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!!
Meal prep! I cook once a week, enough to last me most of the week.
My fiancé and I both work and we usually get groceries for 1-2 days at a time and cook for the two of us most days of the week. For us there have been a few key elements to being able to cook after work:
- Find dishes that you like that take max 45 min to cook including prep.
- Once you each have a handful of go-to’s (let’s say 5-7), you can rotate between these on a regular basis. Of course some will be more suitable for lazy days than others.
- Be sure to update your short list when you feel it’s getting boring to cook and eat the same things.
- It really helps to always have tortillas, pasta and rice in the house.
Hope some of this is helpful!
It really helps to always have tortillas, pasta and rice in the house.
This is something I relate to. It’s a workable system. A good base and throw whatever you have on top.
I’d add a bread to that list. Something over rice one day seems totally different on toasted sourdough (or whatever flavor of bread you like) and when you have part of a loaf that is going stale, you can put it in the freezer for that.
We’ve got a tiny kitchen and a ¾ fridge - it can fit a pizza box if nothing’s in the door. We’ll do things like casseroles, or make enough pasta to fill a casserole dish just small enough to fit in the fridge for leftovers after meal 1. Salads can stretch them further and make each one different enough, and meals of something else in between switches it up quite nicely. A few minutes with some sealable bags and some dressings/condiments around can make marinades easy to make and to store in the freezer. Sunday is our usual meal prep day to prep some containerized lunch for the week while the other gets a dinner made to make leftovers ready to cook.
Everyone around us raises chickens so eggs are easy to come by. There’s usually a quiche or two in the freezer in case we need a quickish meal and are both feeling too lazy for anything else.
I don’t cook much. I’m chronically ill, but if i were working full time I imagine the same problem would come up - it’s too labor intensive to do all of the time. Switching from “is this a real meal” to “is this something that i enjoy eating and will it provide me with enough energy” has made me a lot less miserable about it. What I’ve done for myself is find out which foods are simple, good, filling, yummy, and don’t take a lot of effort for me, and then eating those throughout the day while cooking bigger batches of things throughout the week . It takes a minute to find out which foods are good for this, but once you have a few “i know i can make this and i know i will want to eat it” foods in your back pocket, it gets easier. Some of my faves are premarinated cuts of meat which can be baked and then cut up later, fried up bell peppers onions (eat them with toast or goat cheese!), bean salads or chillis, roasted potatoes, and baked patties of hot sausage with a bunch of oatmeal mixed into it (good on toasty bread or alone). You can also pre-cut or pre-prep things like veggies and spice mixes so that you have them already ready to go when you’re hungry. I also eat a ton of stuff that people don’t consider real food- oatmeal, fruits, nuts, cereal, english muffins with avocado, cheese and crackers, peanut butter, baked beans, toast, banana breads, bread and olives, etc. I find it helps to plan “laziness” directly into the process. Doing what you can to minimize dishes can also help a lot, as can trying new foods. You never know what thing is going to become a go-to.
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By cooking meal types that are fast, like stir fries.
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.
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’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.
We eat yogurt marinated chicken breast pieces cooked on a frying pan with curry sauce, alongside rice-cooker steamed veggies. We usually get 6 lbs of chicken, chop and marinate in an evening, then eat that for ~4-5 days; also keep on hand things like pasta and frozen meatballs for the days where we’ve run out of chicken but haven’t shopped yet. We allow ourselves to order food once or twice a month but no more; this usually happens on days where we’ve run out of chicken.
That both of us are totally cool with eating the same thing for months on end really helps cut down on cooking time. 😅
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.
Another good strategy.
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.
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.
Using some prepared ingredients like already marinated chicken or precut veggies can help if you have a small kitchen. Also things like frozen pizza and bag salad is great when you don’t feel like cooking and much cheaper than takeout. As far as meal planning I decide what I want to cook for the week and write it on a whiteboard on my fridge.
I’m a confident cook making food for two people in a small kitchen.
I wing it, but I’m making choices so that everything fits together and I have some recipe patterns that work well. I don’t do meal prep. Most dinners double as a lunch.
A lot of what makes my cooking efficient only comes with practice. I know the timing of different things and cook accordingly to line stuff up. Rice in the pressure cooker takes 30 minutes. That kind of thing. Make choices so that stuff goes in parallel, or make one pot dishes.
I generally try to have a main dish, potentially a starch side if the main isn’t, and a vegetable.
Some example meals:
- Mashed potatoes (steam in instant pot, mash with olive oil salt and water when ready), kjøttkaker (meatballs) which finish in a brown gravy, and some seasonal vegetable, maybe sauteed.
- Pasta, red sauce with vegetables in it (always an onion, maybe some other stuff), maybe ground meat or sardines. Sauce cooks in pan and then mixes with pasta
- Vaguely Thai curry (sauteed veggies, chicken, garlic ginger onions, curry paste, coconut milk), rice in the instant pot
