown of how to do the core part of it, what makes it work, and from there what extra shit you can do to it to change it up. i feel like it'd also really help with building intuition about how foods work as you start to see different ingredients being added to different recipes to give similar effects

it isn't the cheapest option in the world (approx $15/meal) but I recently discovered wecookmeals.ca (after freezing up at the sight of how much preparation other sites like hellofresh were declaring was 'easy', but not being able to stand any more frozen grocery chain stuff), and it's anywhere from "fine" to "actually delicious" like 90% of the time (10% of the time I can't stand it but that's life, you just learn which ones not to order). it's hard to say how much is just in my head but I swear just switching from mass-produced frozen microwave food to locally-produced refrigerated microwave food did a lot for my energy and so on..... long-term I'm still intending to stare down my anxiety about cooking but hey one battle at a time

also: you can get "Ensure Plus Calories" for like $2/can if you buy a 12-pack, and not only did that finally get me from "severly underweight" to just "underweight" on a BMI chart (not that BMI or even weight in general is a great way to look at health, but like, there's so little else to go on), but for whatever reason, it's one of the only foods in the world (liquid or solid) that actually steadies my stomach for some reason? they call it a "meal replacement" but I don't know how safe it would be to eat it INSTEAD of actual meals; I've been having it as a snack between meals sometimes (partly because I can't eat big meals so I'm always hungry between them anyway) and I'm no doctor but it's probably healthier than most of the snack foods I would've had otherwise, at least

also, if you do want to look for stuff you can prepare yourself, my best cheat code so far is "slow cooker dump meals" -- it usually means 1) almost no preparation beyond chopping and mixing the ingredients, and 2) maybe more importantly: because it's a slow cooker, you aren't doing the preparation in the evening when you're already hungry and tired from work; you do it in the morning (or maybe lunch break), and all you do once work is over is just take it out and eat. I got up the nerve to try it exactly once, and it was easy and delicious, and so were the leftovers. and in typical fashion, despite this, I haven't successfully stared down a second attempt yet. but it's nice to know a good plan exists once I'm up for tackling it

as a live alone with an ED i had to figure out quick hacks to get food in my system so i'll happily help u figure out easy recipes/things that are base skill level!!!! i do love baking but cooking is difficult to me bc i dont love doing it.

like genuinely there's no shame in calling a bowl of cereal a meal and i think there's a lot of hacks like that that u simply have to know about? which is annoying lmao. but yeah i'll happily share my depression meals!

i feel it!! i grew up with a great relationship to baking and it makes me so happy, but cooking was always a chore that everyone in my family dreaded, which sucks cause i see so many people i care about really loving food and cooking and i'm like i want to love it too!! its just hard. id really really love to hear your depression meals if you'd like to share them :host-joy:

This week I literally threw four potatoes, a cup of frozen peas (eyeballed it), and cut up a bunch of costco hotdogs into a pot, boiled them all, drained the water, put the potatoes back in w/o the other stuff, mashed them, and then put everything back together. It was great, and super easy!! Made a whole fucking pot too, I've been working through leftovers for a few days. Also, if I ever come visit, I will cook for you!!

omg that sounds like such a good meal??? it's so nice to have things that give u leftovers for days afterwards. also i would LOVE it u came and visited and also cooked for me hehehe