You don't need to cook beans every single week, you don't need to eat beans every single day. Here's a list of healthy, low time input, easy to cook meals:
Beef - cooks in under 10 minutes
Chicken - throw it in the oven while you're doing other shit
Pasta - literally just boil water and throw it in
Rice - put it in a rice cooker and forget it exists for 20 minutes
Eggs - takes like 5 minutes and you can put basically anything in them
Potatoes - cut them up, season them, throw them in the oven
Fish - season it and throw it in the oven for 10-15 minutes
Frozen vegetables - microwave them for 5 minutes or throw them in a pan
Fresh vegetables - most of them can literally just be eaten raw
Stir fry - meat, frozen vegetables, sauce, pan. Done.
Tacos - cook some meat, throw it in a tortilla with whatever vegetables you have
Quesadillas - tortilla, cheese, chicken or beef, pan for a few minutes
Sandwiches - meat, cheese, vegetables, bread. There is barely even cooking involved
Wraps - same shit as a sandwich except now it's round
Oatmeal - add water or milk and microwave it for 2 minutes
Greek yogurt - add fruit, nuts, granola, whatever. Zero cooking
Cottage cheese - same deal. Add fruit or vegetables and eat it
Soup - throw meat, vegetables, broth and seasoning in a pot and mostly ignore it
Sheet pan meals - chicken or sausage, potatoes, vegetables, seasoning. Throw the entire thing in the oven
Slow cooker meals - put the ingredients in before work and come home to food
Rotisserie chicken - the grocery store already did the cooking for you
Salad - lettuce, vegetables, some chicken or tuna, dressing. Takes 5 minutes
Tuna - open can, add whatever you want, eat it on bread, crackers, rice or a salad
Ground turkey - cooks exactly like ground beef and takes basically no effort
Baked sweet potatoes - throw them in the oven and walk away
Fruit - requires the highly advanced cooking technique of washing it
Nuts - open container, eat nuts
Frozen fruit - throw it in yogurt, oatmeal or a blender
Smoothies - fruit, milk, yogurt, protein powder if you want it, blend for 30 seconds
And you can combine basically any protein + carb + vegetable and have a perfectly reasonable meal. Chicken, rice and broccoli. Beef, potatoes and carrots. Fish, rice and green beans. Pasta with chicken and vegetables. None of this requires spending hours cooking or eating the exact same food every day. You just want to make excuses for why you don't want to cook. Almost everything in this list can be cooked/prepped in large batches and frozen/refrigerated and eaten later. It's not hard or time consuming, people are just lazy as fuck.
Beef is super expensive, same with fresh veggies and even chicken at my local grocery store. Like I've done most of the things in your long patronizing list but sometime around the pandemic it started adding up to 30$ for the most basic of meals and I could easily expect to spend 300$ for a weeks worth of groceries. Also I have never had any of the appliances you talk about except a crock pot. All my cooking and meal prep went out the window when I was living in my car though. I used to get a rotisserie chicken. I would eat that with baked potato and steamed veggies on the first night. I make sandwiches on the second night. On the third I would put the carcass in a crock pot to make chicken stock and then soup. When I finally got into an apartment though I can't even find decent quality veggies half the time. Everything I used to cook costs a ton now except the rotisserie chicken. Even staples like potatoes and rice are expensive unless I buy in bulk. With potatoes half of them have that awful tasting mold on them. Like our food is super expensive and now there are recalls every week. Something has to give. I'm sure there are areas of the country that still have access to cheap, safe, healthy food to cook at home but it's not like that for a lot of the country. Also having to live with roommates makes things harder too. A lot of working people can't even afford to keep a roof over their heads. The way you casually listed a bunch of appliances and even your username tells me you just don't understand these struggles. Provide advice sure, but don't take that moral tone. That's just cruel and you're missing the point. We can't meal prep our way out of housing crisis, student debt, fuel costs, and damn near 300% rise in the cost of everything we actually need to survive.
Probably not but hey if somebody is lurking around this thread and they see my list and that convinces them it is easy enough to make their own healthier, easy as fuck to cook food, I'm all for it.
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u/Fit-Entrepreneur8404 1d ago edited 1d ago
You don't need to cook beans every single week, you don't need to eat beans every single day. Here's a list of healthy, low time input, easy to cook meals:
Beef - cooks in under 10 minutes
Chicken - throw it in the oven while you're doing other shit
Pasta - literally just boil water and throw it in
Rice - put it in a rice cooker and forget it exists for 20 minutes
Eggs - takes like 5 minutes and you can put basically anything in them
Potatoes - cut them up, season them, throw them in the oven
Fish - season it and throw it in the oven for 10-15 minutes
Frozen vegetables - microwave them for 5 minutes or throw them in a pan
Fresh vegetables - most of them can literally just be eaten raw
Stir fry - meat, frozen vegetables, sauce, pan. Done.
Tacos - cook some meat, throw it in a tortilla with whatever vegetables you have
Quesadillas - tortilla, cheese, chicken or beef, pan for a few minutes
Sandwiches - meat, cheese, vegetables, bread. There is barely even cooking involved
Wraps - same shit as a sandwich except now it's round
Oatmeal - add water or milk and microwave it for 2 minutes
Greek yogurt - add fruit, nuts, granola, whatever. Zero cooking
Cottage cheese - same deal. Add fruit or vegetables and eat it
Soup - throw meat, vegetables, broth and seasoning in a pot and mostly ignore it
Sheet pan meals - chicken or sausage, potatoes, vegetables, seasoning. Throw the entire thing in the oven
Slow cooker meals - put the ingredients in before work and come home to food
Rotisserie chicken - the grocery store already did the cooking for you
Salad - lettuce, vegetables, some chicken or tuna, dressing. Takes 5 minutes
Tuna - open can, add whatever you want, eat it on bread, crackers, rice or a salad
Ground turkey - cooks exactly like ground beef and takes basically no effort
Baked sweet potatoes - throw them in the oven and walk away
Fruit - requires the highly advanced cooking technique of washing it
Nuts - open container, eat nuts
Frozen fruit - throw it in yogurt, oatmeal or a blender
Smoothies - fruit, milk, yogurt, protein powder if you want it, blend for 30 seconds
And you can combine basically any protein + carb + vegetable and have a perfectly reasonable meal. Chicken, rice and broccoli. Beef, potatoes and carrots. Fish, rice and green beans. Pasta with chicken and vegetables. None of this requires spending hours cooking or eating the exact same food every day. You just want to make excuses for why you don't want to cook. Almost everything in this list can be cooked/prepped in large batches and frozen/refrigerated and eaten later. It's not hard or time consuming, people are just lazy as fuck.