Avoiding the Dark Side of food. A guide in rant form

For most people a meal on a weeknight after a hard day of work is a necessity rather than a choice. Your stomach is growling and churning, your energy levels are low and your mood has been increasingly deteriorating since about 3:30. Hunger is the path to fast food. Hunger leads to tiredness, tiredness leads to grumpiness, grumpiness leads to suffering.

Enter fast food… You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy! The unworthy adversary of good nutrition! If you choose the quick and easy path, as others do, you will become an agent of evil food, not to mention the complaints from your ever increasing waist line and your clogging arteries. The best way around this is to be able to quickly create a meal that you look forward to eating so much, that the task of creating it is as enjoyable as the final result of eating it. You must unlearn what you have learned.

So here I’m going to lay out a few things that I do on a general weeknight to quickly feed myself and my partner. Whether you’re cooking just for yourself or for others, decide you must, how to serve them best.

The Initial Idea:

All great masterpieces (and horrible failures) usually start with a good idea! You can either profit by this or be destroyed. It’s your choice. I like to start with a flavour idea and move on from there. I’d start a list, but I’m not writing a cook book here.

Whatever you feel like you can usually lump it into a generalized category and then boil it down from there. Italian? Which kind of pasta do I feel like? Do I want something saucy? Chunky? Meaty? Alright, I’ll have ravioli with a chunky sauce, or spaghetti bolognese. Simple? Ok, I’ve got some chicken, so I’ll grill that, steam some veg and microwave a spud, throw together a nice gravy. Mmm. Delicious.

Throwing It Together:

Assemble the troops! Lay out everything you need, assemble your fresh veggies and salad, or your bag of frozen veg (ugghh…if you must) and acquire/defrost/kill your required meat. Less trips to the fridge for broccoli means more energy saved (how green is that!).

Everything that transpires should do so according to your design. I try and plan my preparation to utilize my time most effectively. I know how long I take to chop things and how long it takes to cook things, so I’ll chop some onion and throw it in to start browning (in about 18 tablespoons of garlic!) while I chop everything else up. If you can, do your veg first and throw it into a bowl, then chop your meat. It saves you a wash of the chopping board during cooking and saves everything for afterwards.

Adequate Cooking Time (and YOU time):

Always in motion is the meal. So once you’ve got your ingredients in the fry pan, grill, steamer, wok, whatever, these things take time to cook right? Right! So duck off to the computer and share some dick jokes over IRC, check your RSS reader, and read some comics! There’s no mystical energy field that controls your foods destiny so occasionally nip back to the kitchen for a stir and a checkup on dinner and to add your seasoning as you go.

A Little Something On The Side:

Dinner almost ready? A side. Quick smart. Throw on some rice, or some pasta, and get it simmering away. Alright! You’ve just bought yourself another 5-10 minutes, so I’d grab something else you need to prepare or go read Neil Gaiman’s blog. Make sure you’ve got yourself a glass of red or a beer by this time, because that can be easily overlooked when you’re busy serving…

Serve, Season and Enjoy:

Presentation is just as important as taste! If your meal looks like the back end of a bantha, you’re not going to want to jump right in and start shoveling it. Try to lay your different components out so that they visually compliment each other. If you add some salt, and definitely when you add some pepper, it can serve as a garnish on blank parts of your plate as much as it can season your food.

Eat. Yub Yub.