[sangd]

I have done all of the above except the classical music. I find spending time to do meditation is more useful.

All of the above, I find cooking is an incredible skill that many people underestimate greatly.

Here are the things that I do for my cooking for every week or every two weeks.

+ 30-45 minutes grocery shopping including driving.

+ 30-60 minutes per day to cook daily dinner and prepare breakfast.

+ 10-15 minutes to clean up.

And what I think it solves/helps/improve our family daily life:

+ Food quality is definitely way better than outside. We have good amount of vegetable, fruits, fresh meat/fish/poultry and other dairy products.

+ Lots of time saving for not going out, spending time waiting, driving, moving the whole family around.

+ The cost is very low, probably around 1/3 of eating out.

We do spend a day or two to eat out or eat carry-out food.

While this takes time (months/years) to get a good skill at cooking and minimizing the time, this is so far one of the best skills I have had and I do think people should invest in it.

[chrissnell]

That's awesome! I forgot to mention this in my top-level comment but if you're ever interested in cooking some Tex-Mex, I have a recipe book for you. My grandmother wrote this in the early 1970s and it was regionally famous in the part of Texas where I grew up. She died when I was young and my aunt inherited the ownership of the book. I asked her for permission to make it freely available and she said OK. I had plans to translate it to TeX but never got it finished. I did put up a PDF scan of the original that you can download:

https://chrissnell.com/cookbook/womc.pdf

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. For newcomers to the book, I highly recommend the cheese enchiladas recipe and the anticuchos recipe. Anticuchos are not authentic Tex-Mex but they are very much tied to San Antonio and that recipe is probably the best in the book if you make it with good quality steak.

[sangd]

Those are delicious recipes, I might want to try in the future. Thank you.

[8ytecoder]

Agreed, no one in my friend circle cook any more. I learnt it out of necessity - I missed home cooking and then became vegan which made me realise the lack of creativity of the chefs when it comes to vegan food. Now I love cooking just for the sake of it.