Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal.
Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens.
Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup.
Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice.
Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.
For starters, I'm not incapable of nuking a frozen meal, reheating leftovers, or hard boiling eggs, things like that. Those are backup strategies still employed.
It's difficult to explain succinctly what the barriers are, and without getting in a big debate about my abilities and limits. But in a nutshell:
Start with intractable problems with pest control. If I eat delivery, I get no bugs. If I prepare fresh meals, the cockroaches, gnats and other pests immediately descend. I can't avoid standing water/dirty dishes, and so the longer I try my hand in the kitchen, the worse the bugs get. I'm a renting tenant and 100% reliant on the landlord to do the pest control, and it's ineffective. If I want a deep treatment, I have to shut down my entire kitchen, tear it apart, and put it back together afterwards. So I am roundly cursed for even trying this.
Fitness - I'm not a young man anymore and as a beginner, my time in the kitchen is very inefficient. I could spend 2-3 hours at a time for one meal in a day. I couldn't sleep or rest enough to make it up, and living with this deficit took its toll, especially if stopping to rest meant I wouldn't eat or empty the dishes from the sink, and we're back to cockroaches.
Comptenence - since I never learned how to really cook or put recipes together, I find it amazingly hard to plan out meals and produce stuff that is appealing or even normal. I found it very difficult to collect recipes and work from them, especially when trying to manage fridge/pantry inventory, and oftentimes I wound up with something edible but really weird-tasting because I put together the wrong flavors. Or, my hunger would militate against knowing what I am doing and make it incredibly frustrating to remember all the steps in cooking.
Cooking meals from scratch requires planning and organization, which I found it hard to adapt into a kitchen context, and it was crazy-making if I was hungry for breakfast now and there was nothing but dirty dishes in the sink and I didn't know where to start.
I went to the hospital multiple times last year, because I was extraordinarily exhausted and I truly felt that my heart could fail any moment if I kept that all up. It was truly traumatic. If I could merely find a middle way to preparing simple meals once in a while, just to keep delivery costs down, I would do that, but for now, I'll follow the path of least fear and trembling.
I know you didn't ask for advice, but here's some anyways. Start simple. Ramen costs about 50 cents at the market and requires only the ability to boil water and wait 5 minutes. If pests are a concern, wash and dry. dishes afterwards.
Then you can start with pasta which takes slightly longer to boil and you can get a pre-made jar of pasta sauce to put on it. You can even put cold pasta sauce on a hot pasta and it will warm up.
Neither of these dishes will harm you if you mess up cooking them, and both take less than 30 minutes. Practice makes perfect, so you can iterate and try new things.
I've had pretty intense past problems in the past, I found the best ways to address them are keeping all food and sealed containers, preferably glass jars with a ceiling lid. Doing dishes and avoiding standing water also helps. The idea is the star of the bugs. If there is no food they won't come looking.
As a side note not intended to be aggressive or attacking, if the idea of boiling pasta or Ramen induces fear or anxiety, you should seek medical help. Not everyone is typical, but everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.
You're right: I didn't ask for advice, and I consider yours to be a chauvinistic and arrogant gesture based on totally not reading or understanding my previous post. Please leave me alone.
Sorry you feel that way. You said you were desperate so I thought I'd offer some simple advice. Despite your aggression, I hope you overcome your fears and figure out how to cook for yourself and not rely on exorbitant prices from restaurants
Normal people who are used to cooking at home see it as no big deal to whip up a simple meal.
Some of the rest of us encounter insurmountable obstacles in our own kitchens.
Personally, I haven't prepared a single meal at home since last October. I've been ordering delivery at an extraordinary markup.
Several bad experiences last year put me permanently off home meal preparation. I've tried all the alternatives. I'm desperate to save money; I'm desparate to eat better. I have been left with no other choice.
Basically 100% of my paychecks go to fund those meals because the alternatives are absolutely intractable, due to several of the above factors.