We want to break out of this cycle of ordering delivery but at the same time, cooking everyday has been a challenge. We also have been trying to develop some sort of routine where we meal prep on the weekends but we live in an apartment with a really small kitchen so cooking and storing food for 5 days doesn’t seem doable. Maybe cook for 3 days and then prepare the ingredients to cook again on Wednesday?
I’d appreciate if you could share your strategies and experience. The goal here is to eat healthy and good food.
Edit: Thank you everyone for all your contributions! I am a little overwhelmed by the number of replies so I if I do not reply to you please do now feel bad!!
I am not great at this, but I find these things helpful:
Cook before you’re hungry. That’s kind of a Captain Obvious line, but sometimes a meal can take more than 1/2 hour to cook and that’s a long time when you’re starving.
Have a limited menu. Find a few things you can stand eating on the regular. Example, I could probably eat meatloaf once every couple of weeks till I die. I keep a list of things like this so if I’m drawing a blank, I can look at it. It’s funny how you forget.
Figure out how to make leftovers not be awful. Example, make meatloaf on a day you don’t work so there’s no time crunch to get dinner on the table. The next day a slice of meatloaf (microwaved or not) with toasted bread and mayo or whatever sauce you like makes a good sandwich with a salad. The salad doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be lettuce and dressing. No time crunch if you rinse the lettuce while the bread is toasting. The next day you could make spaghetti. It’s easy and cheap and you can throw cubed meatloaf into the sauce to be “meatballs”. If you have two days off in a row, make two different meals those nights and rotate the leftovers to last a week without getting bored.
Make a Taco Bell system. By this I mean think about the Taco Bell menu. Most of their menu items are made from the same ingredients, but are prepared differently.
I make something called burrito soup which is browned ground beef, undrained canned green chilis, taco bell sauce (you can buy it bottled at the store), undrained ranch style beans, undrained black beans, undrained canned corn, and whatever else is in the fridge that would work. Seems like it’s all cans, bottles, and beef, but it’s really good. Sometimes I’ll throw in fresh bell peppers or other veg. Anyway, a batch of this is great for burrito filling, served in a bowl with tortilla chips for scooping, in a bowl with extra milk to make a soup, on top of rice, on top of a salad to make a “bowl”. All of these are heated up, btw. One thing is used in a bunch of different ways. Sour cream and guac make this extra special.
Find a “burrito soup” that fits your tastebuds and run with it.
Keep “fast food” in your freezer. It’s no big deal to keep a pizza in the freezer (or something else you know everyone will eat) for when you’re too sick to cook or just aren’t feeling it. It beats eating just chips for dinner or calling for food. I also try to keep the fruit bowl full for snacking. Being hungry will make you quit before you start. Go ahead and eat an orange while you’re making dinner.
Bonus tip If you’re cooking something that can be frozen, double it and stash some for another meal when you aren’t in the mood to cook.
I doubt most people are good at this. Anyway, good luck.
For me, cooking at home is less about finding the time and more about decision fatigue. I still fail at this a lot, but on the days I’m successful it’s because I planned ahead of time what I’d be cooking for dinner. That way when dinner comes around it doesn’t require thought, just a bit of chopping.
Sustainable cooking is a function of the amount of time you’re willing to commit to cooking and the tools you have at your disposal. A slow cooker, for example, can involve almost zero prep and very little time actively spent cooking (you toss it all in the pot and hit go). A much more involved meal which requires regular attention, on the other hand, might take less total time to cook, but more active time cooking.
I think the best way to provide advice is to get a grasp on a few important factors:
- Price sensitivity/budget
- How much time do you tolerate between starting cooking and eating the food (active cooking + all other time, such as time spent in the oven or slow cooker)?
- How much time do you tolerate where you are in the kitchen actively cooking or preparing ingredients?
- Do you have any food restrictions or preferences?
- How varied do you want your cooking to be? Are you okay with eating the same thing every day or want more variety?
What does “working full-time” mean for you?
How many hours are you away from home each day? I suspect everyone is answering with their view of what working full-time is, but it can be different depending on where you live, how long your commute is, if you work shifts, overtime, etc.
Just for reference, between last Monday and Tuesday I spent 90 hours at the office. Luckily exceptional, but no, I didn’t cook.
Also, leftovers can be great.
As someone else mentioned, decision fatigue is so real for me. Millions of recipes out there, everyone recommends cooking a given meal a bit differently, and then reviews online have further suggestions. I cook enough to follow a recipe well but not enough to know how to cut through the noise.
I started out bouncing around to all the meal delivery services when they’d offer discounts. Try it for a bit, swap to another when the discount ended, swap back when they gave me a “come back” discount. All those services come with recipe cards so I’ve kept those and curated a little recipe book with our favorites. All the info for shopping and prep is right there for me. I guess it’s like a regular recipe book with extra steps, but it sure beats what I used to do with scouring the internet for too long and trying to read my phone while cooking.
I feel that. I occasionally get myself to try something new. I’ll just keep cooking the same few things I know over and over lol. I definitely need to branch out more, and my food can get really boring to my taste buds, but I’ve survived this far! I do still tend to eat out more then I should though.
You can also create something similar with index cards and an index card holder. Whenever you find a recipe you like, write it down and put it in the card holder, preferably with some dividers for alphabetizing them. I take cards out of my recipe box and arrange them into a meal plan that I just stick to my fridge with magnets. It serves as a meal plan and grocery list all in one, since you can easily see what you will be making for the next 5-7 days or so.
It would not work for grocery shopping or sticking to the fridge like your idea, but I bought a blank recipe book and I’ve been writing in recipes I like with whatever modifications I make so it’s the version of the recipe I like and it’s great. I don’t need to do a meal plan though because I just meal prep one thing for the whole week.
