Ask for beef wellington and baked alaska on a work night.
(bonus points for whoever gets the reference!)
First, you might want to ask your wife if it is required that you rigidly adhere to her standards. Personally, I figure that if the person is going to do the meal planning and cooking, they can cook whatever they want within reason. I do most of the cooking and meal planning in our household. I am so happy whenever my husband plans and cooks that I really don’t care what he makes, as long as it’s not something that he knows I hate.
That being said, you can try realsimple.com. They have a lot of good recipes that fit most or all of your criteria. Many of my standard recipes come from there.
I just want to say kudos for making an effort. I am the one who plans and cooks 99% of our meals because my husband doesn’t like doing it. It’s caused a fair amount of stress in our marriage because we both work full-time jobs. Personally I wouldn’t care what he cooked, I’d just be happy to see him making something besides a frozen pizza.
Here is what we do each Saturday morning.
We start by inventorying the freezer, and seeing what in there should get used up. This makes sure we don’t buy chicken when there is plenty of chicken on hand.
Next we survey the supermarket flyer, and see what is on sale.
Then we start to layout the menu based on what is there and what is on sale and if we have any constraints, such as needing a quick meal.
Then we might go through some of the massive library of cookbooks to see if anything involving a cheap ingredient strikes our fancy. My wife has a book which contains recipes which have worked - not the recipes themselves, but pointers to the books where they can be found.
Then we build the grocery list based on what is needed. We may go to the farmers market also, but the good one is on Sunday and we shop on Saturday, so if we do we leave a space for the veggies we buy there. It is pretty easy to know what is available based on the season.
Works fine for us. You can cut down on cookbook overload by picking only a few to look through and limiting your search based on the ingredients you are going to get.
Lots of great comments here. I will try to work through them.
I hope to get to the point of being able to use inspiration, but if I did that now we would get a lot of grilled chicken breasts and iceberg salads.
This is exactly what my wife does really well and what I aspire to.
I love Cook’s Illustrated (and America’s Test Kitchen). It appeals to my scientific mindset. You (and not what you’d expect) are probably right that one way to deal with analysis paralysis is to pick one thing at random and just go with it.
We have a fantastic farmer’s market 100 yards from our door every Saturday. we have watched a lot of Food Network together (Alton Brown is on both of our “infidelity is allowed” lists).
The infinite variety on the shows or the market only add to the analysis paralysis. I feel like I am drowning in choices and unable to separate them into acceptable/not to my wife.
So, for ten years, the usual entente is for her to do the deciding and the cooking and me to do the helping and the cleaning. But that isn’t really fair to her and some days she gets fed up with always being in charge.
Thank you for the words of support. My wife holds herself to a “it is either nearly perfect or it is a total failure” grading system. This is part of why it drives her crazy to try and teach me, but I think she will be much more amenable if she only has to see the results and not the process.
You are the second person to recommend Real Simple. I think that I will lean heavily on them for my recipes. Do you have any particular favorites?
That is my aspiration. For ten years, we have tried different ways to get to that point and I inevitable sit there like a six year old trying to do Calculus.
When I look in the fridge or the pantry, I don’t see what isn’t there but should be (beyond daily necessities like milk). When I look at a cookbook, I struggle to visualize myself following the instructions and anticipate what it would taste like. I feel like an idiot, but I doubt that I am the only one with such challenges.
The only way to learn is to do it. I have to have the pot on the stove when I realize that we don’t have any onions before I will really learn to look for onions on Saturday mornings before going to the market.
You stumped me, but I love how the Straight Dope will combine assistance with advice with humor.
I spent way too many hours here during grad school (to the benefit of my education and the detriment of my academic progress) and regret not visiting enough in the past few years.
Thank you all!
Have you been spying on my wife and me?
I feel for you both, just as I feel for my wife and myself. I have little interest in cooking; I’m a master of the meal I can be eating within 15 minutes of realizing I’m hungry. I only “cook” when my wife calls it quits and says “Feed me!” (knowing what she’s likely to get.)
And yet she’s silly enough to ask me what we should have for dinner!
Of course, she’s the injured party here, truly. I’m just too lazy and uninterested to develop a knowledge of cooking and more importantly, meal planning. She does all the work, and she’s really very good at it, and I’m the lucky one. So, I kill the spiders, chase out the bird that happens to fly into the house, mow the lawn, handle the garbage, and do the dishes, and a bunch of other stuff she’d rather not do.
And no, next time she asks me what I want for dinner, I won’t ask her how she wants the garbage handled. I’m not that clever. 
Instead, I try to turn it into a conversation by asking questions, like what have we had recently, and trying to remember stuff she’s prepared not too long ago that I really liked, etc. It’s still a lazy way out, but gives her more credit. And I do understand her need for some input on a job she’s sick of taking care of all by herself all the time!
BTW, were I a true mensch, I’d get interested in cooking and learn and pay attention to what’s in the fridge and the pantry. I never said I was a mensch.
