Cooking your own food requires a lot. A lot more than you think. Let’s take an example, a simple one: spaghetti with store-bought sauce enhanced with sautéed garlic, onion, and mushrooms with avocado oil.

Step 01: Grocery Shopping You’ll need to get dressed, tidy up your hair or put a cap on, get in your car or on your bike (don’t forget to take your reusable grocery bag and your mask if you think there will be a lot of people and a long checkout line), get there, find parking, and go through the isles and pick out your ingredients:

= organic vegan gluten-free angel hair pasta
= organic pasta sauce
= organic (minced) garlic: optional pre-minced, saves time and effort
= organic onions
= organic avocado oil

(Of course, if you already have some of these ingredients you won’t need to buy them.)

Once you’ve got all of your ingredients in your cart, you get in line, wait, pay for them, and head back to your car or bike. Lucky you if you have a grocery store that sells organic foods within walking distance. If for some reason — weakened immune system, physical disability, etc. — you are not able to go grocery schooling online shopping and shopping services are a good option; you will have to plan a bit more ahead because they usually take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours depending on which service and how much you are willing to pay for quicker service.

Step 02: Food Prep Prepping your food starts once you get home. I have recently been forced to inventory everything I have because I had to move. Prepping food requires a lot of things:

= Refrigerator / freezer: Refrigerate leftover pasta sauce, minced organic garlic, mushrooms.

= A sink with running water. This is something we take for granted, but sometimes you don’t have access to a sink. Search on Craigslist and there are many rooms available where you are limited to using the microwave and mini-fridge in your room. And many listings prefer limited and simple cooking with no strong odor. That rules out pretty much the world’s cuisine except for US cuisine such as simple sandwiches, mac-‘n-cheese, salads (without anchovies!), etc. Sautéing garlic would be a terrible violation.

= A cutting board, and enough room to have the cutting board flat without wobbling. You don’t want your cutting board to wobble when you’re using a sharp knife to cut things.

= A sharp knife. Sharper is better: there’s less chance of it slipping and accidentally slicing something it shouldn’t. And to keep a knife sharp, you’ll need some kind of sharpening tool.

= Kitchen towels to wipe your tools, plates, bowls, and utensils as well as your hands.

= A heat source. It can be a hotpot, gas, electric, or induction stove. It can also be a wood stove.

= A pot and a wooden cooking spoon. Both I assume are clean (which requires several other items that I will cover later in this post).

With these items you can start to prep your food. Rinse your cutting board and your knife, peel the onion, chop the onion and hopefully you have some way of composting your food waste. Put them in a small bowl. Oh yes, you need some bowls. Do the same for mushrooms, though you’ll need to wash them first.

Step 03: Cook

You’ll then heat up the pot, pour some avocado oil, add the minced garlic, chopped onion, and chopped mushrooms. Use your wooden cooking spoon to stir so they don’t stick to the pot. While it is cooking, you want to rinse your knife and cutting board and put them away to dry.

Once the garlic, onion, and mushrooms are sautéed to your liking, open the pasta sauce (you might need to take out your regular dinner knife and wack the lid a couple of times at different locations to make it easier to open) and pour it into the pot, and then stir, stir, and stir some more. After the sauce gets hot enough for it to start boiling, reduce the temperature to low.

Get another pot and fill it with water. I forgot to mention, this simple spaghetti meal will require two heat sources. A cold pasta sauce isn’t as tasty so want it to be kept warm. Wait until the water boils and then add the angel hair. Stir, because if you don’t the past will stick to one another and to the pot. I prefer cooking chopsticks for this, but you can use regular chopsticks, a fork, or for those of you with high heat tolerance your fingers and check to see if the pasta is cooked. Once cooked, get your strainer out and strain your pasta. To prevent from further cooking, rinse with cold water.

Step 04: Plate

I prefer a bowl, but many prefer a plate. Take a handful of pasta and put it in a bowl or plate. Pour some sauce over the pasta. You can simply use your pot, but a tool can make it less messy. Then I grind some black pepper and sprinkle some sea salt. Oh, yes, you’ll need a pepper grinder (much better than pre-ground and doesn’t require much work if it is a good quality one).

Step 05: Eat

You’ll need some kind of table for this. Or you can use your desk. Or lap desk. I don’t want to assume everyone reading this has a proper home setup with a dining table and chairs. I don’t. I use a fork, but I’ve seen others use chopsticks to eat pasta, including spaghetti.

Step 06: Clean

Once you’ve enjoyed your organic vegan spaghetti meal, it’s time to get cleaning. Hopefully you’ve licked everything off your plate or spooned everything out of your bowl so you don’t have much if anything to throw into the trash can. Oh, you need a trash can, lined with a plastic trash bag. I like to hand wash simple items, in this case there are two pots, a bowl or a plate, a cooking spoon, a pair of cooking chopsticks, a fork, and if you drank something a cup. I rinse first then put some dishwashing liquid on a sponge and get everything off. Then I rinse again. I put on gloves to do this because you want the water to be as hot as possible: so you kill as many germs as possible. I’ll put all of this on a drying rack.

Step 07: Organize

Once they area all dry, I’ll take a kitchen towel and make certain they are dry and put them where they belong. It can be a cupboard, a ziplock bag, or some kind of container depending on your particular living situation.

From step 1 to step 7 we are looking at using up a lot of our limited resources: time, energy, focus.

STUFF

I think you can see from what you’ve just read, there are a lot of stuff involved. I mean lots! From the fridge, cutting board, knife, to pots, bowls, utensils to kitchen towels. You might even noticed that I forgot to mention an apron, or a place setting, or a napkin. There’s probably more.

All this stuff and lot of things we need to do just to cook some wholesome good-old spaghetti. Imagine what you would need if you wanted to cook something a bit more complex.

MINIMAL

Because of where I am living at the moment, I was given the opportunity to think about, “How can I eat without cooking?” If I could achieve that, then I wouldn’t need any of the things I mentioned above. So I started googling. And found Huel, specifically the ready-to-drink bottles.