Grilled bread cheese. Cutting it into cubes and making sure each side of each cube is grilled to perfection, or at least well, is a fun game. To turn it from a snack to a meal, add a whole can (they did say "low effort" after all) of daal and spice it up as needed.
I've never bought bread cheese or halloumi but I have a meltdown(in a good way) whenever I see it in stores, idk why I never buy it
I eat popcorn on my stove four times a week, its cheap and if you eat them one at a time its almost like stimming
Also corn thins with hummus and olives (and cottage cheese if you eat dairy)
Store bought hummus and toasted pitta all day every day until i die, aint nuffin easier. Just needs a toaster and fingers
i've been eating a lot of omelets dinner lately, usually with rice and stir fried veggies
Avocado, beef, rice. Salt.
Omelette with chorizo, mushrooms, spinach, potato, pepper, etc etc whatever else is in your cupboard that seems nice
beans on toast
Rice and hot sauce. Add a mix of some vinegar, oil, and some sugar if you want a bit of a sushi taste.
Just put it into a rice cooker and forget about it.
If you get one of those salad chopper devices, the ones that are hinged like a mousetrap (or a wide guillotine I guess lol) which has the catch area below it you can use that to slice/dice whatever vegetables you have on hand. The same can be done with tofu, feta, boiled egg (ick but you do you) etc.
You can eat straight out of the catch container. Obviously throw in some lettuce or other leafies if you've got them, drain a tin of beans if you feel inclined, and whatever salad dressing or sauce you feel like.
Home salads are rarely sufficiently well-salted btw.
You can also do nachos or a burrito bowl - rice, vegetables of your choosing, and a tin of black beans plus some salsa or hot sauce goes over well. Cheese and sour cream too, if you're dairy-inclined. It's definitely bachelor chow-tier but there's no shame in it. As someone who makes their own corn tortillas from scratch, I still do the bachelor-chow food because executive dysfunction and autistic burnout absolutely kicks my arse.
You should get your hands on dried garlic granules and dried onions. Half of the battle of cooking most dishes is chopping and cooking those guys down. Because of how they are processed, the sharp flavours of the onions and garlic are mellowed out to the point where you can throw them in the pan last, give them a minute to rehydrate, and you'll be good. I often use these to boost the flavour of a dish towards the tail end of cooking if it's lacking in either department.
If you can throw some ground meat in a pan, then some dried onions and garlic, maybe a diced pepper and a tin of tomatoes plus some seasonings or sauce of whatever you feel like, and maybe some frozen peas or other vegetables then you're pretty much all the way to a dish but in like 15 mins.
I also think it's worth giving a shout out to TVP granules - you can cut ground meat 50/50 with it and you won't notice. You can go 100% TVP and rehydrate it directly in the flavourful liquid or sauce that you're cooking and it's soft and tasty within like 2 mins. If you combine this with dried onions and garlic granules, you basically just need to throw a sauce or some tomatoes, or perhaps a soup base like pumpkin soup or mushroom soup, into a vessel to heat up. Throw in the TVP, garlic, onion and some water or stock because all those ingredients are dry so they'll soak up a lot of liquid. Maybe some frozen vegetables or rice. It doesn't even have to be a proper dish it can just be a take on minestrone or some thrown together otherwise-unspecified casserole.
Also sweet paprika is just dried bell pepper that has been powdered, and celery seed provides a distinct celery flavour to your dishes - with dried garlic, dried onion, sweet paprika, celery seed and maybe some broth or bullion powder and you've got yourself the base for a vast array of dishes except it's already prepped so basically all you need to do is to rehydrate this for the few minutes it takes to warm things up and add some vegetables, some protein, and some carbs along the way and you'll legitimately have a 10-minute meal.
The chopper device is something I thought of using in the past but haven't been sure about how effective it would be. I worked at an organic hippie grocery so I'm pretty spoiled about needing fresh veg so this sounds like a great alternative to frozen veg or chopping for 50 years lol.
