Meals based on basic ingredients are not very hard to cook. With basic I mean noodles, rice, or potatoes. Just throw one of that in boiling salt water and make a sauce to go with it. Tomato sauce is very easy, just chop some tomatoes and fry em with an onion and some garlic. Go crazy and fry some other veggies to put them into that sauce, like bell pepper for example, courgettes, or eggplants. Cheeze sauce is also pretty tasty, just cut a weak cheese in small pieces and let those melt in boiling cream. Season it with some herbs.

Or make salad. Chop some veggies, put it all in a bowl and make a vinaigrette (oil and vinegar with some salt and pepper, maybe some herbs and mustard, then whisk that entire shit with a fork till it's creamy).

Actually, I love simple meals very much. Like rice and beans. Could eat that every day because it's so flexible. You can add almost anything to go alongside that. Or cooked spinach with potatoes and fried egg. Delicious af.

When it comes to veggies, you need to understand to differentiate roots/tubers from solanacaea from salads from beans from cabbage, because they all need to be treated differently and have different purposes. But that comes with experience, you just keep cooking and experimenting.

AS I started to live on my own I went throught the same experience.

I know many dishes, but right now Im focusing on restoring my body from the punishment of when I started to ive alone eating nothing but take out.

A good balance meal, low fat, economic and easy is always a good pot roast. Just need very basic ingredients and cheap. The only thing is that it takes a litle while.

1. buy the bigest cut of beef you can, the cheaper the better. I think the one I get is like under 3 dollars a pound in walmart, But I forgot the name. season very heavely with your taste. I use complte seasoning, cuz is easy.
fry it a litle bit on all sides, make sure its just a bit, it will finish cooking later.

2. on the same pan, fry some carrots, celery and onions for a litle bit, just to get the vegys a little colous. Then add some grlic at the last minute. Garlic burns to easy so you want to cook the other vegys first for as long as you need then add the garlic for like one minute.

3. add some beff stock and water to the same pan and just bring to a boil. Not to much, just enoughf to cover the meat, will depend how big your cut is.

4. put the meat back in the liquid. Then set in the oven at 325 farenheit for 2 hours minumun. More time if you get a really big cut of meat. remember to cover it. If you dont have a oven safe pan, or a deep enoughf pan, after all is fryed you can just transfer to a bigger tray, like thouse cheap dispossible oven tray that only cost like a dollar. This is the bigest time block, the rest is done rather quick in less than 15 min. The rest is just waiting, watch tv, play games or do what ever.

It will not burn if you leave it for longer since there will still be water in the pan, it will not over cook, even left an hour more. We use cheap meat cus it will get very tender cooked in this manner. It taste very good and is easy to make. The slow cooking melts the fat awway, well most of it anyways. and its very easy and cheap. You an always make big batches and save them for later.

Thank you very much! I'll definitely try it out! Hopefully I'm able to do it.

Hopefully it does end up being good!

And I'd like that tomato soup recipe too, when you can :)

Some very nice ideas, I also love rice and beans a lot, can see myself doing it a lot once I've learned how to. I'll try to be experimental with vegetables as you said as well. Thank you!

Thanks! I've never had Pot Roast before, but it sounds like something I could really enjoy. I'll definitely try this as well and yeah I just want to restore my body to a better state as it is right now.

Tomato soup, 4-ish servings

You need

·         2 shallots

·         3 cloves of garlic

·         tomato puree

·         3 BIG tomatoes (think the size of a decent sized apple)

·         vegetable bouillon

·         8 decilitres of water (Use google to convert it to whatever unit you prefer)

·         immersion blender

What to do:

Cut the shallots and the garlic cloves in small pieces (it would appear that my food-related English is limited, so I don’t know the word, but in Norwegian it’s “finhakket”, or “finely cut” directly translated). Fry it in a pan using some olive oil or another neutral oil. Fry it enough that it gets glossy and blank, but not brown. Then turn down the temperature and add two tablespoons of tomato puree, and try and mix it together in the pan.

(Image for reference)

Now you need to boil up the 8 decilitres of water and mix in the appropriate amount of bouillon as stated on the package of whatever type of bouillon you bought.

In addition, you need to boil up enough water to soak your three tomatoes (this is not a part of those 8 decilitres for the actual soup). Then let the 3 tomatoes soak in that for 2 minutes while the water is hot. This will make the skin of the tomatoes come easily off and you can peal it off by hand. Alternatively, you can just leave it on, but make sure you wash the tomatoes properly. Then cut out the stalk in a sort of conic shape.

Cut each tomato in four, and add everything (including the onion/tomato puree mixture) into the 8 decilitres of water. Add two tablespoons of tomato puree, and let it boil for 15 minutes til the tomatoes get nice and soft, then use the immersion mixer to mix it so that you get a nice smooth soup.

Serve with some bread and optionally hard boil some eggs and cut them in half and add them when you eat.

The end result should look like this:

(See that texture in the soup? That’s how real soup looks like. Not the sort of soup you get when you buy those bags of powder that you just add water to. That’s not soup, just tomato-ish flavoured water)

If you have any questions about the recipe, let me know and I'll try and help you out to the best of my ability!

Sources for the images:

http://i1.wp.com/trinesmatblogg.no/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/IMG_1117.jpg?w=800

http://i1.wp.com/trinesmatblogg.no/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/IMG_1153.jpg?w=800

I'd say you should try out Middle Eastern and Asian foods. They have a great amount of vegetables and essential nutrients in them.  A great recommendation is a Middle Eastern salad named Tabooleh. There's many ways to create it. Here's a link: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/tabbouleh-recipe.html

Take This



Put it in



Put that in for about a minute on full power.



Then pop a few slices of



in a



wait for it to pop, put the stuff which came out of the toaster on a plate, then put the stuff which came out of the microwave on top of that... fucking sorted, cheap, filling and somewhat healthy!

Thanks! That pic does look good and it seems easy enough to make I suppose. I'll be sure to ask if I have any issues!

That Rabooleh does look delicious and healthy, I'll check if I am able to do it :p Thank you for the link!

Damn, I could do this right now! I'll see if I like it, probably will, since I love beans. Thanks!

I've found it easy to cook using the basic ingredients for whatever I want to make. I've made pastas, traditional dinners, breakfasts, cakes, savory and sweet dishes. Always using fresh ingredients is a good start if you're learning how to cook from the basics. Using the net for some recipes and ways to cook can also be handy, for myself I resort to my old cookbook that my mother passed down to me some years back.

Yeah, I'll probably do that. Really don't know anything about cooking. Thanks!