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| How do you approach cooking when you just need to eat or feed people?
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| I want to be very clear: I don’t consider Mama J’s cooking to be “lazy.” And honestly, that’s not my favorite way to describe any meal.
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| Whatever you have on hand and wherever you need to grocery shop, you do you. No need to guilt-trip anyone for eating canned, frozen, or premade food from a hot buffet. Everyone has a different budget and access to ingredients, not to mention the number of people they have to feed regularly.
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| I posted today’s question in my office Slack channel and got some interesting responses. Check them out below!
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| “We have some meals we can pretty much always make, including if we didn’t go to the store, because the main ingredients are either frozen or pantry items: rice bowl with tofu or frozen dumplings (we always have ingredients for a soy-based sauce) with fermented veggies and whatever else there is; boxed pasta with either pesto, frozen tomatoes I thaw in the microwave, or sauteed zucchini, plus canned cannellini beans for protein; PB&J” — Heather Hobbs, growth editor
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| “I love breakfast for dinner, so I whip up eggs with toast, honestly, once a week. Frozen turkey burgers are an easy protein to keep on hand, and I often make what I call adult lunchables: turkey breast, cheese, crackers, crunchy veggies, and some sort of dip like hummus or labneh. Smoothies with frozen fruit, nut butter, and collagen powder are another go-to, since I try to keep the ingredients on hand.” — Emery Wright, Bezzy editor
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| “Tacos! You can buy pretty much all the ingredients pre-prepped — just cook the protein.” — Ren Dias, editor
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| “Curries tend to freeze best, and these can be so simple to make. For example, the one I’ve been batch-making recently is just one squash (peeled, diced, and put in the microwave on full power for 10 minutes), one onion, a drained can of green lentils, a can each of tomatoes and coconut milk, a bag of baby spinach, and some curry paste. Cooking takes around 20 minutes. Divide into containers, and meals are sorted for around 4-ish days.
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| Other days, I just have a comforting “peasant’ meal: some bread, some cheese, a nice hot drink. Basically, a little picky meal that I can arrange nicely on a plate and snack on while I’m doing other things.” — Veronica Zambon, senior commerce editor
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| “Chicken breast with bottled Alfredo sauce and basil, then add broccoli at the end, with a tossed salad. And if I’m keeping it even simpler, I’ll throw together hummus, baba ghanoush, tarator, and other dips with pita bread. None of these take me over 15 minutes to prep and serve.” — Sandra Silva, senior growth editor
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“+1 on taco night! It’s almost always easy to season and cook up a ground meat of choice. I always have some in the freezer and keep my favorite store-bought taco seasoning stocked up. Then, you just let everyone BYOT [bring your own toppings] with whatever fixings they want from the fridge.”
— Catherine Connelly, commerce editor
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“Similarly to Emery’s adult lunchables, we do snack dinners. Any cheese, crackers, fruits, veggies, dips, meats, nuts are fair game. It’s a good way to use up the odds and ends that you have and requires no actual cooking!”
— Sara McTigue, Bezzy editor
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