Bursitis has completely stopped me from using my left arm. I was trying to think about what could be cooked with just one arm.
This is where pantry clean out met up with my upcoming Sunday edition Heathcliff edit. I can cook spam with just one arm.
The only scratch made element in this is some mustard seed caviar I made a while back. I put some of it in the spice blender to cream it up a little. It went excellent with this otherwise depression causing meal.
Cost per person: $4
It is very expensive to cook from completely prepackaged foods.
Wow, that’s any tough question that probably you’re the best to answer over random lemmings.
But I’ll play. My thoughts as someone who has never been limited like that are …… its the preparation more than the cooking
- electric can opener if you don’t already. My first thought is how do you open those cans one handed.
- rice cooker is dump in two ingredients and forget it until dinner. It’s like 15 minutes so you can be making the rest of dinner in the meanwhile
- knives are tough. Someone suggested a mandolin but mine is clearly two handed operation. Perhaps one of those larger ones built into a bowl? I guess you want something that is secure in the counter
- mini food processor/chopper. I always found the full sized ones Overly complex for most tasks, but the mini ones are great. Single button, parts go in the dishwasher.
- one skillet meals. They seem easier to me, but even if not, your selection of meals is probably important. Internet can help with recipes if you can think of a search term
- mini potatoes. I can’t stand instant potatoes, but can understand it’s a hassle to peel and cut. Mini potatoes, or generally cooking baked potatoes, are great with less prep work
- my far out thought of the day: glass top stoves suck. I transitioned from gas to induction last year, and it’s nicer in several ways. But now I can’t stir or mix without holding the pan to keep it from sliding around
You can make pasta. Take the pasta out of the water with a pasta spoon, throw it into the pan with premade sauce and veggies. Tadaaaa
Break your other arm and have your stepmom cook for you.
Sir this is a Lemmy’s. Not a reddit.
Mashed potatoes seems like it would be pretty hard to stir one handed, so credit to you for that. Thinner soups or things you can boil and drain would probably be an easier choice, so you don’t have to keep hold of a pot while stirring.
Things which keep their shape and that you can fry in a large flat pan and use tongs to move about, like the spam, are probably going to be much easier and safer overall though.
If you can afford one, a mandoline that is heavy or you can fix to a surface is something that will be useful even if your arm improves, they make chopping vegetables fast - but can be risky if you’re not paying full attention. I have one similar to this, but the more industrial ones are even sturdier.
If that isn’t an option, pre-cut frozen veg are usually not hugely more expensive than fresh, and are often more nutritious than stuff on the supermarket shelves. Tinned tomatoes or sauces are easy to throw on pasta too, which doesn’t need any real stirring - just be sure to only cook smaller pots so they’re lighter to deal with. Tinned beans are also great, my go to meal is that plus tinned tomatoes, a bunch of dried herbs/spices, and whatever veg I’ve got around at the time. You can fry some meat, throw in the rest, let it heat through and you’re good to go.
If you have an oven, a whole cob of corn in-husk is 30 mins. You can throw it in there, walk away, then after 30 take it out of the oven. Just gently tug the silk out from the top, which will now come out easily with no real mess, and you can then pull down the husk to use as a handle while eating.
Don’t write off microwaves either. Washing a few potatoes and nuking them for a few minutes per potato will get you a perfectly good meal base that you can load up with whatever. Microwaves are my go to for the frozen veg to help bulk out anything else I cook too.
My speciality is not arm-based problems but I’ve had to change a lot about how I cook for medical reasons, so hopefully some of this is helpful to you too. Good luck and I hope you don’t need to adapt for long!
You’ll be all right
I never have needed to cook with jist 1 arm, but I guarantee if I had to, I’d be making crockpot meals. Just dump everything in the pot in the morning, turn it on, let it slow cook all day.
The problem in my kitchen is that you look around and there’s nothing to eat, just stuff to make food from. I don’t have a lot of the ingredients you can just dump into a crock pot. Everything needs some kind of treatment before it can be used as an ingredient in something else. It’s part of how I keep my cost so low.
Husband use to make a lot of frozen dinners when he was a bachelor. He also made a lot of pasta though. He has access to about 1.5 arms with his cerebral palsy. Use useless arm to hold pasta sauce to chest, twist open with good hand. Everything else was easier to open and cook.
Split pea and lentil soup. Get dried green split peas and dried red lentils. Put them in a pot, pour in water, add stock or salt and some dried parsley and thyme, bring to a boil then simmer for 1~1.5 hours.
Cheap, filling, healthy, and a lot of filler ingredients work in it if you want to change it up. I’m recovering from a crushed ankle, on a crutch so I’ve had to figure out one handed recipes to a degree.
Another good one if you have a rice cooker - coconut milk, lime juice, peanut butter and some sugar. Melt it all together, have it on rice. Again, something that’s adaptable for adding other ingredients.
I tossed the rice cooker 16 years ago. Never as reliable as a pot and took up space.
We were also in a time crunch because we had to eat and drop a kitten off for transport to their new rescue home.
A pressure cooker is also great for cooking rice if you have one. I used to swear by cooking it on the stove, but now my pressure cooker rice is just as good as the stove but way more hands off.
