Making cooking suck less, part one: Be Your Own Prep Cook

There are some fundamental truths in life, and one of them is this: If you never eat, you will quickly die. Even the dumbest dumbass you can think of has to figure out a way to feed himself.

It’s for this reason that cooking will be part of all of our adult lives. But contrary to what food porn would have you believe, not everyone orgasms at the sight of a perfectly seasoned cast iron skillet.

In fact, a lot of people really, really hate cooking. They find it stressful, boring, and tedious. All the planning and chopping and cleaning totally sucks. Although some people might enjoy parts of the chore, cooking is still a chore. But unlike doing laundry or cleaning the toilet, cooking isn’t a chore that can be put off for very long. True, if you never do laundry, you’ll eventually become Smelly Guy. But that’s small potatoes compared to the consequences of not eating. If you don’t eat, you’ll become Nutritional-Deficiency Guy and eventually Dead Guy.

I conducted a very scientific Facebook poll of my friends and found out there are three things that people who hate cooking (and even people who love cooking) hate the most: Planning, prepping, and cleanup.

My biggest tip for those people, and myself, is BYOPC: Be Your Own Prep Cook.

In a restaurant, the prep cook is the dude who does all of the suck work for the bigwig chef: Chops veggies, grates cheeses, etc., so the fancy chef can do the magic fun parts.

Do your weeknight self a favor and spend an hour or so on Sunday doing all the prep work for the week, since that’s the biggest time sucker for making meals. Grate all the cheese you’ll need for pizza or lasagna. Wash and cut all of the veggies. Chop onions and garlic and herbs. Do it all at once. Just power through it. It might be unfun in the moment, but you will thank yourself later in the week.

I did this last weekend and wanted to make out with my Sunday night self the entire rest of the week. When it was Monday at 6:00 pm and time to roast broccoli, I wasn’t wasting time chopping. I dumped the already washed and chopped broccoli onto a sheet pan, drizzled it with olive oil and salt, and roasted it in a 425-degree oven for 20 minutes. That weeknight veggie prep took 1 minute.

On Tuesday when I wanted to add carrots, onions, and bell peppers to black beans and rice, I took the already diced veggies out of containers and dumped them in the pan. This took 10 seconds.

I did the same thing later in the week for green beans, asparagus spears, Swish chard, sugar snap peas, garlic, rosemary, and thyme. Store your chopped, diced, and grated everything in plastic containers in the fridge. The only foods this doesn’t work for are fruits and veggies that will turn brown, like apples, pears, and white potatoes. It’s perfect for everything else.

If you can faithfully find the time to BYOPC every week, you’ll save yourself so much time when you’re hurrying to make dinner after work. The prep time will be less, and the cleanup time will be less, too.

Stay tuned later in the week for more ways to make cooking suck a little less, but until then, what are your favorite kitchen tips? Tell us in the comments below.