I think if you get a decent one they're pretty good for smaller 1-2 serve salads as a main, depending on what you put into it or maybe 3-4 serves as a side.
They aren't a workhorse though.
If you wanted a step up it would be a mandolin and one of those orange korean julienne slicers, but then you've moved out of the low energy, low cleaning burden and into a completely different realm of cooking because suddenly the amount of dishes piles up significantly. (Although if you love carrot and you want the right texture, a julienne slicer is second to none.)
The other alternative is one of those electric salad shooter-type rotary slicer/grater appliances, the ones that rest on your bench top are a better design imo, but what you save in prep time you probably pay for in cleanup time. If you were planning on making and eating lots of salad in the coming days as your main meals though, that's where you'd hit a sweet spot of them being an efficient use of time and your energy.
In that use-case it would be something where I personally would prep my veggies and throw them into individual containers so I'd be able to make a salad at a whim for lunch and then I'd use that same container of sliced peppers and grated carrot to put as the side vegetables for a burrito bowl while combining the diced/grated tomato with the diced onion and a bit of lime and cilantro into a pico de gallo. Or basically the same, except for nachos or tacos.
If you bulk prep each veg and keep them separate then you'll probably find that they'll keep longer, if one thing is more delicate and it goes bad it's not going to ruin all the other veg, and it would help give me the guise of variety while riffing on the exact same base ingredients of fresh vegetables, except served in different configurations in different dishes.
Those small cucumbers in the spring/summer in :estonia-cool:. Just that. They're real nice and crunchy. When there's a sale like 2€/kg then just load up on shitloads of cucumbers.
I also have this vegetable peeler that I bought at a fair from this Russian guy who shredded cabbages and carrots with it like a kind of Soviet Billy Mays. Can add it to soup/leftover ramen broth or make spaghetti out of squash.
Death to America
Black beans and rice. I drain and rinse can beans and cook in some olive oil with onions and garlic plus whatever seasonings I'm feeling. I'll add about 1/4 cup water to give them a nice little bean sauce and cook them with the lid on. I'll just throw the rice in a bowl and dump a bunch of beans on it sometimes.
Bread, cream cheese and sliced tomato makes for a surprisingly versatile base though it’s a nice sandwich snack alone. Add onions, vinegar, fish, spices, and so on.
not healthy but my go-to autism meal is some oven chicken nuggets on a toasted bagel with bbq sauce and american cheese lol. slightly better nutritionally is laoganma rice with a fried egg. basic cheese and pepper pasta is a staple too.
Better to eat than not at all! Sometimes I'll just go to bed hungry instead of trying to eat anything at all bc of burnout. That sounds hella good and easy too
I forgot, my lowest effort snack is a Tofurky Italian style sausage. Eat straight outta the package, each one is like 24 grams of protein. So good I've been eating those for like a decade or more now
I almost always have some steamed frozen mixed vegetables as a side. Affordable, healthy, low effort (five minutes microwaved while you make other stuff), and you can make as much as you need to balance out the rest of the meal.
Stovetop popcorn is relatively healthy, being somewhat high in fiber for a starchy snack. It's pretty quick and easy to clean up, if you use a nonstick pot then all it takes is a little soap and a quick scrub and youre done. Super cheap too!
I'm no longer doing keto so I'm gonna eat the fuuuuck outta some popcorn! One of my favorite foods
Carbonara or vegetarianonara or veganonara. Ramen. Orzo with eggplant and tomato sauce. Avocado and egg on toasted rye
I love the sound of veganonara lol. How would you make it without egg at least isn't that what Linda gives it the saucy texture?? I haven't made it myself in a long time so I forget the ingredients
Yeah egg is what gives it texture, but I made a thickening agent with potato flour that sorts of worked. Kind like what some people use for thickening wok-sauces. It worked, but the vegetarian variant still wins out
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