Ten food hacks to make your life easier

This was almost a post on why millennial motherhood is so challenging, but turned into tactical food hacks.

This was going to be a piece about the impossibility of millennial motherhood and the wild expectations that our society has of mothers.

I realized many years back that I was holding myself to the same standards of household management as I witnessed growing up.

But my mom was a stay-at-home mom in a home with a very gender-normative division of roles and responsibilities, while I worked outside the home full-time at a series of startups, so it was truly absurd for me to have those expectations of myself.

No wonder I was running myself ragged between long commutes, days full of supporting my teams, and my desire and expectation I put on myself of home-cooked meals.

Somewhat appropriately, I’m too tired to write that particular post today, so it’ll have to wait for another day.

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Today, we’ll keep it lighter and go with some tactical hacks to make home life easier via food, because everyone has to eat. As many people in my life know, I love food. But I am also a lazy cook, so I will take every shortcut there is to take to get to reasonably good results quickly. Most of the food I cook doesn’t require a lot of steps or hands-on stirring.

So here are a few food hacks off the top of my head. As I think of more, maybe there will be a part 2 or even part 3.

It’s hard to differentiate between what everyone knows and what few people do — like when you pair program with someone at their desk and they use an unknown keyboard shortcut that they thought everyone knew. So some of these may be obvious, but hopefully a few are new and helpful.

1. Refrigerate your avocados when they’re ripe. How could we talk about millennial motherhood without talking about avocados! This is the secret to having a steady supply of perfectly ripe avocados and never throwing out overripe avocados. I am shocked when people have rotting avocados on their counters. We buy bags from Trader Joe’s when they are hard and leave the whole bag on the counter to ripen (doing this also ensures more consistent ripening, whereas buying them ripe often results in rotting parts). Once they are ripe (gives a little under pressure), throw the whole bag in the fridge and remove them one-by-one as you consume them. Once you’re down to only a few ripe ones, buy or take another unripe bag out of the fridge to ripen. If you’re not consuming huge amounts of avocados, do the same with individual avocados instead of bags. Ripe avocados stay perfectly ripe in the fridge for at least a week or two.

2. Make the Trader Joe’s blueberry muffin mix and add an entire thawed bag of frozen blueberries. The mix comes with some freeze-dried blueberries you have to rehydrate. Other mixes often come with canned blueberries. But it’s not very much. My ideal for blueberry to muffin ratio comes from Small World Coffee in Princeton (pic of said muffin), which was more like blueberries held together with muffin. Adding an entire additional thawed bag of frozen blueberries is a pretty reasonable approximation of that ratio. You can leave it in the fridge overnight to thaw, or run it under water in a colander if you didn’t plan ahead. This has been a big hit with kids and adults alike these past few months.

3. Freeze rinsed, uncooked rice for fast rice porridge. Congee, or rice porridge, typically takes awhile to cook, because the rice has to break down. If you rinse uncooked rice and freeze it, the expansion of the water while freezing does a lot of this work for you. You can leave a small container of rice in your freezer, and you’re ~20 minutes away from rice porridge anytime. The linked recipe has a lot more ingredients for a more fully seasoned congee, but it’s pretty common to just have rice and water, and then add toppings when you eat it.

4. Crack an egg in your ramen. I have to imagine this is a well-known one, but poach an egg in your ramen! It cooks in the seasoned soup and is delicious. If you’re not a fan of runny eggs, you can break it up so it cooks more. If I want to make sure the noodles don’t overcook with the cold egg lowering the temperature of the pot, I finish cooking my noodles first, take it out with chopsticks, and then cook the egg in the soup. Also delicious: frozen corn kernels and a slab of butter on top of everything right when you serve it.

5. Use up fridge stuff with soup. Home cooks have probably been doing this since the beginning of time, but sometimes we become so dependent on following recipes and getting exactly ingredients that we forget this is a delicious option. A few years ago when we weren’t eating out at all, almost every Sunday, I made a big pot of veggie and tomato soup, dicing carrots and potatoes, throwing in whatever leafy greens we had wilting in the fridge, adding a big can of diced or whole tomatoes, and a few cups of water. It made a hearty soup that we modified throughout the week for lunches — with fried egg, avocado slices, sliced chicken, etc.

