Reddit reviews OXO 1071396 4.0 quart square Pop Container, 4 Qt - Flour

OK, so it has some startup costs due to it needing a rice cooker and crock pot plus Quinoa is expensive if you buy it in smaller amounts, but you're a bachelor so it's likely you've got a little extra money.

A rice cooker is going to be an important addition to your cooking tools because fuck using the stove and burning shit or having to stand over your cooking. It's easy to use, easy to clean, and it's pretty much automatic, you fill it up, plug it in, flip it to on...and blam that shit's cooking. When if flips itself to off, your rice or quinoa will be done.

A big ass crock pot will serve as the main cooking device for your meals. Again, screw the stove, you don't want to have to stand over the damn thing...pour stuff into this bitch flip it on and go to work on what you'd rather be doing. The bowl comes out and goes right into the dishwasher. I'd have starved to death without a slow cooker when I was a bachelor. As you're making meals for several days here...your mother's little 5 quart version isn't going to cut it, spend the 35 bucks and get this one. The reason you aren't buying a bigger one...they don't make one bigger that isn't 200 bucks.

Quinoa This stuff becomes your "rice" except that it's MUCH better for you than rice. If you're poor or don't care all that much about nutritional value, then by all means, buy rice. But seriously...25 pounds of dry quinoa will last you a long fucking time. Get a big tupperware container, pour the quinoa into it, and leave a 1 cup measuring cup in it. If you're looking to cut some costs but still get some of the nutritional value, mix it half and half in your tupperware so you don't have to mess with it when you're making the meals. The water to food mix is the same for both, 2 cups water, 1 cup quinoa (or NON instant rice).

Meat...buy whatever is on a good sale, never pay more than 3.99 per pound for beef (we aren't buying steaks, look for top or bottom round and buy what's on sale, after 12 hours in a crock pot you won't be able to tell a filet from rump roast), or 1.99 per pound for chicken, pork, or 80/20 ground beef (for the love of your colon don't go worse than 80/20.) Shop the sales, have your mother or sister or grandfather or thrifty co-worker look at the sales fliers and find coupons if you don't have time. Buy in bulk, but freeze in smaller quantities ~ 2 pounds each in generic 1 quart FREEZER bags, not the cheap sandwich ones or you get freezer burn. I buy the Walmart brand freezer bags in boxes of like 100 and they're fine.

My wife still laughs and says she can always tell when I find good sales because when I do, I revert to bachelor shopping style. Thursday I came home with 12 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breasts from Stop and Shop because they were on SUPER cheap sale as they were getting close (3 days) to expiration date, they were a buck a pound, I bought as much as I figured I could fit in my freezer.

Vegetables. This is where you're going to get a good chunk of your nutritional kick. When I was a bachelor I would go to the grocery store on Sunday morning and hit the "it won't last much longer" shelf in the produce aisle. I would buy pretty much whatever vegetables they had if I could chop them and toss them into the crock pot, and because I was going to start cooking it in like an hour, I didn't give a shit that it wasn't going to last another 5 days. I found that I was eating a ton of shit I had never heard of, but it was almost always delicious and amazingly more nutritious than eating from a box.

Vegetables that you should always keep on hand are onions, whole carrots, sweet potatoes, and turnips. They're all cheap regardless of sale, they last a long time if stored properly too. I would buy 10 pound bags of onions, 5 pound bags of carrots, for sweet potatoes and turnips I just made sure I always had like 5-10 pounds. To keep these lasting a long time, get a wire cart thing from Staples or Walmart for like 20 bucks, the wire mesh keeps them open to the air and dry, to help prevent rot. It's also on wheels so if the onions make a mess you can move it and just vacuum under it plus you can drag it over to the kitchen with you when you cook.

To make your meals, you start this the night before you want to eat.
Take out 2 beers, start drinking one, pour the other into the bottom of the crock pot.
Cube your meat (or if it's still frozen then fuck it toss it in whole,) chop your vegetables and add both to the crock pot at about a 1 to 1 portion ratio, if the meat is frozen pack the vegetables around it evenly, if you remembered to thaw the meat and cube it (which will improve your meal quality) then mix them in the crock pot. Season this any way you like. I buy spices cheap from Atlantic Spice Company as they're better quality and a lot less money than grocery store spices. I like the smoky meat flavor so I also add a capful of liquid smoke or toss it with Taco Seasoning once in a while, regardless this is up to you, but when in doubt, onion, garlic, oregano, parsley, salt, pepper. Once you've got like 2 pounds of meat and 2 pounds of vegetables packed into your crock pot, put it on low then walk away. I normally started mine at like 8-10pm.

About 30 minutes before you want dinner, toss 2 cups of quinoa into the rice cooker with 4 cups of water along with some salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder. Push the cooking thing down on your rice cooker and walk away. If you were cooking a frozen chunk of meat instead of cubed meat, take this time to shred the fuck out of it inside of the crock pot, no need to mess up any more plates or anything, use a fork and a big ass knife and get the meat evenly shredded to like a pulled pork consistency, then stir the vegetables into it.

