Nutritional Skills to Achieve Consistency in the Kitchen

Nutrition
21

[quote]twojarslave wrote:
What I am trying to do is find ways of eating that fit into my busy life, complement my lifting and fat loss goals and are sustainable long-term practices for me. Building healthier habits, if you will.[/quote]
Dan John talked a ton about the importance of meal prep and meal planning here:

“…for the past few years we’ve used a simple menu that usually rotates between three basic things: a grill night, followed by a chicken “with something” evening, followed by a kind of stew.
…
Josh Hillis told me that the secret to long-term fat loss is substituting two training sessions a week for food shopping and food preparation…”

For me, as soon as I realized that delicious food doesn’t have to be crap-filled, the better I felt and performed. “The more you cook, the better you look” is corny, but pretty true.

In my kitchen, I have kosher salt, pink sea salt, black pepper, white pepper, crushed red pepper, garlic powder, garlic salt, basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme, chipotle powder, cayenne, cumin, cardamom, coriander, turmeric, ginger, wasabi powder, dry mustard, Chinese five spice, cinnamon, tarragon, paprika, cilantro, parsley, sage, Frank’s Red Hot, tabasco, horseradish, brown mustard, yellow mustard, soy sauce, apple cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, rice wine vinegar, and sherry vinegar.

I can and often do use any combination of those, without really requiring a ton of thought or complicated recipes, to increase flavor while adding basically zero calories. That said, I’m also a fan of the “5 ingredients or less”-type recipes. And really, that’s pretty much always enough if you pay the littlest bit of attention to what you’re doing.

As far as particulars, I have three real go-to’s: A chunky chicken chili (black beans, red beans, chopped tomatoes, diced chicken breast, chipotle powder, red pepper flakes, and tabasco), an indian-spiced chicken (chicken thighs marinated overnight in rice wine vinegar, garlic, ginger powder, and turmeric, then simply sauteed), and a simple roasted chicken (only salt and pepper on the skin, an onion or head of garlic in the cavity, in the oven for about an hour on 450. I usually do the gibblets quick in a pan with some butter for a little snack while I wait).

Michael Ruhlman’s “Ruhlman’s Twenty” is a great, pretty easy to follow book that explains the basics and just-above-basics of cooking with several different methods (roasting, sauteeing, frying, braising, etc).

22

[quote]Yogi wrote:
… and TUPPERWARE. You’re not a bodybuilder unless you own a load of tupperware.[/quote]
21st century bodybuilders watch for BPA, man. Xenoestrogens are a motherfucker. :wink: I’d go glass or stainless steel only.

23

[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:

[quote]Yogi wrote:
… and TUPPERWARE. You’re not a bodybuilder unless you own a load of tupperware.[/quote]
21st century bodybuilders watch for BPA, man. Xenoestrogens are a motherfucker. :wink: I’d go glass or stainless steel only.[/quote]

dude, you’ll be trying to get me to quit smoking next

24

Ok, so where I live most houses don’t even have big kitchens with tons of pantry and counter space like the most basic room in America. And then I live in a normal one room apartment, so there is virtually no counter space and washing dishes (no dishwasher) is a mega pain.

“What to do when your kitchen hates you.”

Just learning how to move in my kitchen and do everything efficiently, For example, If I pull out a kilogram of chicken (2.5lbs) but am only going to eat a third or a fifth of that, I still often cut it all at once and then store it again. If I did I waited to cut it again, I’d just have to wash the cutting board and knife again next time. And I think I perform the tasks with more speed and efficiency when there is a large amount in front of me (GET IT DONE! kind of mentality).

Not worrying about 6 meals a day and just having three. Less cooking. Bigger meals. Happy me.

Having all your spices properly organized, dried foods (oatmeal, rice, beans) in an easy to access location. And those glass containers from IKEA look purty.

Buying NEW fry pans for specific foods. I have this tiny circular fry pan that I use mainly for eggs. It cooks them consistently since the egg has the same thickness all around and quickly since the fry pan is smaller.

KNOW what you are going to cook and what you need, and then have EVERYTHING ready before you start!!!

Also those sandwhich bags are huge time savers for stuffing things into the fridge.

25

I feel that learning how to cook and developing the interest in cooking as a skill makes it more fun which gives you more motivation to prepare great meals. Also by marinating meat before I leave for school, all I have to do when I get back is cook it and it’s ready and flavorful in ~10 min

26

[quote]twojarslave wrote:
I am especially interested in hearing from people who are not content to eat bland food all the time.

~twojarslave[/quote]

Dammit, why you gotta exclude me like that?

But seriously, I would like to make a small contribution to the discussion even though I’ve been disqualified.

