The Groove guide to freeing yourself from food delivery

Feeding yourself on a regular basis, however you choose to do it, is expensive and a pain in the ass. DoorDash, and delivery culture writ large, is one of the great evils plaguing modern society. We’re all adults here and can acknowledge that both these things are true.

Both issues have been a little more top of mind than usual this week. In part because new tipping rules for delivery apps went into effect this week, after companies such as DoorDash and Uber Eats fought tooth and nail in the courts to make it harder to tip their delivery workers (cool!). And in part because, like clockwork, the New York Times dropped yet another rage-baiting trend story about Americans’ delivery addiction, notably featuring an Atlanta yuppie couple who spend $700 a week on food delivery.

As it does every few years, social media erupted with goofy-yet-troubling debates over whether it even makes sense to cook for yourself at all in the city, with alleged economist Adam Tooze claiming in a (now-deleted, endlessly dunked-on) Tweet that eating out makes more financial sense than buying groceries in New York, and that “in NYC home cooking is a borderline vanity project.”

But actually more troubling to us than the tales of clueless rich people being clueless rich people were the stories of people making $50,000 a year and still spending hundreds of dollars a week on delivery. And the legions of people on social media claiming that keeping ingredients like vinegar and red pepper flakes in the pantry is an unreasonable psychic and financial burden.

Does no one know how to be broke anymore? Pull up a chair, because everyone at The New York Groove sure does, and we’ve got tips.

As we all know firsthand and talk about endlessly, grocery prices have spiraled out of control in recent years, to the tune of an approximately 25% increase since 2020, according to recent Consumer Price Index data. But Jesus, there are ways to minimize the impacts! 

For one thing, let’s dispel the idea that “cooking” entails picking an elaborate recipe you’ve never made before and buying a bunch of niche spices and sauces and condiments you don’t already have in your pantry, along with a large and expensive piece of meat, each and every time. Unless there’s a special occasion or you’re really in the mood for a project, this is not the way. 

Instead, approach it in the reverse: look at what you have in your pantry or fridge, what’s on sale at the grocery store, and build your meals around that. (This took me years to learn, frankly, and I only figured it out when I started getting a GrowNYC CSA bag, a program that has since been discontinued by the Adams administration.) Many perfectly delicious and balanced meals just require the most basic of pantry staples and one or two fresh things from the store, if that; stay tuned a little farther down for Team Groove’s go-to cheapo “recipes” of choice.

Beyond that, if we’re looking at the situations in which one is probably most tempted to order overpriced delivery — you’re exhausted, busy, overwhelmed, drunk, high, or some combination of those things —  there’s also the key category of “food that can be assembled” versus food that requires honest-to-god cooking. I’m talking pre-bagged salad, pre-marinated (or cooked) meats, sandwich ingredients, prepared foods and frozen meals. There's a whole, quick-and-easy universe that exists between "Julia Child's full boeuf bourgignon recipe" and "$40 with fees for a single middling burrito."

Just make the 'idiot quesadilla'

We’re frankly also overthinking what needs to constitute a “meal.” A peanut butter sandwich or peanut butter toast and a piece of fruit is perfectly fine a lot of the time. If you’re wasted and dreaming of Taco Bell, I promise heating up some shredded cheese on a tortilla with hot sauce (what I like to call an “idiot quesadilla”) will do just fine.

You don't have to use the apps

If you’ve gotten this far and still won’t rest until you have food that someone else made for you, most restaurants in the city now offer the option of ordering directly through their websites or through Toast and other seemingly less-gougey services, so you can at least avoid going through apps that financially handicap both restaurants and delivery workers. Ordering through a restaurant's website is typically cheaper, and preferred by the businesses too.

I’ll personally vouch for deleting the delivery apps altogether, or forcing yourself to only order only food that you can pick up in person as effective ways to wean yourself off the ordering habit, as well.

Use your New York privilege

There’s also the damn deli. I’ve never been a brunch person anyway, but in our collectively brokest years, on hungover weekend mornings, instead of going out or ordering in, my friends and I would do something we called “deli feast.” This didn’t involve anything more than getting an egg sandwich, a side of chips, a drink and maybe something sweet for about $10 a head, and taking it back home to enjoy on the comfort of the couch. Inflation has pushed up those prices slightly, but deli feast is still available to all who wish to seek it.

A lot of this might be stupefyingly obvious to plenty of people reading, which, I hope so! But enough people seem to be addicted to delivery (or at least iffy on how to feed themselves well and cheaply, even when feeling tired or impulsive) that it felt worth getting into. Anyway, we’d rather rely on each other than on free groceries from Kalshi or Polymarket.

So with all that said, here are Team Groove’s personal recs for quick and dirty — but nutritious and delicious — meals to make on the cheap.

Dave's garlic and anchovy linguine

I like to cook at home, because it's nice to take some time to make something and listen to the radio and also because yes it is absolutely more affordable than eating out. I make a lot of things, most of them revolve around pasta, which may be one of the reasons people mistake me for Italian. Anyway. The other day I made linguine with olive oil, garlic and anchovies. Anyone can do this!

The pasta was cheap, you can get it at Trader Joe's for 99 cents, but it's not like it's much more if you go somewhere else and get a box of like Barilla. The anchovies were a little more than two bucks, the garlic is who even knows how cheap it's a head of garlic. Probably the most expensive thing is the olive oil but it's just regular olive oil, even if it's 10 bucks you have a big bottle of olive oil to keep using after this, so stop complaining.

