Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@wardi This is one of the reasons that I decided to do my work as a freelancer, personally. I now negotiate deadlines out of the contract whenever talking to a potential customer - in that I make it clear that I cannot function with deadlines outside of exceptional emergency cases (eg. regulatory deadlines), and that they are not necessary for work to get done either.

That gives me enough room to schedule my work based on how I'm doing mentally, rather than being expected to be present at a specific fixed time. This works really well to remove pressure, and instead spend my spoons on what my brain can actually deal with at any given moment. On average, more than enough work gets done.

It's harder to pull off under a regular employment contract, but I *have* heard of people doing so successfully.

@mynameistillian (Unless you're *baking*, in which case being a microgram off may cause your cake to explode and/or a curse to befall you 🙃)

@mynameistillian Oh, and a very important note to save spoons: ingredient quantities and cooking times in recipes are basically bullshit.

Unless a recipe specifically says an amount or time period is *exact*, you should imagine that there's an "approximately" in front of it. There are very few things where it actually is as precise as the recipe would suggest.

@mynameistillian Not exactly a direct answer to the question, but I do have some tactics I/we have used to reduce the spoons cost of food logistics (which for me has helped by leaving more spoons for actually trying out new recipes from eg. the web, as well as reducing waste):

- Cook for several days at once, then freeze portions in (heat-safe) freezer bags, and on subsequent days just take out a bag and boil it (bag and all) in a pot of hot water until the food inside is hot. Tastes almost fresh, and heats evenly.

- Get (any) cheap contact grill. Most meats and meat replacements can be cooked on these, and it is almost impossible to burn stuff on it, so you can let it cook almost unattended. Eliminates an entire thing you need to watch.

- Oven dishes; even a cheap toaster oven works. Get an oven dish (I used a square metal one), fill it with ingredients (vegetables, potatoes, meats, fish, whatever), sprinkle with a little salt, cover with tinfoil and oven unattended for like 45 minutes, then 15 more minutes without the tin foil. Ta-da, tasty meal with no coordination, works with basically any ingredients.

- Sauce does a lot of the work; if you learn a few simple and tasty sauces, you can cobble together a meal from almost any ingredients you have laying around, without even needing to plan ahead much. An example of such a sauce would be (a small amount of) peanut butter + chili (flakes) + cream. Another would be fruit jam + banana. But it depends on what is available locally, the basic formula is "goopy liquid + high-flavour ingredient + maybe spices".

- Likewise, macaroni combines well with almost any kind of meat (replacement) and vegetables, and stays good for a very long time (dry) in storage.

Generally I'd recommend building up a basic set of simple and cheap dishes that you like and can make with low energy, so that you have a reliable food supply, and then gradually experimenting with variations over time to figure out where your preferences and spoons limits lie. "Rice with vegetables" and "pasta with vegetables" are both good basic dish formats and don't require much else.