These next few hacks do require some specialty appliances, so they’re only really hacks if you have those appliances around already.

6. ABC soup [requires Instant Pot]. Another recipe-less (or rather, no exact recipe) soup! My friend Winnie taught me this one. No, it doesn’t have alphabet pasta in it…it’s actually a super simple but comforting Chinese soup, with A, B, and C representing the different vitamins in the soup. Chinese soups can be quite intimidating, but this one is so simple, we make it most weeks during the winter months. Throw about a pound of frozen chicken drumsticks or thighs into the Instant Pot, and add a few pinches of salt. Add chunks of potato, tomato, carrot, and whatever other veggies you’d like — chunks of corn on the cob is really nice as well. Add 2-4 cups water, depending on how concentrated you’d like the flavors to be. I usually add around 4 because I like to drink the soup. I like to add some ginger and white pepper. Cook at high pressure for 25-30 minutes. It comes out so good every time.

7. Ready-to-sous-vide frozen meat [requires sous vide machine, and optionally vacuum sealer (or freezer bags with water displacement method)]. This is a recent one for us, as we are getting more into sous vide. At first, I couldn’t fathom waiting hours for a meal to cook, but it’s actually a very hands-off meal prep that complements remote work really well. Freeze meat with spices and vacuum seal. This could be chicken breast with salt, pepper, lemon slices, and rosemary/thyme — this will be the juiciest chicken breast you’ve ever had. Or steak with salt and pepper. It can go straight from the freezer into the sous vide container, usually for at least an hour and flexibly up to a few hours, and then you just quickly sear it and serve.

8. Stand mixer to mix wonton or dumpling filling [requires stand mixer]. This is only a time saver if you’ve already decided that you’re going to make wontons or dumplings by hand instead of buying them frozen from the supermarket. But I’ve been doing this more recently, and having the stand mixer to mix everything up helps me get over the mental resistance of making wontons from scratch. As a child, I often manually mixed dumpling filling with chopsticks, and it was much more tiring and time-consuming. We also use it to make some version of Nom Nom Paleo’s wonton filling, and use an ice cream scoop to make meatballs, which go in the air fryer.

9. Immersion blender mayo / hollandaise [requires immersion blender]- Eggs Benedict always felt like something that would be hard to make at home, requiring patience and a double boiler, but the other day, I looked up a recipe online. The hollandaise sauce came together in just a few minutes. Homemade mayo also comes together super quickly and is delicious.

10. Get an air fryer. This seems like cheating because it’s not so much a hack as a recommendation for an appliance. Technically, air fryers are just convection ovens with a marketing makeover. However, because of the small size, it heats up quickly and crisps things up nicely. There are two main types of air fryers — bucket and oven. The bucket kind has a handle and you pull out a deep drawer that food goes into. The oven type looks like a glorified toaster oven. We have the Ninja Foodi Flip Oven, which we selected because the cooking area of the buckets ones looked too small for our family. It is a game-changer — we use it multiple times a day. For anything you’d put in a regular oven, you can cook it in this appliance with < 1 min preheat time (cookies, roast vegetables, fish, wings), and because it is smaller and circulates the hot air, it takes about 2/3 of the regular cook time. So instead of waiting 10 minutes for your oven to pre-heat and 20 minutes for your broccoli to roast, you can stick the broccoli directly in and air-fry it for about 10 minutes and it is perfectly crispy. This can be dangerous, because if you keep a stocked freezer, you are always 8 minutes away from perfect onion rings or 12 minutes away from very crispy tater tots. But it also makes a veggie side or broiled salmon an under 12 minute endeavor from start to finish.

If you try any of the above, let me know how it goes!

And now for the fun part: What are your favorite food hacks? Favorite air fryer recipes?