Can you provide the timing and water rice ratio? A pressure canner doesn’t release as much steam so I’m thinking less water? But also it only takes about 15 minutes of zero stress in a pot but if you get distracted with a pressure canner on such a small amount of time it’s going to burn.
I do 1 part rice, 1.5 parts water by weight. My usual recipe is 400g rice, 600g water. Rinse the rice until it doesn’t make the water cloudy when you mix it anymore and drain thoroughly, then add your recipe water. For my instant pot I do 6 minutes and let it do a natural pressure release which takes about fifteen minutes, so it does end up with the usual twenty minutes at temperature. I don’t think I would bother using a stove top pressure cooker for rice, though.
Ah. All my 5 pressure cookers are stove top. I don’t trust appliance based ones to live longer than a year or two because the heat destroys the electronics in them. A stove top one is a BIFL item.
I’ve been practicing cracking/opening eggs with just one hand for the last year. Good to know one of my favorite breakfasts of spam and eggs could still be on the menu.
Easy meal. You can even do bagged hash browns. Just don’t think about shredding cheese and trying to roll it into a breakfast burrito.
I got Korean BBQ flavored Spam out of curiosity the other day so you’re inspiring me to actually try it.
I’d definitely eat that
I can’t find it now, but I saw a video just yesterday of a lady with one hand chopping onions and some other items. She had an implement on the counter with pins facing upward that she could stick half an onion on while cutting it.
I’ll keep and eye out for it, but in the meantime searching for “one handed cooking” on youtube will get you a ton of interesting things, from gadgets to methods of dealing with prep.
I have a cutting board with pins that suctions to the counter, been very helpful while my arms heal from surgeries
I could make one of those. Wondering if I should go with stainless steel or brass?
I befriended an older lady in a wheelchair when I was young, she was paralyzed on one side. She used a scissor to cut a lot of things, even chicken meat, which I found funny at the time.
It might not be an obvious one, so it might be a useful tip.
I think mine has stainless in it, because it’s cheap. If you have brass on hand, why not? I think it’ll be strong enough, I’d just wonder about corrosion at the point where it meets the board
I’d have to buy the neils either way. Brass is food safe and more antimicrobial than stainless. And would look better with the wood I would use instead of plastic. Wood is also naturally antimicrobial. A small amount of Titebond III and the join would be water proof.
I knew you’d know if it’s suitable, haha.
The one thing I hate about the one I have is that it’s made of plastic. You’ll have to share pics when you have made yours!
I can’t afford the nails right now but I could take one of my existing unsold boards, build the wals out of scrap and have the whole thing done in under 12 hours if I could.
I was thinking one of the hardest things for me to do, that I do regularly, would be to peel and chop an onion, and here is a solution. Thanks for linking this. I’m happy to know it exists, if I ever need one.
It made my life so much easier! I needed a carpal and cubital release in both arms and couldn’t even slice veg by the point I was entering hand therapy.
We’ll see if I still need it after the surgeries heal, if I don’t then I plan on donating it to an accessible device service in my state so it can help more people
If you break your legs, it’s hard to cook orangutan.
Personal experience?
Nah, it’s a meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D29x8JBmkk0&t=4
Ah. I can hear it now.
Tell your left arm to get a job.
It’s fully doped up on prednisone, antibiotics and ibuprofen so that it can get a job.
Dope that punk-ass arm the fuck back to work already and get well soon xoxo
Look into adaptations! I have an electric jar opener and an electric can opener. After a friend got frozen shoulder, I got her a couple of rocker-knives and a pair of tong-spatulas (a pair of tongs, but with spatulas instead of grippers at the end). There are plates and cutting boards with little upright prongs on them, to hold things in place while you cut them with your good hand. There are also things like the slap-chopper or magic bullet, those box-dicers where you slap the lid down, etc.
Essentially – you know all those late-night commercials with the weird kitchen gadgets? Those aren’t actually weird, they’re intended for handicapped people. But they know if they market them as being for handicapped people, sales drop. But if they market them as weird convenience devices, when someone needs them, they look at them in a different light and they make the sale.
I’d also suggest searching the web: I know I ran across some disability blogs, where people talked about their adaptation and techniques and where people discussed which products worked or didn’t.
Oh - if you like wearing jewelry, they make little magnets that clip onto the ends of necklaces and bracelets and such, that make putting on jewelry one-handed easier.
I’m hoping this does not become a long-term issue.
Some of those things are just good ideas even when you dont have mobility issues.
Instant potatoes mixed with corn, some chicken nuggets and some hot sauce is a guilty pleasure.
You may have replied to the wrong comment. I was talking about the kitchen gadgets.
Fair. Rereading it it is a little ambiguous.
Want to punch it up a little add some egg and some cheese to the potato and fry dollops of it in the pan with the spam fat.
Ah, right comment but I didn’t see the context of your reply so I thought you meant the foods.
My first thought: how’d you open the cans? But I guess you must have an electric can opener.
I can’t stand auto can openers. They take up space and break.
I have a very ergonomic OXO manual that is easy to do with just one hand.But I did ask my wife “why didn’t we buy cans with pull tags!” Her “because we buy whatever is cheap.”
With pull tabs you’d still need to hold the can down anyway.
The SPAM can had a pull tab. I was able to pull it with leverage and just the one hand.
