Introduction: The Chronically Lazy Cook

It's 7.30pm and you've just left the office. The highway is jammed and you grumble as you pay the highway-robbing toll so you can crawl at 15kmph through the teeming mess of cars and daredevil bikes to get home.

Brake. Accelerate. Brake. Accelerate. Brake. Accelerate.

By the time you reach home it's close to 9pm and there's nothing more you want than a nice comforting meal and bed.

But you're too tired to cook. So you settle for curling up in front of the TV with that bowl of Maggi Mee watching Gordon Ramsay cooking delicacies that make your mouth water. Or you eat dejectedly out of the polystyrene boxes and plastic bags of hawker food you brought back on the way home that got cold by the time you get there.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Cooking is not the simple act of preparing food to eat. Logically it does look like it, but what I realised after I grew up and moved away from a house full of foodies is that a living in a house that doesn't cook is a living in house without a heart. To paraphrase the the words of a relative: Cooking for the household makes the house a home.

At any rate, if you can't cook for yourself, you lose out on a lot. Cooking is an expression of creativity, and it's incredibly fun. People tend to not like it because they just don't know what they are doing. And when that happens they expend A LOT of effort to produce food that tastes horrible. Then they get disheartened and stop trying.

But like I said, it doesn't have to be that way.

So this blog is about cooking for people with very little time, experience or effort. It's about producing in good, simple, delicious (and occasionally healthy) home-cooked food in a life where other things like studies and careers tend to dominate. I am not a trained chef. I'm an engineer with a full-time job and a love for good food. I'm just someone who enjoys cooking who also happens to be lazy and thus invents ways to cheat at cooking and still get results.

So if I can work 44 hours a week, probably spend 8 hours a week commuting, and still cook on most weekdays (weekends are a give)... so can you.