When it pops up then take a ladle of the meat and vegetable mix over a scoop of your quinoa and enjoy a badass meal. You'll find that you can fill tupperware containers with the quinoa and the meat/vegetable mix and freeze them or toss them into the fridge for lunches/dinners throughout the week. I would often freeze half of mine and set the other half in the fridge for lunches, the frozen ones would get rotated out so I wasn't eating the same thing lunch and dinner 5 nights a week. If you freeze them, at least date them. I never bothered to label what it was other than that, but they keep like 6 months in the freezer and it's nice to have a mix of different meals.

I picked them up at Bed Bath and Beyond lol. But I found them on Amazon right here for anyone interested! Mine are in a few different sizes :)

Had fun doing this! Here's my drawing

And the link to the Item


Thanks for the fun contest!

The Flying Pan is a 'sweatpants diner'. Go and order greasy food and don't give a crap (even if you're wearing sweatpants). I don't think their food is that good and I haven't been more than twice in the past four years (despite going all the time in the past). Their pancakes are really, really dry.

If you're asking about whether or not there's anything they do or don't do that makes them successful...don't even bother. This is Hong Kong. We've seen a toilet-themed restaurant explode in popularity. There's a gourmet popcorn store in the IFC, where people wait in line so long they literally might as well watch a movie at the Palace IFC and get popcorn there instead. Hong Kong's dining choices, especially in the low/medium end range that your restaurant would target, is absolutely bizarre.

That said, I was thinking how fun it would be to open a restaurant here that just features a giant griddle. It's just so easy and quick to make damn near anything, especially Western cuisine. Eggs, fried chicken, pancakes, fried chicken, burgers, whatever. Add in a few burners for woks and cast-iron pans, you can cook just about anything you want.

For pancakes, I have a one gallon OXO airtight POP container that I have homemade pancake mix in.

6 oz all purpose flour
2.0 tsp baking soda
3.0 tsp baking powder
1.5 tblsp salt
3.0 tblsp sugar

Then anytime I want pancakes, it's just 2 cups mix, 2 cups milk, 2 eggs. Plus since it's a weight based recipe it's the same consistency even with this masochistic humidity in HK.

These OXO containers are great.

Tough, heavy, good seal, easy to use.

Not well :(. I was on a tight schedule since I was leaving for university about two months after I threw this together. It was an OXO tall storage container. I threw some fans on the container to try to improve airflow, but keeping the cool from the refrigerator killed the batteries.

I buy flour in 2lb packages because I don’t have access to bigger bags, but a quick googling brought things like this
https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Good-Grips-POP-Container/dp/B000UHYB9E

A cheaper way would be a foodsafe pails (you could get from a restaurant kitchen, where I live they come in different sizes with ketchup or mustard or stuff like that).

It maybe you find something like this available for you:
https://www.auer-packaging.com/us/en/Pails-&-Screw-top-jars.html?customer_type=private

These are my favorites: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000UHYB9E/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1449023382&sr=1-2&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=oxo+containers&dpPl=1&dpID=3112147NPTL&ref=plSrch

keep food in containers, I like these

just imagine pests swimming around in your rice and flour and whatnot while you are asleep and you never knowing about it

if they can't smell it or get to food they wont come to your house

I'm usually on a tight budget lol so I'll definitely look into it. I've also found these. I know they're clear but as long as you keep it in a dark area (or tape it up) it sounds like they would work just as well. The only thing is that they're plastic, but they're meant for food so i assume they'd work.

Some products I find help:

• Can opener
  
• Jar opener (twisty lids)
  
• Easy-open containers (mostly preference; I prefer the Snap and Pop kinds)
  
• Well-oiled pans, or at least non-stick stuff (a good pan/pot is underrated, I think)
  
  Freezing things is a great idea. He could still help you prepare and cook the things, and still have options if he doesn't have energy to cook sometimes. Lots of people do this, hence the sub /r/MealPrepSunday :P
  
  Maybe consider a crockpot (/r/slowcooking)? Might be good for a beginner, and the recipes usually don't require a ton of work.
  
  This likely won't be an option now, or ever, but if it comes up: a powerchair with an elevate feature is amazing. I mostly use this feature in the kitchen and am honestly unsure how I'd manage without it. (I'm probably overall weaker than your brother, but I can stand for a little bit, too. "A little bit" doesn't really cut it while cooking, IME.)
  
  One site that's great for beginners, I think, is Budget Bytes. They provide step-by-step pictures for most/all recipes, and, obviously, aim for affordable dishes.
  
  EDIT: Toaster ovens are amazing and so much easier than a regular oven.

These OXO Good Grip POP Conainers are pretty money. I use them to store new cigars before they go in the humi and to store unused Boveda.

I'll dump a few pouches at a time into a container like this and I don't have any problem using it over the course of a few weeks. Much easier than dealing with reaching in the pouch with a scoop.