By the way, there is another person who takes a similar approach to my “most of the time” habit of purposely making my food plain and non-rewarding. Her name is ChickenTuna if you want to google it sometime. It seems to work for her, I don’t know. But mostly I just wanted to give you an excuse to google that name, you’ll see.

Anyway, I’ve seen some good advice and recipes and stuff here. But let’s distill this down again. Your present goal is fat loss. And muscle preservation, but if you can suspend disbelief for a second, let’s just pretend that muscle loss is not going to be a problem.

So if the goal is fat loss, the thing you need to be consistent about is eating less. What kinds of daily habits can you improve or implement that would make it easier for you to consistently eat less.

What are you eating when your kitchen skill deficiencies leave you with nothing healthy and pre-prepared? Which foods are kicking you out of your groove? Look for patterns and start grabbing some of these things by the roots and pulling them out. Start with the ones where small efforts will lead to big changes.

Because once you get your kitchen skills and habits sharpened, those other things aren’t going to go away.

Great topic for a thread and once again - great job so far and keep up the good work. Although I’m a little pissed about the scale embellishments, but I’ll let it go. I’m sitting here trying to connect patterns in the weights you are reporting with root causes and I’m unknowingly working with corrupted data.

27

just to touch on what Serge has said about bland food:

My meals on the go - eaten out of tupperware at work - are chicken breast, white rice, a tablespoon or two of fat and veggies if I can be arsed to prepare them. More often than naught, I can’t be arsed cooking the veg so it’s just chicken and rice.

Bland? Yup. Boring? You betcha.

But it serves a purpose. I meet my macro targets, and all the preparation I need to do at night is tip some cooked chicken into a tub, and scrap some rice out of the rice cooker. No hassle whatsoever.

And by being so dilligent with my pack lunches (of which I eat two or three in a day) I can do pretty much whatever I like when I’m having dinner. Dinner is always huge, tasty, with tons of veg and stuff like that. I also snack on fruit during the day, so I’m definitely getting all the required nutrients without any real hassle.

So yeah. What I’m trying to say is there’s definitely a time and a place for bland.

28

[quote]Serge A. Storms wrote:
What are you eating when your kitchen skill deficiencies leave you with nothing healthy and pre-prepared?
[/quote]

Let’s be clear here. I wouldn’t consider myself deficient in my kitchen skills at all. I’m probably well ahead of the meathead pack. I’m just looking to get better is all.

I’d call myself an above-average cook. You won’t see me on Iron Chef, but I cook much like I lift. I focus on big basics, solid execution and try not to get too far away from simple.

Eggs are my fall-back food at the moment. This has not really been an issue for me since re-focusing on fat loss. I buy in bulk, so I always have healthy food on hand. If I happen to get caught with no eggs, I can be eating pan-seared tilapia and steamed veggies in about 20 minutes.

[quote]Serge A. Storms wrote:
Which foods are kicking you out of your groove? Look for patterns and start grabbing some of these things by the roots and pulling them out. Start with the ones where small efforts will lead to big changes.
[/quote]

Well, there is not much mystery to solve there. Beer is pretty much the only thing that gets me out of the groove, and I’ve been doing a B+/A- job of cutting that out. Thanks, vodka!

Cake has always been a weakness, but not buying cake has been a good way for me to control my cake consumption.

Solid calories have really not been a recent problem for me, other than the logistics of shopping, planning, prep and cleanup taking too much time. Hence this thread for ideas on making that less of a time sink. I actually enjoy eating well.

I’m also doing a fine job of avoiding my GF’s poorly-hidden caches of junk food. I just don’t crave much junk food. I’ll crave steak, potatoes, more steak and pork chops.

And yes, I had to come clean about lying to myself and log followers about weight! It was stupid, I know. You can basically add 5 pounds to my reported weight for much of my log’s history. With a buffer for water weight, I figure about 6 pounds of fat loss since renewing my vigor for this goal.

So from 9/29 to 10/17 I went from 298->291 with no measurable loss in strength and a few PR’s along the way. I’m happy with this, and it has not been particularly grueling for me. I just miss my beer.

29

[quote]twojarslave wrote:

Let’s be clear here. I wouldn’t consider myself deficient in my kitchen skills at all. I’m probably well ahead of the meathead pack. I’m just looking to get better is all.
[/quote]

Oops, didn’t mean it to sound that way. You are way ahead of me on the kitchen skills, man. I just meant you were trying to improve on where you were.

I hear you on that one.

30

Literally, I learned by trial and error.

Pick some foods that fit within your guidelines, e.g., meat, veggies, and grains or fruits (if applicable). Find some recipes online - start simple. Follow the recipes as directed.

Once you’ve made these foods a few times, you get adept at learning how to mix and match, and even make them from blind memory. Start making more complex, time-consuming recipes. Before long you just get skilled at learning how to cook, temperatures, seasoning preferences, and so forth. Cooking is something that you just learn by doing, it’s not exactly a spectator sport.

