“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation– experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.”

– Paul Theroux

6 things that happened when I cooked 75% of my own meals

This month I cooked two out of my three meals every single day. I also made some type of post-workout dish after the gym. Three-quarters of the food I ate, barring the odd snack, was prepared by me.

This might not sound that interesting or exciting, but it actually was. I learned a lot about cooking, saving money, eating healthy, and foreign culture.

Below are six of my observations as well as a great list of resources for different dishes that I enjoyed. Skip to the bottom if you’re looking for food ideas.

1. A serious fear had to be overcome

I have an irrational fear of accidentally causing a kitchen fire that kills everyone in my apartment complex. Old ladies, children, and even the friendly Schnauzer who lives two floors down. They’d all die because I couldn’t figure out how to program my crockpot.

Like spiders, heights, clowns, and other things people are terrified of this is a totally irrational fear. But it still caused immense stress for me.

At first I was really hesitant about making certain things but eventually I started to grow more comfortable in the kitchen.

While you might not be afraid of killing your neighbors, most people have a fear of incompetence. You might be self-conscious about going to the gym, starting a business, or talking to girls you like. Everyone dreads failure and most people will avoid going after what they want just so that they never have to risk getting shot down.

I didn’t kill anyone with my Swedish meatballs and you probably won’t die from whatever makes you nervous.

2. I gained weight (in a good way)

I was planning on getting my physique measured last week, but Halloween put a damper on doing so. The staff at Gold’s Gym who are specifically there to check your progress weren’t around whenever I went in.

Because of this I had to guesstimate my progress. Using compliments that I’ve received, as well as the snugness of my shirts, I can tell you that I’ve gotten quite a bit bigger. When I wasn’t cooking any of my food I lost a ton of muscle mass. Small shirts were almost too big for me.

Now I’m back up in weight and can comfortably squeeze into a medium size again.

3. More money for hookers and gambling

Eating out would cost you between $10 and $15 a day, if you only ate three meals a day at the cheapest places around. That might not sound like much, but it translates to $1,350 over the course of 90 days. A full year of cheap food would run you $5,400.

A year of eating white rice and bland chicken, that’s what the cheap places usually serve, would cost half as much as a two-bedroom apartment on the ocean with all utilities included.

When you start looking at things in terms of what you get out of them you realize how much money you’re wasting.

I went to the grocery store and bought a week’s worth of food for less than $50. Eating at home for a year would only cost $2,600. That’s a $2,800 savings.

Could you use an extra $3,000 a year?

4. My testosterone went through the roof (I think)

Using a very unscientific method, I was able to determine that my testosterone had gone up exponentially.

Eating steak and eggs, with a half-gallon of milk to wash them down, sent my energy levels skyrocketing. I’d jump out of bed at two in the morning and go run around for an hour. I also started lifting a lot more in the gym. And my sex drive reached the coveted level of “crazed weasel.”

I guarantee that a protein rich diet will change your energy levels tremendously.

5. Better discipline was developed

Cooking is fun. Cleaning up and doing the dishes after you eat is not. I know there’s an old trope about lazy bachelors who never clean up after themselves, but that’s disgusting.

I’m big into keeping things tidy. I always make my bed, the apartment gets vacuumed at least once a week, and I never leave dishes in the sink.

Hand-washing plates and bowls might not sound like fun, but it helps to create a good habit. I never had to worry about rushing to clean stuff before company came over, and there was never a shortage of clean silverware.

Making your own food, and cleaning up after yourself, teaches you to take pride in your apartment. Far too many guys treat their places like pigsties. It’s disgusting and childish.

6. I learned more Spanish

When I first moved to Peru I couldn’t remember a lot of the Spanish words that I had studied. Going grocery shopping and buying Spanish cookbooks solved that problem.

When you’re overseas and shopping for butter, salt, coffee, and shrimp you’ll quickly learn the local language. Picking up items, looking at ingredients, and asking for certain material is far more engaging than some workbook or audio cassette.

I learned more Spanish words for food and cooking utensils in the supermarket than I did anywhere else.

Special bonus: Recipe resources

Here are some great resources that can help you find easy, and nutritious, meals to make.

7dollardinners: This is a subreddit that has some great, and cheap, ideas. If you’re just learning to cook, these are some pretty simple dishes to practice with.

Michael Kory’s YouTube channel: This guy had some solid post-workout dishes. I actually ended up making his chicken and fried rice recipe quite a bit.

Peruvian cookbooks that you can’t get in America: I bought two different books that can’t be found in the United States. And one of them is even written in English! I also snagged Ceviche: Peruvian Kitchen: Authentic Recipes for Lomo Saltado, Anticuchos, Tiraditos, Alfajores, and Pisco Cocktails, which can be found in the United States. The other two are, in my opinion, a little more utilitarian, but Ceviche is a cool book too.

