By cooking meal types that are fast, like stir fries.

I’m going to tell you exactly how I do it, in excruciating detail. Sorry in advance.

I cook 4-5 nights a week, and that’s with a fairly demanding job, wife, two small kids. From when the kids are down at ~7.30 to about 8.15 or 8.30, I’m cooking. We’ve had a good, home cooked dinner most nights before 9pm. We do frequently get a delivery on Friday night but I think that’s no sin.

The principles that make it work are:

Limit experimentation and get good at your recipes. Everybody knows that the prep and cook times on recipes are bullshit… until you actually master the recipe. Most of the stuff in our weeknight dinner rotation consists of meals I have cooked many, even dozens or hundreds of times. I can do the prep quickly and almost absent-mindedly while listening to a podcast. I can answer emails or chat during the cooking. And the dish comes out reliably great and quickly.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not trying new stuff! But I try perhaps one new recipe a week. And on weekends, I’m doing big “project” cooks where I might be in the kitchen all day. But weeknights are for shipping quality food fast, and familiarity with the recipe makes that work.

Make a meal plan that uses ingredients intelligently. I use Paprika Recipe Manager to plan meals and manage my grocery list. I’m just cooking for two people on weeknights, so I make sure that I have a meal plan that uses everything in the shop. I only need half a block of feta for Baked Feta Pasta on Tuesday night, so I’ll do Orzo with Spinach and Feta on Wednesday night. I get two grocery deliveries a week so I have fresh ingredients on hand and can limit waste; I make a meal plan in Paprika before every shop.

Do a big Sunday night cook and eat the leftovers Monday night. I have less time pressure on a Sunday night; if you do as well, do a big batch of something like bolognese sauce or lentil soup that you can reheat for dinner on Monday, when you might not feel like cooking.

Find a recipe developer you like and stick with them. This is kind of an adjunct of point number 1, I suppose, but once you find a cook whose food you like, make more of their stuff. Some of the tricks you pick up for adjusting or speeding up their recipes will frequently cross-apply to other stuff they do. For me, I like Melissa Clark and Kenji Lopez-Alt from the New York Times, the folks from the Woks of Life, and Daniel Gritzer from Serious Eats.

I enjoy cooking a lot, so I am probably willing to spend more time thinking about it than most. But I spend perhaps an hour a week doing meal planning and shopping online for groceries, and maybe 2-3 hours total doing weeknight cooking. That’s a pretty good return on investment for me.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Meal prep! I cook once a week, enough to last me most of the week.

Have simple recipes on hand to lean on. Simple fried rice or pasta recipe with no more than 5 ingredients. Chop, all in the pan, wait 10 mins. Done.

On super lazy days I just have freezer pizza. I don’t care…

So the prep is have onions, have rice and penne, then have some ingredients. Mine are roasted aubergines, red peppers all in oil, chuck them all in the pan. Or on the fried rice side peas, sweet corn, eggs maybe.

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.

the crock pot is a lifesaver here, and I’ve learned a couple tricks to make it even better. The go-to example that I have is throwing some chicken and some french onion soup mix in there before I got to work, then shredding it when I get home. What you end up with is juicy, flavorful chicken but in an almost entirely generic way such that you can use it on almost anything. Dinner salads, mayo-based chicken salad, toss it in some oil w brown garlic to go over pasta, sammiches, whatever. Any crock pot meal is gonna be your friend here, but this one is something that I make before I have a plan for it just because I’ll almost always find something good to do with it and it takes literally less than a minute of actual work from me.

I meal prep on Sunday but I’m also ok with eating the same thing 4 or 5 days in a row. If you aren’t ok with that then meal prepping is going to be a lot more work. I also strongly suggest making extra and freezing some in individual portions so if you do run out of food, or just really aren’t digging what you made, you can grab something out of the freezer.

And let’s not underestimate the power of making your own frozen junk food. Like frozen burritos? Make a pile of burritos (which is great because you can put exactly what you like and make them healthier) then wrap them individually in tin foil and freeze. Make a frozen pizza in a square casserole dish and freeze pieces. Lasagna also freezes really well. It’s a lot of work up front but it will keep for months so you have something easy to grab when you want it.

You can also precut things like vegetables if you will want to eat veggies later in the week, or if you’ll want to cook something fresh later but know you won’t do it if you have to spend a lot of time on it.

Edit: I forgot to say since it seems like storage space is an issue that you should make sure you have the most space efficient storage containers. A big circular container might not be as good as a rectangular one of the same volume that you could stack multiples on top of each other.

If I actually wanted to make an event out of it and didn’t have plans for Sunday, then the classic Sunday meal prep strategy applies.

But many times, I also feel lazy or have stuff going on so I try to find one day in the week where I can cook some type of larger effort item that takes more than a couple hours and do the rest on other days. Mind you, I live alone so YMMV. But for example, I could spend one day with the high effort portion of a main dish. This would classically be some type of protein but I don’t always want to limit myself to that mentality. Just anything that I’d be most excited to eat.

If I don’t have the time to make any other sides, I won’t. I’ll have a partial meal that day and do other stuff while I put the rest in the fridge. Then the next day I’ll cook a different side or two. If I do it right, I’ll have a rotating menu of options in the fridge where I cook new dishes to replenish ones that are about to be gone.

This way, I don’t need to dedicate a whole day to cooking, and I can still have fun with cooking in smaller portions and still have the evening to do other things. My meals can also be a mix of various sides which can stagger. This is not always the case as I do find myself just clearing things out frequently to start from a fresh palette of foods. But just a different take on the meal prep that I personally find is manageable.

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