Food Savings

Can’t wait to see the day of Thor’s Instant Pot Cooking Club

Careful, we dont want YouTube or twitch to see that tasteful thumbnail

thor in a frilly yellow apron with duckies on it baking bread at 4am is a nice dream

Thor out here to become the modern day internet dad rolemodel, I'm so here for it

Cooking and gathering your own ingredients is such an important skill. Refreshing to see someone in the content/gaming space talk about this since it's so common place to order food. It's a dummy good money saver which allows for more important things such as the Heartbound demo.

Thor, the 225lbs is likely the hanging weight. The processed weight is 2/3 of that. On average, the lowest cost after processing is 4.5 -7.5 per lb. It's still a great thing to do, just clarifying for anyone budgeting it out.

So what I've learned today is, if there's ever an apocalypse and most people are eating rats, maggots and each other, Thor will be chilling out and dining on fine deluxe ramen with bok choi from the windowsill, oyster mushrooms home-grown in a bucket, and carefully fermented kimchi. Rad!

came for the game dev, stayed for the food

Wait. Thor wants to open a bakery, Ludwig wants to bake good fucking bread, Connor wants to eat some good fucking food and I want a creative workspace. I smell profitable bread.

I'm convinced Thor must be a Timelord. No way one man has enough time to do so much stuff otherwise.

The Flavor Bible was the primo recommendation of this monologue. Get that digital book, you will learn to cook gourmet sh**.

Man thor out here exposing his Noods like they’re free

The half a cow per year trick is really good, but you need a big ass freezer. And not a lot of people have space for a freezer, especially ones that co-rent apartments. Getting a big-ass freezer is a life goal of mine when I get my own separate apartment.

The thing about buying in bulk is that when you invest a day and cook a meal in overabundance, you can prepack it in "generous" portions for 1 (or more) and simply freeze them. This works well when living alone since you only need to invest a few days a month and can stuff a variety of different meals into your freezer so you don't have to eat the same food 5 days a week. This works for very well for smaller living arangements or a lack of freezer space, a "preferred method" in Germany for younger people, be it working class, students, single households, etc.

Another thing people can do that I’ve done is when meal prepping a lot of food, just freeze portions and put them in the fridge to thaw a day or 2 before! A great option is curries, soups, burritos, lasagna, casseroles, frittatas, etc. just spend an evening making 5 casseroles, freeze them, and you have weeks of food for cheap. Also check the discounted meats at the store and buy bulk when it’s on sale if you can’t afford to buy a half cow at a time!

It gets even better! Once you're done the food prep for veggies, you can store all the waste parts in a bag and freeze it. Drag it out when you need a vegetable stock and boil it for an hour. The same can be done with chicken stock and the chicken carcass and beef stock and a large beef bone when they have added onions/carrots/celery. Instead of always paying for oil, save your grease drippings in a cup and store them in the fridge, separately, of course. Those cups become instant seasonings for things like potatoes and vegetables. A pack of bacon can last you a week or two in the grease returned. Most herbs for cooking can be readily grown on a windowsill and don't take much maintenance outside of water. Fresh thyme is always preferable to dried/ground variants. Celery, garlic, and onions can be regrown from just their bases. Place the base in a large vessel and add water; ensure to change the water every day. Once the roots have grown out, they are ready to be transplanted into soil. Potatoes and rice, when bought in bulk and home-cooked, are incredible value for their price point. Used bread makers usually pay for themselves with a few months and you will have filling carbs with the best taste around. There are more ways to stretch a dollar, but these are the ones I can remember right now.

Trying to figure out how this man has time to do all the things he does, then I remembered he sleeps like a maximum of 5 hours every night and it makes more sense

This right here, Thor. I saw my grandparents (who lived through the Depression) do a LOT of this. Grandma canned, preserved, made jams and jellies, and so on. They'd buy in bulk and store it. They grew veggies and rhubarb. Tried growing an apple tree, but that tree was to its species as Charlie Brown's Christmas tree was to pines or Douglas firs (apparently the Southeast Alaskan climate was not conducive to growing apples at the time). Everyone needs to see this as an example. Do what Thor is doing. Buy in bulk, preserve as much as you can, get less fussy about what you eat, and don't prepare or buy what you can't consume in a timely fashion.

One super pro tip I'd recommend is looking into how restaurants do batch cooking, and how that can be turned into meal prep, basically using your freezer as a DVR to timeshift the slow parts of cooking into periods when you can make batches of components you later assemble into meals instead of buying some hideous premade sauce where the label cost more to produce than the stuff inside the jar. British Indian Restaurant style cooking revolves around a base sauce and protein you pre-cook and can easily freeze, plus a few additional spices and sauces you throw in. Italian restaurants make buckets of marinara sauce that get modified into what the recipe calls for. Etc. It's a total power move to be able to defrost some prepped sauce and poached meat in the microwave then make a six serving restaurant style chicken curry in 20 minutes.

Saving Pants