Slow cooker, definitely. And one good knife, as you said. Also a microwave and a freezer and a blender. Those are the essentials.
A nice optional extra is a bread machine. The big thing for me with cooking is cognitive load: if I have to think hard about it, I'm much less likely to do it. Now that I have a simple bread recipe in my head, and all the ingredients at home, it is actually easier to make a load of bread in the bread machine than to go outside and face social anxiety and buy a loaf of bread. And the home-made bread is the same price or cheaper!
Like the slow cooker, the bread machine is set and forget. It will even keep the bread warm for a few hours and then turn itself off if I forget to come turn it off and take the bread out when it finishes.
The sad thing is that I've discovered that my insulin resistance is a larger factor than I had realised in my daytime fatigue, so I'm probably going to have to have a lot less bread from now on. Bother it.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-09-04 01:30 pm (UTC)A nice optional extra is a bread machine. The big thing for me with cooking is cognitive load: if I have to think hard about it, I'm much less likely to do it. Now that I have a simple bread recipe in my head, and all the ingredients at home, it is actually easier to make a load of bread in the bread machine than to go outside and face social anxiety and buy a loaf of bread. And the home-made bread is the same price or cheaper!
Like the slow cooker, the bread machine is set and forget. It will even keep the bread warm for a few hours and then turn itself off if I forget to come turn it off and take the bread out when it finishes.
The sad thing is that I've discovered that my insulin resistance is a larger factor than I had realised in my daytime fatigue, so I'm probably going to have to have a lot less bread from now on. Bother it.