You boil the water for the pasta, obviously, and use about a third of the box. Chop up a couple cloves of garlic real small and get four or five of the anchovies out of the tin of anchovies. Throw the pasta in boiling water for eight minutes or whatever the package says is al dente, and heat up some oil on a skillet. When it's hot, toss the garlic in there along with the anchovy fillets and cook the filets all the way down and the garlic until it's gold but not brown. Turn off the heat if this is done before the pasta is done, which it probably will be.

Keep some of the pasta water in reserve just in case, and when the pasta is finished use some tongs to transfer it to the pan with the oil and fish and garlic and put the heat back on low and toss the pasta around with everything until the pasta is good and coated. If it's a little dry, add some cooking water. This will only take a minute or so. 

There, it was that easy. When I was eating this the other night, it was good, the garlic and the faint anchovy taste work well together. I thought maybe the one thing it was missing was a spritz of lemon, so if you want to try that you can spend 33 cents or 50 cents on a lemon.

Tim's pantry peanut noodles

I looked up the nearest “peanut noodles” to me on DoorDash (I don’t use the apps much at all these days and still think of Seamless as the dominant food-ordering-brand-verb, but apparently “DoorDash it” or “GrubHub it” have become more dominant verb form elsewhere in the country; the apps are bad and have forfeited their right to verb status anyway). The best option came from a place where the peanut noodles were $15 and labeled a “SMORGASBURG FAVORITE!” (gross). After taxes, fees and “optional” tip, that total came to $30 for a single order of cold peanut noodles.

This is, naturally, absurd; I could fill a bathtub with peanut noodles for $30. I just might!

Peanut noodles are my fail-safe go to when either too broke to grocery shop or in desperate need of making a dish with whatever is lying around the house. I can’t even do the math on how much it costs because it’s so cheap: a pack of soba noodles will run you $5; and you can indeed use spaghetti if you must. A jar of peanut butter is as cheap as however much your sketchy neighborhood bodega that clearly resells stuff from Costco is charging.

You make the noodles and then make the sauce, and the sauce is all creativity based on what you have in the kitchen: soy sauce, chili crisp, brown sugar, lime juice, hoisin, garlic, maple syrup, sriracha, ginger — any combination of these will work to your taste. Put them in a blender with about a cup of peanut butter (or however much suits the serving size you’re going for), and fiddle until they taste to your liking.

The only way to improve one of the most perfect foods

‘We split the atom here today.’

The New York GrooveTim Donnelly

Then you mix the sauce with the noodles and throw in whatever else you got in the fridge: carrots, cucumber, cabbage, edamame, cilantro, chopped peanuts, it’s your canvas. If I'm craving something meaty and we have walnuts and mushrooms handy, I'll make some quick walnut ground beef to throw on there too. The peanut sauce is also packed with protein, so you protein-obsessed freaks don't have to go to Dunkin Donuts for your daily protein-milk infusion.

Make a bunch and chill it and have it for lunch all week long, or fill your bathtub with it. You might not be a pro at these yet but you’ll learn quickly, and I promise your version will be better than paying $30 for the "Smorgasburg favorite."

Virginia's tofu and broccoli bowl slop

This is a dish that really doesn’t sound like much at all, but has probably become one of my most failsafe options, something I make for myself at least once every couple of weeks, especially when I’m coming back from vacation or a big weekend and need to feel like a human again. It mostly relies on pantry staples (basic spices, chili crisp, rice), so once you’ve got those in place, it’s variable and cheap as hell.

I’ll also advocate here for investing in a rice cooker. I’m always looking for ways to “set it and forget it” in cooking, and you can get a perfectly reasonable model for like $30 that’ll last you for years and years. Anyway, get some white rice (or rice of your choice, whatever) going in that while you tend to the rest of the main event.

First there’s the broccoli — famously one of the cheapest and healthiest vegetables available at any given time, plus it’s very filling. Chop that up into bite-ish sizes, then toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, cayenne or red pepper flakes, and garlic powder if you’ve got it. Roast that in the oven at 400 for 20-25 minutes or until it looks roasted (the main point is to get it past the “soggy” stage and to get some reasonable level of crisp on it).

As far as the tofu, drain that (just wrap it in paper towels and press it between two heavy plates for a while, you do not need to be buying a whole tofu press). Then cut it up into cubes, toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, cayenne and paprika or whatever you have, and ideally some kind of flour or cornstarch to get some nice crust action when you bake. This one also goes in the oven at 400 for around 20 minutes or until it’s looking crispy.

Once that’s all done, add a pile of broccoli and a pile of tofu over a pile of rice, and from here you can do whatever you want. I like to top it with a heavy drizzle of chili crisp (the Trader Joe’s one is just a few bucks and is better than a lot of the fancier ones on the market, for my money) and some chopped up almonds if they're in my pantry. Sriracha, a drizzle of peanut butter, crispy fried onions and many other things would also almost certainly be great. (Pro tip I learned from an old editor: keep your nuts in the freezer, they keep longer and taste better this way.)

And that’s really it! This makes several meals, all of which are healthy, filling, oddly delicious, and variable. Smugly tuck your hair behind your ear while you tell everyone you had tofu and broccoli for dinner.