TL;DR > Also, please mention whether you work outside home or primarily within home (as a homemaker or a long distance worker)
Do some part of my work from home, but go to office too. > How much time here do people spend actually cooking the food they eat? To make the data more useful, calculate the time you spent over the past week in total. I have a lady who comes in to cook and clean twice a week. So my cooking is purely based on whether I feel up to it. I usually cook on weekends, and time actually spent exclusively in preparing the food would be about an hour, maybe two. > > I would expand the question to "How much time do you spend managing the food ecosystem in your household?" Our cook and housekeeper takes care of ordering basics from our neighbourhood store, which delivers. I shop for things I want that our kirana guy does not stock, and a bit of meat and fish, usually once every two or three week, a couple of hours each time, including getting to the mall and back. TM;SI* I can barely claim to cook. Until a few months ago, I prided myself on a good fluffy omelette, getting the coffee powder right in my filter, and recombining leftovers and sauces. The lady who cooks for me isn't comfortable outside the spices-and-oil thing, though she uses far less in my house than she does in her own home or elsewhere. She does rice, daal, veggies, a meat dish enough for a couple of meals. My cooking is purely based on whether I want something different from the stuff she knows. She has worked for us for nigh on 15 years, and when Mum was alive, she would cook under her supervision, not really paying attention to the methods, so she can't re-create family recipes, Anglo-Indian food. Also, she's Muslim, so we had no pork, which I love, and now we can eat that, since I buy and cook it. I only started cooking regularly a few months ago, when I resurrected my mum's electric rice-cooker. Yes, it cooks lots more than rice, once you get the hang of figuring out adding ingredients at different stages depending on cooking times and prepping some things before tossing them in. I've been messing around with it, learning from advice from friends and recipes online. Mostly it's one-pot cooking, with some prep (rinsing, soaking, chopping, marinating, sometimes a little pre-cooking on the stove). With the RC, once it's in the pot, I practice delegation and go off and do other things while it does its thing. So time taken varies depending on the prep work needed and what else I have to do. My grocery shopping is mainly to indulge this quest of mine, getting herbs, spices and veggies the carts near home don;t have, and mildly exotic stuff from the foreign goods shelves, as well as meats. By the way, if any of you, like me, did not cook because you'd never learned, I thoroughly recommend a rice-cooker. It takes a lot of the pain and trial-and-error out of cooking, is simple (two options: Cook and Warm (the third is switch off the power at the plug)) very versatile, and rather foolproof (I have no culinary disasters to date, and I'm a bigger doofus in the kitchen than in other parts of life). This Ebert essay - https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/the-pot-and-how-to-use-it - helped me make up my mind to just go for it. You might like the read. Cooler friends are recommending the Instapot and variants of it, These basically have more controls.I haven't reached the limitations of the RC yet, so I haven't been tempted. I found some of Mum's handwritten recipes, and once I get used to the idea that I can sort of cook, the next goal is to try and make those. * tangential meandering; safely ignored