I learned to cook as a kid and still do, so I cannot really relate.
But you might like the Food Lab website, which presents recipes and techniques in a somewhat scientific light.
Also and MHO, it is not important to cover every nutritional requirement in every meal. “Balance over time.” There is no such thing as an unhealthful recipe or food item, but there is such a thing as an unhealthy (overall) diet.
There are some cookbooks with only recipes taking five ingredients or fewer.
Or you can find one in a cookbook you own. Reject any recipe with too many steps, or which asks you to do something you don’t understand. Like I said, put the ingredients on the grocery list. Then, when ready to make it, take them all out and do your measuring in advance. Read all the steps. Read them again for gotchas.
By the time you reject all the recipes too complicated to start with you’ll have it winnowed down nicely.
Don’t visualize what it will taste like. There appears to be a science about what stuff goes together, but that is something you learn in cooking school. Anything in a cookbook with ingredients you like will be fine.
I have an advantage in that my father’s family was in the restaurant business, he could always cook, and he taught me 50 years ago before that was normal.
All you need is confidence, and the way you get that is to start small.
BTW - when we go through the freezer we hand everything out. Forces you to not miss anything and helps in finding stuff that got lost. In the fridge it forces you to face stuff that really needs to get tossed.
You can do it!
One other tip - and I’ve found several “keeper” recipes this way:
Survey what’s in your pantry/fridge/freezer. The simply google the ingredients. Like this - sausage rice beans. Or cauliflower onion cheese. Or black beans chicken thighs cream cheese.
With a little experimentation you’ll figure out what can be substituted for what (eg, most carbs can be interchangeable, ditto protein sources, and cheese makes everything better.) 
Also, the right spices can make or break a meal. A couple of potatoes can be transformed with nothing more than, for example, mustard seeds, curry powder and a bit of oil. But you have to be willing to experiment a bit to figure out what tastes good to you (and your wife) and what’s a dud, taste-wise.
All the preceding advice is good. Now: buy a freezer and plan intelligently, so that you’re not thawing hamburger at 5 p.m.
My go-to’s are:
Crockpot pot roast with carrots, potatoes, and either turnips or parsnips.
Roasted chicken (buy a whole roaster!) and baked potatoes. Use the leftovers in chili or other Tex-Mex dishes. Make broth from the wing tips, neck, heart & gizzard. Freeze this.
Stir-fry using round steak, pork steak, or chicken breast, plus (at minimum) mushrooms and celery.
Learn how to deal with oddball grains like brown rice, quinoa, buckwheat, and amaranth. Use instead of pasta.
Learn how to make a good pilaf, using that chicken broth, rice or quinoa, and either lentils or orzo.
Always have on hand bay leaves, peppercorns and grinder, powdered Colman’s mustard, turmeric, celery seeds, and celery. Turmeric makes a pilaf look like gourmet mideastern cuisine. Learn the intricacies of ginger, and why the types do not interchange.
Do not focus on one vegetable, because the day will come in which, if she ever sees another dish with tomatoes or with carrots, she will go ballistic. Variety is the key.
Get a subscription to Raecheal Ray’s magazine. In each issue, she has a 2 to 4 ( I don’t remember which) week calendar of meals with a shopping list and recipes. Make sure to read each recipe through at least twice so you don’t pick something too involved. If possible, watch a few episodes of 30 Minute Meals so you get an idea of her cooking style. Hope this helps.
If you have the space, keep a few herb plants like basil and rosemary. Totally different experiences fresh!
I get the impression from reading your original post that the issue isn’t so much that your wife is tired of cooking, but that she’s running out of ideas and looking to you for some inspiration and you’re just being wishy-washy and indifferent. I like cooking, I like putting together a nice meal, but day after day, I run out of ideas for yummy things, and end up eating frozen pizza because I just can’t come up with anything better.
It seems to me that she wants, not so much for you to take over the cooking (you said in another post that she gets frustrated with the way you do things) but for you to be more involved and express an opinion. Perhaps even get excited about a meal, or a recipe, instead of looking at it as just food to fill you up.
I applaud you for stepping up and wanting to take over the cooking for a few weeks to get an idea how it might feel to be the one always responsible for creating meals.
Since you mentioned not knowing what items should be in the fridge or cupboard all the time, here is a link to Rachael Ray’s list of pantry staples. Real Simple makes one too (I love that magazine) but my subscription has lapsed and I can’t get to that part of the website.
This list is a starting point, obviously if you and your wife eat jalapeños or something at every meal, you’ll want to add that to your list of staples. Or you could Google for another list that might suit your family better.
Rachael Ray’s list
That is a great idea for how I can be useful during brainstorming time.
Fantastic user name and excellent advice. If she can stand it, I should pick a few staple like these and make them several times to get the technique down and then try to add variety.
Let us never introduce our wives to each other in the presence of sharp knives.
I usually try to turn the brainstorming session into a conversation, but she recognizes it as a ploy.