If you have some cooking resources you’d like to share, or questions that you want to ask, feel free to leave a comment.

“Arroz con pollo is a traditional dish of Spain and Latin America.”

– Wikipedia

Arroz con pollo recipe

Arroz con pollo (or chicken and rice) is a deceptively simple dish. Despite being easy to make, it has a ton of flavor. Anyone who travels to Latin America ends up raving about this meal.

And for good reason too.

The dish tastes great and really fills you up. Eating a big plate of chicken and rice after working out or sightseeing is a good way to get your daily dose of carbs and protein.

Every Latin nation has their own take on this dish, but the Peruvian version is generally considered to be the best. Peru is well-known for its food and attracts all kinds of famous chefs, including guys like Anthony Bourdain, who come down every year to sample cuisine.

Unfortunately, a lot of the great recipes never make it beyond the border.

Western cookbooks and websites have very poor imitations of Peruvian dishes. And arroz con pollo is no exception. The English recipes I found didn’t do it any justice.

How you got an authentic arroz con pollo recipe

To improve on both my language and culinary skills, I’ve picked up several Peruvian cookbooks that are written in Spanish. Due to a variety of reasons these can’t be purchased outside the country.

Unless you’re willing to pay $900 and take a 10 hour flight you’ll never get to see the recipes.

Until now.

Because I’m hand translating all the instructions, I can share some of the authentic meals with you.

Depending on the interest, this might become part of an ongoing series.

Arroz con pollo recipe

Before getting into the actual instructions, you should know that this recipe makes a lot of food. You’ll be eating leftovers for a while.

Ingredients:

• 1 chicken
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 onion (diced)
• 3 cloves of garlic (chopped)
• 1 green chili (ground)
• 1/2 cup cilantro with spinach (ground)
• 1 cup beer
• 4 cups rice
• 1/2 cup peas
• 1/2 cup corn
• 1/2 cup carrots (chopped)
• 1 pepper (cut into strips)
• 4 cups boiling water

Instructions:

You’ll need a few kitchen appliances, like a frying pan or large pot, to prepare this. Get them ready before you actually start cooking.

Cut the chicken into pieces and season with garlic. Fry the chicken in oil. Then remove the chicken and brown the garlic, onion, peppers, cilantro, and spinach in the same oil.

Re-add the chicken pieces and beer. Fry for a few more minutes. Then remove the chicken and add rice with carrots and peas. Add the corn and pepper, add water. Season to your liking and cook for 15 minutes.

Serve with the chicken pieces.

Other notes

This might sound more complex than some easier meals, like burger patties or eggs, but it isn’t that tough to make. You basically just need to be able to use a frying pan or pot. The whole dish took me less than 30 minutes to prepare and that was with zero experience cooking it.

Also, if you live alone or are only cooking for two you’ll have a lot of leftovers. This is great because it saves you from having to make anything the next day.

“The disparity between a restaurant’s price and food quality rises in direct proportion to the size of the pepper mill.”

– Bryan Miller

How to save money when eating out

People love to eat. Every city has dozens of bars and restaurants you can go to. Back in Iowa there are towns with less than 500 people, yet they have two or three eating establishments.

One of the things I noticed, even as a young kid, was the fact that people who “never had any money” somehow managed to eat out several times a week.

While I’m not Sherlock Holmes, it was easy to find a correlation between eating out and being broke.

Every restaurant is in business to make a profit. The dish you order is marked up to pay the rent, staff salary, and utility bill. No matter how you look at it you’re overpaying for quantity of food you get.

A quick example

When I was traveling around the Peruvian countryside it was really hard to find a gym or a decently priced meal. A small pizza and drink was about $10 and the only gym I found charged me $12 for a day pass. That might not sound like much, but it was almost as much as my hotel cost. Doing some squats and eating a mediocre snack should never be that expensive.

I’m all about living cheaply. A 45-minute lift and post-workout meal that runs me $22 is insane. That’s more than a lot of people earn in an hour.

Three meals and a trip to the gym would add up to $42. With my hotel I’d be spending $82 a day. And that’s without any little impulse purchases.

Living on $100 a day doesn’t sound like much, but it’s expensive.

Basic math will save you a lot of trouble

$100 a day times 365 days equals $36,500. That’s quite a bit of money. More than a funeral attendant, travel agent, or police dispatcher would make in a year. Like I said, $100 a day isn’t as cheap as it sounds.

Most guys in their early twenties aren’t making enough to cover those expenses. You’d need to be pulling well over $40,000 to survive debt-free.

Think about your expenses in terms of percentages

$50 is not a lot of money. A new video game costs less than that. If you make $500 a week spending $50 seems like nothing.

Until you look at your expenses in terms of percentages.

That $50 is 10% of your earnings. Buying 10 new games, something that’s very easy to do, would eat up all your income. Same with one wild night at the bars. $100 in drinks and $40 in snacks and other expenses doesn’t leave you with much. $140 is 28% of your paycheck.

