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I'm lazy so here's lazy delicious veggie tip:
Get a rice cooker. Get rice and FROZEN pre-processed (chopped) veggies. These are still very inexpensive, require no preparation, last forever in the freezer, and are actually FRESHER than "fresh" veggies, since they are picked when ripe and then flash frozen rather than picked prematurely and sprayed with a ripening agent. Your rice cooker should come with a veggie tray so you can cook the rice and veggies simultaneously. Drop them in there and fire it up. Get yourself some "simmering sauce" and heat it up in a pan for ~15 minutes and baby you got a stew goin'.
Can you elaborate on where the stew is going?
It's chasing after their refrigerator.
Is Stew alright, like in the head?
Can you elaborate on this so called simmerin' sauce please
It's just like a pre-mixed (typically middle-Eastern) sauce with coconut milk and spices and thing like that pre-prepared. It shouldn't have any preservatives or anything you can't pronounce.
Any packet sauce mix like curry or gravy'll work too
I've also heard you can cook a chicken breast on top of the bed of rice
There's many options for sauces, depending on your preferences and dietary requirements, but there are a few key common steps.
For example many Indian curry type sauces can begin with frying diced onions, some ginger, garlic, chillis, coriander seed powder, cumin powder, turmeric powder, black pepper, and tomato paste, then coconut milk to form the main body of the sauce. Don't worry if you don't have access to all of these, mix and match. Then finish with fresh coriander leaves.
Or a simple marinara type sauce begins with frying diced onions, garlic, tomato paste, followed by a glass of wine and a can of tomato to make the main body of the sauce. Add basil at the very end, as the flavor is delicate and destroyed by heat.
Notice in both cases we begin with aromatics - onions, garlic, spices - that get heated up to release the volatile flavor compounds. Then deglazing the pan and simmering with something that constitutes the main bulk of the sauce - e.g. canned tomato or coconut. Then finishing with more delicate herbal flavors that get desroyed by extended cooking. This is a general pattern that appears in foods from all over the world. The crucial part is learning how long each ingredient requires to cook for, and therefore what stage it gets added.
Once you get used to this you can begin to enjoy the creativity and rewarding nature of cooking, and explore the world through food. Like the Indian example above can be quite easily modified into a Thai green curry with a few substitutions such as extra green chillis, galangal instead of ginger, and finishing with Thai basil.
I'd say another crucial aspect is appreciating the importance of emulsions - a colloidal suspension of small fat particles in water - which results in a rich and unctuous mouthfeel. Many of our favorite foods and sauces are emulsions (butter, mayonnaise, pesto, curry). But I don't want to overload you with information as I've already written a lot. Good luck.
Also a starch slurry or roux are easy ways to thicken sauces, controlling the consistency of a sauce can be important depending on what you are tossing in it or putting it over.
Veggy tray? Do you mean the steam "table"?
Sure, let's go with that.
WTF are you me?!
and are actually FRESHER than "fresh" veggies
As an adult who thought that they hated pretty much all veggies (especially broccoli and corn) and found out that I absolutely love them when prepared fresh and that the bagged versions tasted like ass, I'm gonna call bullshit on that.
It might work for you, but nothing beats freshly-prepared corn, whether grilled in the husks or cut and sauteed.
You can call bullshit on whatever you want but it's a scientific fact.
The foodtuber Adam Ragusea happens to have two videos addressing these specific topics:
The superiority of flash frozen foods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_PMnCpaJiQ
Food starts rotting the instant it's harvested, and continues doing so while it's packaged, transported, and stored on the shelf. Modern flash freezing techniques preserve foods perfectly, halting the microorganisms that cause decomposition, and avoiding the damage caused by large ice crystal formation that's inevitable with slow domestic freezers.
The selective breeding and genetic engineering of sweetcorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVG54wNPd0
Interestingly with the sweetcorn, it used to be that it had to be eaten immediately after harvest, so much so that you'd have the water boiling before even picking them. However with modern developments they can remain fresh much longer.