Chris C’s response was pretty solid. You’ll want to stock some basic seasoning blends, beyond salt and pepper. Quite a few veggies are succulent when they are sauteed in soy sauce, garlic, some cooking oil, lemon and salt/pepper. You can even throw in some cooked bacon or chopped almonds for added protein and fat.

I have an entire bookmark folder on my computer full of recipes that are “clean,” and adaptable whether fat loss or LBM gains are the goal, e.g., garlic/tomato/zucchini/eggplant, creamy mashed cauliflower, green beans with almond and bacon, stewed green beans, homemade chicken or shrimp stir fry with peanuts, sauteed broccoli, crock pot chicken and pork roast recipes, broiled pork chops, no-carb flax bread (eggs, egg whites, ground flax seed, olive oil, baking powder), grilled or pan seared steak recipes, Italian sausage/pepper/onion sauteed in white wine, pan seared tuna, and more.

31

Group tip threads like this are always cool. It’s great to see solid info coming in from everyone.

One more thing I forgot to mention that I think is pretty useful, we keep a simple monthly calendar printed out and posted on the side of the fridge just to keep track of regular schedule stuff, but I’ll jot down what we had for dinner each night.
A) It helps keep track of leftovers so I don’t eat two-week old pork chops. And B) It blatantly shows how often we have crap (pizza or fast food) and how repetitive, or not, the meals are.

But like some guys have mentioned, a repetitive/boring/consistent diet can definitely be helpful for meal planning. If you can mentally tolerate it, go for it.

[quote]Yogi wrote:

[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:

[quote]Yogi wrote:
… and TUPPERWARE. You’re not a bodybuilder unless you own a load of tupperware.[/quote]
21st century bodybuilders watch for BPA, man. Xenoestrogens are a motherfucker. :wink: I’d go glass or stainless steel only.[/quote]
dude, you’ll be trying to get me to quit smoking next[/quote]
“With regard to smoking, here too I must plead guilty, I am not a non-smoker. As is, of course, true in regard to practically everything, excess in smoking is very injurious. Moderation in all things should be the motto.” - Arthur Saxon, The Development of Physical Power in 1906.

Nah, you’re good. Ha.

32

I just wanted to share that tonight I am making a green bean and potato stew, with smoked ham and cranky sausage. I should be called the theChef.

tweet

33

I have this recipe book, which is all 3 and 4 ingredient recipes. They are all very tasty and easy to make and combine with other dishes.

My favourites are the lentil dhal (takes about 15 min to make) and the Brussels sprouts with creme fraiche and almonds (add chicken or bacon).

34

[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
One more thing I forgot to mention that I think is pretty useful, we keep a simple monthly calendar printed out and posted on the side of the fridge just to keep track of regular schedule stuff, but I’ll jot down what we had for dinner each night.
A) It helps keep track of leftovers so I don’t eat two-week old pork chops. And B) It blatantly shows how often we have crap (pizza or fast food) and how repetitive, or not, the meals are.
[/quote]

We keep a list of cooked food at our house too on the refrigerator, it serves to make sure we eat our leftover dishes before they go bad and that we dont waste any food. We’ve all had that one dish or two that got pushed to the very back of the fridge and covered up until it was eaten alive by mold…

35

Old thread, but reading through it thought it would be worth bringing back up.

I think honestly a crockpot, rice cooker, baking sheet, tupperware/bags and a little block of time (1-2 hours) one day a week is all you need to be ready for the week and to keep a person consistent with food.

On Sunday’s I literally spend 2 hours doing the following:

Chop most of my meat, veggies, fruit
Put something in the crockpot (meat and veggies)
Bag my fruit for smoothies
Put veggies in tupperware to have ready for week
Turn on the rice cooker
Crack 16 eggs in my muffin tin and bake (20 min)

That literally takes me 1-2 hours depending on what all I’m doing and that’s it. All my breakfast and lunches are ready for the week. These days I’ve been eating 2 meals a day so it’s a bit different but similar. Then when the wife and I come home, dinner takes 20 minutes or less because everything is prepped just needs to be cooked.

I don’t think I could ever NOT prep my whole life. Even when I have kids, we going to prep. Spending 1-4 hours on ONE day a week saves you money, time, keeps you eating well, and also you just don’t waste food!

2 Likes
36

Similar to the guy above this post, on Sunday I make my breakfasts and lunches for next five days. Overnight oats for breakfast mixed with protein, and lunches are just the usual trite of meat/carb/veg.

If I’m feeling adventurous (read: lazy), I’ll also bring in a premade shake and some fruit.

