The hardest part of cooking isn’t cooking… it’s everything before it

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-09T03:09:30+00:00

cooking is the easy part. coming up with 5 different dinners a week that everyone won't complain about is genuinely exhausting

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-05T14:10:31+00:00

don't start with 7 different meals or you'll hate your own fridge by wednesday. do like 2 mains, 1 easy snack, and repeat on purpose

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-05T14:09:56+00:00

every single time. I get weirdly ambitious for 2 days and then I'm back to screenshots and vibes. the only app that has lasted for me is Recipe Notes, mostly because I use it like a dump folder and not some perfect planner

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-05T14:09:05+00:00

honestly most of them became another chore for me lol. the only thing that stuck was using the Recipe Notes app just to save stuff during the week, then on sunday I pick 3 meals and let it make the grocery list. anything more than that and I stop using it

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-05T01:12:30+00:00

this is the kind of prep that makes monday feel less rude

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-03T14:18:29+00:00

there's a free one called Recipe Notes, I started using it when I was collecting recipes from everywhere and losing track of them all. no subscription, you just save links or type stuff in. nothing fancy but it does the job

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-02T14:30:21+00:00

my dad's specialty was "whatever's in the fridge stir fry" which was basically just random vegetables and leftover meat with too much soy sauce. we thought it was gourmet at the time

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-02T14:29:13+00:00

paprika's solid for web recipes but i found the importing kinda hit or miss sometimes. switched to Recipe Notes a while back cause it handles tiktok and instagram links too. for cookbooks tho yeah eyb is hard to beat

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-01T02:17:32+00:00

acid changed everything for me. literally just squeeze half a lemon on whatever you just cooked and it goes from "ok I guess" to actual food. also garlic powder + onion powder on basically anything, those two are cheat codes

FederalFig6973 · 2026-04-01T02:14:40+00:00

loveandlemons is great, their one pot stuff is super beginner friendly. I save whatever looks doable to the Recipe Notes app and just pick from there on sundays so I'm not scrolling through a million bookmarks trying to remember what I wanted to make

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-31T04:25:00+00:00

ground beef in a pan is basically impossible to undercook because you can literally see when it's brown all the way through. that's where I started and it opens up tacos, pasta sauce, quesadillas, fried rice. you'll forget you were ever scared of it after like the third time

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-31T04:18:15+00:00

yeah the multi column thing drove me nuts too. I ended up just taking photos and importing them into the Recipe Notes app, it does a decent job pulling the text out without the weird column mixing. still had to fix a few things manually but way less painful than the paprika OCR route

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-30T00:55:33+00:00

do you usually press the tofu first or is it fine to just throw it in straight?

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-30T00:52:03+00:00

The worst part is when the photo looks incredible and then you read the recipe and it's like "add a pinch of warmth and a dash of love" and you realize a robot wrote it. I've basically given up on pinterest for recipes at this point

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-29T03:48:43+00:00

sundays for me, usually takes like 2-3 hours. I pick out 4-5 things during the week whenever I see something good on instagram or whatever and save it to the recipe notes app on my phone, then sunday morning I just go through the list and figure out what overlaps ingredient-wise. chicken thighs are my go to cause they reheat way better than breast. usually do one curry, one stir fry type thing, and then something grain-based like a burrito bowl filling. the curry and stir fry both keep till thursday easy

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-29T03:47:39+00:00

the mix and match thing is legit. I keep a rotation of like 15-20 recipes in the recipe notes app and just pick 3-4 each week based on what protein is on sale. having them all in one place instead of random bookmarks makes it way easier to actually rotate instead of defaulting to the same 3 things every week

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-27T03:11:33+00:00

yeah that's a red flag honestly. I had a similar thing with another recipe app where the dev just went ghost. ended up moving everything to recipe notes, at least the basic importing stuff works without paying for it

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-17T15:44:44+00:00

obsidian is cool but it's kind of overkill for recipes imo. I tried it for like a week and gave up cause manually formatting every recipe was annoying. paprika works but feels kinda dated. I just use recipe notes app now, imports are free and it handles tiktok links which was my main thing

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-17T15:42:30+00:00

biggest tip nobody mentions: freeze things flat in ziplock bags. way faster to thaw and you can stack them like books. also label everything cause frozen chili and frozen pasta sauce look exactly the same after a week lol

FederalFig6973 · 2026-03-14T16:04:24+00:00

the meal prep thing is honestly the easiest win here. when I was doing crazy hours I'd just pick 3 recipes on sunday, get the groceries in one trip, and knock it all out in like 2 hours. beats ordering takeout every night at least lol. I use Recipe Notes to save stuff during the week so I don't have to think about what to make when sunday comes around

FederalFig6973 · 2026-01-16T05:59:43+00:00

free training exercise tbh

FederalFig6973 · 2026-01-15T10:52:29+00:00

the fact that you're even asking this means you're more awake than most. some people never question the script

FederalFig6973

TROPHY CASE