Good Ole Boy

Your family will eat whatever you make them. That’s how it worked for all of history. Every meal has a starch. Rice, potatoes, pasta. Buy these in bulk. Infinite ways to prepare and customize. Buy bone-in meat, save and freeze the bones. Save and freeze all vegetable trimmings. When the freezer is full, throw it all in a pot and make stock. Use the stock to cook rice and as a soup and stew base. Stock your pantry with canned tomato products, beans, vegetables, etc. Divvy your grocery runs between monthly purchases of shelf stable goods and weekly purchases of produce and perishables. Don’t “meal plan”. Don’t cook “recipes”. Cook food and eat the food. Avoid leftovers other than soups and stews. Everything should be either a slop bowl or meat/starch/vegetable prepared fresh. When you have everything on hand, dinner takes less than 30 minutes a night to prepare. 90% of people believe cooking is this massive slog of a chore when in reality they’re just needlessly working uphill. Abandon recipes. Buy food, cook the food, eat the food. Making stock once a month and doing purposeful dry-goods purchases is a lot less work than trying to create inventive meals every night forever.