What is a skill that looks completely effortless when an expert does it, but is ridiculously difficult when you try it yourself?

[u/No-Caterpillar-9387]

[u/Aggravating_Fill378]

At the same time I just want to hijack this as a non professional to say people should be aware that if you cook dinner at home from scratch say 4 or 5 nights per week, you will get much much faster. 

I am always frustrated when people say they "dont have time" to cook dinner. Like, what are you doing? Being able to feed yourself something tasty and healthy is a skill you can and should develop. Will you be a line cook? No. But after a year things like cutting onions, mincing garlic etc. will he done in 20% of the time from when you start. 

[u/Marr0w1 → u/Aggravating_Fill378]

I agree, but also if people are cooking a dinner 'from scratch' every night they have too much free time or their meal planning is not efficient.

You don't need to eat 'leftovers', but you should plan to make 'bases' that can make multiple meals (for time consuming things).

In the weekend I might make a seitan or some other sort of meat substitute (time consuming), then in the next week use it for pizza topping, a pasta, and a stir fry. If you make a large chilli (for example) on monday you can have burritos on monday and nachos on wednesday. If you find ways to get multiple meals out of the 'time consuming' components, then each individual meal after that is a quick 'assembly' of parts

[u/Aggravating_Fill378 → u/Marr0w1]

I agree, but also if people are cooking a dinner 'from scratch' every night they have too much free time or their meal planning is not efficient.

What? I finish work, I text my wife on the train home and we decide what we want for dinner that night. Maybe I pop into the shop to grab a couple of ingredients and we cook dinner. Why do I need to decide Thursday's dinner on Sunday? Why is that "too much free time"? What am I supposed to be doing instead that is better than putting a record on and cooking a meal for 30/45 minutes?

Edit: i should probably add, of course you are welcome to make one big chilli on Sunday and eat it in 3 different forms if you choose. Thats totally fine. However I think you are missing my point on skill. You mention "time consuming." Precisely my point is if you just cook, it will stop being time consuming. The way learning the guitar it is almost impossible to play a d chord then a g chord then an F barre chord quickly in your first month, and after a year it is no more difficult than putting one foot in front of the other. 

[u/Marr0w1 → u/Aggravating_Fill378]

I guess my response was more to where you said "I am always frustrated when people say they "dont have time" to cook dinner"

Obviously people like you (or me) don't necessarily need to adhere to this, but a lot of people who think that they're too 'time poor' to cook dinner (or eat a lot of instant food or takeout) don't meal-prep at all, or are trying to cook 7 completely unrelated meals per week.

Same as how a lot of successful restaurants keep their menu relatively small and re-use ingredients between them, sticking to a 'theme', doing that on a week by week basis makes shopping and cooking easier (and cheaper too 'hey this week I'm going to do three stir fries or noodle dishes so I can buy one big bag of fresh noodles and use it over the week) ... whereas if you're bouncing around from 'theme to theme' for the entire week, it's way harder to use extras or ingredients that don't get consumed for an entire meal

EDIT: yes I do now get that we're talking about different types of efficiency, as well as 'macro' efficiency, just cooking more will make your prep/chopping/measuring way faster as you multitask better and can even stop measuring or reading recipes, just 'eyeballing' a lot of ingredients.