Over one-quarter of what you earned would be lost on an evening of sub-par entertainment.

Easiest way to save money when eating out

Look at restaurant prices and compare what you’d get with what you could make at home.

I love Chinese food. And in Peru you can get cheap fried rice and honey chicken for three bucks.

Buying rice, soy sauce, chicken, eggs, broccoli, carrots, and peas would cost me way more than three dollars. It’s cheaper for me to eat Chinese at a restaurant than it is for me to cook it at home.

Non-fast food hamburgers cost six or seven bucks. It’s less expensive for me to buy buns, ground beef, cheese, and ketchup at the grocery store. Same with sandwiches. I can make a steak sub for less than any shop.

If you want to go out and order something look at the price tag and then check to see how much it costs to make yourself. Eggs, toast and coffee are cheaper at home than some trendy cafe. Hamburgers, pancakes, and sandwiches are that way too.

Unless you want something with a lot of ingredients, like Chinese food, or a gourmet dish, like cerviche, stay in. Foods that don’t require expert preparation aren’t worth going to a restaurant for.

“More than 50,000 cases of fish-related food poisoning during travel occur each year – and that’s only one food group.”

– USA Today

Foods you should never eat while traveling

One of the big problems with Lonely Planet books is their scope. You can’t fit an entire country into 580 pages. As such, anywhere that isn’t home to a major tourist attraction gets glossed over. Right now I’m in Ica, a small city with a population between 100,000 and 200,000.

While Ica isn’t huge, it is about the size of most metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Yet my Lonely Planet guidebook only lists five restaurants in the whole city. And one of those is a bakery.

In the U.S. this wouldn’t be a big deal, but overseas it can be a major problem. Food safety isn’t a huge concern in other countries. Meat is left out in the open, things that fall on the ground are put back on plates, and some kitchens lack running water.

You’re always one plate of anticuchos away from a week of gross intestinal issues.

Having not gotten sick during my first three months of living here, I wanted to give a few pointers that can save you, and your underwear, from the effects of food poisoning. Below are a handful of foods that you should never eat while traveling:

Fruit

Buying fruit on the street and eating it while you walk is not a good idea. A lot of stuff isn’t washed and, in some countries, is stored in unsafe environments. While traveling through Nicaragua I bought some mango slices that made me ill. After recovering I learned that the cut up mangoes were all thrown into a five gallon bucket and left out in the hot sun all day. Buying fruit from a street vendor, especially if it is pre-sliced, is not a good idea.

Ice cream

When it comes to ice cream and milkshakes I’d play it safe and avoid both. Prepackaged cones or popsicles are fine, but anything sold by street vendors could easily get you sick. Also, shakes at places like Burger King or local fast food joints are probably not a very good choice.

An ice cream parlor is fine, but buying a cone from some guy on the street isn’t the wisest idea.

Fast food

In Lima there are always American backpackers who go to Burger King or McDonald’s assuming that they won’t get sick from Western food. They end up eating burgers, chicken nuggets, and chocolate milkshakes.

Then they still fall ill.

Fast food places are unsanitary in America and they’re just as bad overseas. The only difference is that you’re used to eating American mildew and drinking sodas with American feces in them. You’ve built up a tolerance over the years.

Foreign mold and bacteria isn’t something you’re accustom too. You’ll end up getting sick.

Smoothies

These won’t get you sick, but they can be really gross and misleading. In the United States smoothies are usually a healthy drink. In Peru, and other nations, they are full of sugar. There’s a place here that blends up all kinds of delicious fruits, and then pours maple syrup in with them to make it sweeter.

Chugging Mrs. Buttersworth and pineapple juice doesn’t taste too good and it makes your teeth feel scuzzy afterwards.

Where to eat

Go to places where middle class locals dine. You’ll be pretty safe there and the food won’t be expensive. In a lot of poorer neighborhoods people eat at very dirty restaurants or buy food off special handcarts. I’ve seen vendors at these pet dogs before touching ingredients and witnessed someone drop meat into a mudpuddle only to put it back on a plate.

Don’t eat at venues like these. That might sound like common sense, but I see a lot of granola munching backpacker weirdos who want to try food from these places for an “authentic” experience. They all contract horrible diarrhea.

Lastly, a lot of these locals only joints don’t like tourists. I went to one a few days ago, it was the only place that was open, and was given a totally different price than the regular customers. There’s something called “Gringo Tax” and you’ll be paying it.

Most countries have a much better alternative to these hole in the wall type places. In Latin America there are plenty of little restaurants called menus. These have a daily special that runs about $5 and contains some type of meat, carbs, vegetables, and a drink. These places are also run by people who take their craft very seriously and aren’t going to be serving up rancid meat that fell on the floor.

You still get to save money and eat an authentic meal, but you also aren’t risking some horrible illness for the sake of a cultural experience.