Have really appreciated this thread and reading everyone’s different ideas 😊
My schedule is basically a 60 hour week most of the time, so there are days when cooking a big dinner is just not in the cards. I am single so it is a lot easier to prep and make food for one vs a family so there is that at least.
My routine for many years now has been evolving around a commitment to organic produce and better nutrition. I don’t have anything boxed, canned, or frozen in the house; I guess that sounds weird but where I live it’s easy to get fresh produce so I usually stop by the store every few days on my way home from work and get whatever looks the most yummy and plan from there. Menu during the week (especially in summer) tends to revolve around lot of salads and veggies and adding a chicken breast or fish to go with it, since it takes very little time to cook those additions. I save part for lunch at work the next day.
Weekends are when I have more time to get more creative, so I prepare a couple dishes I may fancy and make sure I cook enough to have leftovers so that I can add those into my week along with the above. In winter, I occasionally use a slow cooker for beans and soups, which makes it nice to come home to ready warm food.
That was the idea of the post. I wanted to create a post that would have different perspectives and that could help other people having the same issues, being for lack of time, ADHD, etc. Thank you for your contribution!
By cooking meal types that are fast, like stir fries.
Frozen Costco foods heated up and put together. Put some (heated) frozen broccoli in a box of mac and cheese. Eat fish sticks with a bagged salad. How about a pre-prepared frozen Asian noodle dish with veggies? If you’re careful about the nutrition stuff, it’s a real step up from takeout in terms of health and saving money. I know because I only stepped up and started doing it a few months ago. Good luck.
I’m terrible. If I’m cooking for myself? I won’t make anything that takes longer to prepare or clean up than it takes to eat. LOL.
Breakfast, generally, is a small can of whole kernel corn mixed in with a can of chowder.
Lunch is a couple of sandwiches.
Dinner maybe a couple of burgers. Sometimes a big salad.
Now, cooking for OTHER people… that’s a different deal. :) But, yeah, it takes planning, sometimes a week in advance.
Meal prep! I cook once a week, enough to last me most of the week.
I’m far too lazy to meal prep on my weekends. But I will choose 3-4 dinners for the week and write it down like a menu and get the ingredients I need for them. If I know it’s going to be a crazy week, I will cut the vegetables immediately after grocery shopping that way I can just dump them in the pan or bowl or whatever when I’m cooking. Then I have options to choose from several different foods over the week.
I always make enough to have leftovers so I don’t have to plan for lunches too.
Best of luck
A mix of limited menu during the week, and food prepping are the biggest things.
If I know the upcoming week will be busy, I’ll batch cook on Sunday and just reheat the rest of the week.
Otherwise, learning simple recipes I can whip up quick. Practice makes perfect after all, and the more I cook, the faster I get.
Honestly, this might be a hot take but when it comes to food in the modern western world, people are really privileged lol. Why is the expectation that you eat something different every day for every meal?
I think prior posts cover things pretty well, but I wanted to add a couple of ideas/thoughts:
- Single pot meals can be very convenient and save prep and cleaning space. The instant pot is great because it can sauté, steam, slow cook, pressure cook.
- Sheet pan meals. Foil over the pan, maybe a bowl for mixing - easy, single pan, space efficient, minimal clean up.
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Our primary motivation was weight loss ahead of our wedding, but the guiding principle should transfer: make it super easy. We’ve found that the lowest effort method will win out over all our intentions, so we’re rolling with it.
An example: chicken curry with rice. Also a disclaimer, we have a couple of appliances that make stuff slightly more convenient but I’ll put the alternative down too.
It takes around a minute to wash the rice then chuck it in the rice cooker. you can get microwave rice cooker pots or just use a pot on the stove. Once you’ve got the weights and timings dialled in this produces perfect rice just as you’re going to serve with no interaction during.
Then cook the chicken breast and set a timer for when the rice will be ready. We use an air fryer, but used to use the oven.
5 minutes before the chicken is done whip up the curry sauce.
Then it’s just serving - rice goes in the bowls, slice the chicken and put on top, then pour on the sauce.
Whole process looks like this:
- start rice cooking
- start chicken cooking, set timer for 25 minutes
- go do something else for 20 minutes
- start heating the sauce
- when chicken timer goes ding, put the rice in bowls
- slice the chicken, add to bowl
- pour on curry sauce
Total cook time is around 26 minutes. Total interaction time is around 10 minutes.
It’s also super cheap.
Edit: forgot to mention that you can cook whatever veggies you want in the same thing as the chicken and don’t need to adjust your timings
This is a great way to think about it! I also like to include the cleaning time when considering cooking. Thank you for your perspective!
Yeah, we use a rice cooker and an air fryer. Both are huge time savers.
We got a rice cooker that can also be a slow cooker, which is another useful strategy. Chop stuff up in the morning, chuck it all in, set it going then eat whenever you want.
I dunno if my life is easier because I’m a vegetarian or what but we mostly make our food and most of what we make is not time consuming. Steamed greens and carrots with boiled potatoes. Roasted veggies in the oven. Stir fries. Beans and whatever stewed in a crock pot with canned tomatoes.
For breakfast, oatmeal with chia seeds, hemp hearts, flax meal, sunflower seeds, peanut butter and fruit goes together real easy. Alternatively, frying some eggs and having the above things on toast instead of oatmeal.
Usually we make a bunch of stew or soup that will be used for lunch over several days. Cook like 4 cups of rice to go with it. Then for dinner, usually steamed stuff or perhaps roasted veggies or a stirfry with rice or noodles.
Homemade pizza is also pretty easy. It takes about 5 minutes to throw the dough together, then you can prepare whatever toppings you want while the dough rises for 45-60 mins. Takes ~10 min to bake when ready. I can post the recipe if anyone wants it but I’m sure you can find stuff online.