For dinners, same same, just smash something into a slow cooker on the weekend, maybe also make some pasta sauce so I can just lazily throw some pasta into a pot during the week.

Prepping is great when you make a habit of it, and there’s nothing worse than having to make food after deadlifting or squat session… well actually there are plenty of things that are worse, but point is clear, avoid food prep at all costs after lifting.

37

It’s kind of funny to see my own reply in this thread from 5 years ago, when I was living alone in an apartment (my wife and I were dating at the time but didn’t even live in the same city yet!)

Even today as a married man with a one year old, I stand by the original post, with some additional notes:

  1. my wife and I use a cookbook called “Cook Once, Eat All Week” that gives you a grocery list & prep instructions for multiple meals all following a basic template: each week is centered on one big portion of protein (“beef roast” / “whole chicken” / etc) that you can prepare a couple different ways with different sides / accompaniment. Highly recommended, thus far we’ve been happy with most of the meals we’ve tried. That handles dinner most of the time for us these days.

We used to do most/all of our meat in the slow cooker (except when it was grilling weather, or searing a steak in a cast-iron skillet) but a recent revelation is our pressure cooker (which we’ve had since our wedding, but only got around to using recently). Very happy with our first couple uses of this as well, handy when we’re trying to meal prep a LOT of food (can start one thing in the slow cooker and then do another big hunk of protein in the pressure cooker).

  1. Now that I have to eat quickly at work, I prep a couple of very simple lunches (similar to what some others discuss above - for one example, on Sunday I’ll cook 1 cup of rice, brown 3-4 pounds of ground beef, season the meat liberally, and portion out into 5 lunch containers) that are not anything special but good enough to eat & which keep me on track during the work week.
1 Like
38

The thing that made me most happy about this thread is seasoning meat with cacao. I thought it was something weird that I did, but it seems to be an established practice.

Today marks the end of Sunday, and I now have in my half-sized fridge three lunch boxes with

Lunch A (post-workout)

  • 80g rice (weighed uncooked, so, something like 200g cooked). This is about 20g more than the recommended serving size. Might want to trade that for something else in the future…
  • 170-200g of beef, made in a slow cooker,
  • small assortment of vegetables (mostly because my lunch box won’t fit that much more content),
  • doused with the sauce from the slow cooker

Two lunch boxes with,
Lunch B (off-day)

  • Salmon & tuna salad with plenty of greens and purples (pomegranate seeds, beet root, and red onion)
  • olive/avocado/sesame oil is added on the day depending on my mood

5 servings of
Breakfast A (preworkout & pre-climbing)

  • Steel Cut Oats with psylliumhusk and wheat germs. Left to sit overnight with gelatin, ground flax- and sunflower seeds and boiled today in chai tea. Left to cool, mixed peanut butter into it and protein powder and yoghurt is added on the day

Two boxes with,
Breakfast B (off-day)

  • baked eggs and egg whites together with cubes of low fat cheese,
  • small serving of nuts,
  • vegetables.
  • Sauerkraut added on the day.

And finally a lot of meat left over to be had for dinner when arriving home together with whatever greens I fancy.

1 Like
39

Since this thread has been bumped…

So right now I don’t have many meal prep skills; I cook all my meals to eat them right away. This works well enough for me because I like cooking and I have the time to do so.
My “main” meals consist of rice/pasta, with tuna/beef/salmon/chicken cooked together with a veggie, the most common ones being spinach, tomatoes, carrots, and peppers. Additions include cheese, olive oil, or half an avocado.

But in a few weeks I’ll begin university and a lot of time will be spent traveling back and forth and, umm, studying I guess. So it’d be nice to sharpen my meal prep game. Right now I have a crock pot which I have never put to much use. I saw a video from Eddie Hall about how he uses it to make steak: he basically puts in frozen steak, frozen peppers, beef stock, and salt, and lets it cook overnight, then adds rice. It’s a shame that rice can’t be cooked in a crock pot too, or it’d be perfect to save virtually all the time.

Do you have any other suggestions similar to that one? Another rather quick way of getting in A LOT of food that I’ve been experimenting with lately is through a shake. I add milk, whey, Greek yoghurt, a banana, peanut butter, ice cream, ice, and a couple drops of sweetener, and it’s pretty good. I guess I could try adding in some more stuff like spinach, whose taste I’ve heard gets covered up.

1 Like
40

Asking about equipment or recipes?

If it is the former, you might want to get a rice cooker but not before getting the essentials out of the way - i.e., if you are going to meal prep you will need a stupid amount of containers depending on how often you want to cook.

If it’s the latter: I usually thaw my meats in the fridge two days prior to wanting to cook it, I like the end result better. Also, I’d season it with a bit more creativity. While rice is a no-no, potatoes and sweet potatoes are a go-go.