food

This speaks to me. I'm poor and my kitchen is busted and like 98% of recipes are out of my reach/skill, so I have to settle for basics like boiled pasta, and then I get made in fun of for being a bad cook, and the cycle continues.

I feel the "use fresh herbs" and I just grab one of the many unlabeled and covered in dust jars of dried stuff and did a vibe check of the smell.

Nothing should take you three hours that either isn't setting your house on fire or because you forgot to turn the oven on (which is a thing I have done).

The show Take Home Chef was kind of cool for that reason, the handsome Australian dude would meet people in a store and shop with them, then cook at their place with whatever equipment they had, even like just a microwave on an episode.

lol, i have ramekins and mixing bowls that i set up prior with premeasured ingredient amounts to the start of a cook so i can have all my shit ready to toss in.

i would like to pretend i picked it up as line cook in high school at this shitty place, but really the idea occured to me a decade later when i would help a friend of mine do a stir fry with fried rice in a wok over an open flame outdoors and was cemented when i was trying to replicate some street food at home. like where time is of the essence because i'm working with HIGH heat.

like not everything gets its own little bowl, but maybe there's a sequence of bowls for the stages of adding ingredients. setting it up before hand lets me critically understand the cook process, consider alternatives, and once it starts, the pressure is off because i can focus on what's happening instead of being like "oh shit, i gotta cut the X or measure the Y in 60 seconds"

but, the point of the post is taken. they really should show all the prep ahead and teach kitchen skills like safely chopping for size and speed like a real educational program, but when would they have advertising breaks?

A single cooking show where contestants are confined by the same constraints that the average prole contends with would be very worth watching. Start that shit from the grocery store too. Bonus points for fewest dishes dirtied.