How adorable.
Hey guys, look. This one still has HOPE! 
…and? One thing bachelors have is time. No spouse or kids to tend to frees up tons of it, so learn to cook. Better yet, get out and learn to cook. Record the game, pause the play station or whatever, take a class on a food you like (my thing is baking, but I can hold my own in most areas).
However, for fast and fairly easy, my goto is broil a chop of meat (pork and chicken are cheap, NY strip when I splurge) using one of those shaker seasonings, steam or sautee a veggie, nuke a potato (preferably a yam/sweet potato). Takes about 15-20 minutes for all three, looks presentable, tastes good, minimal clean-up if you line the roasting pan with foil.
Me? Married, 25ish years. Hope is dead. 
Walmart has a 5qt. crock pot for $16. Should be filled half to 3/4 full to cook right. Buy some already cut up stew beef, add veggies (fresh or frozen), large-cubed potatoes and especially quartered onions (so they don’t cook away.) Everything tastes/smells better with onion. Throw everything in raw. A few pats of butter, some Worchestershire sauce and salt & pepper. High for 4 hours or Low for 8 hours. If you want, a packet of Beef Stew Mix…there are lots of flavors available in the soup aisle.
Frozen stir fry veggies. There are lots of varieties. Add whatever meat you want (can be sliced thin if still partially frozen.) Uncle Ben, Mahatma & Zataran rices are your friends for just about anything.
You can add lots of different things to mac & cheese…browned ground beef or sausage, broccoli, peas etc. Go to foodgawker.com, put in your ingredients and see what combos come up—voila!
Stouffer’s and Marie Callander are better than Banquet and Michellini (sp). Hot and Lean Pockets aren’t bad.
Grocery store delis are great for cooked meat you can use for 2-3 days—rotisserie chicken, meatloaf, fish. The side-dishes are usually avoidable, though.
Damn right you can’t. I’m sure you people would just love to get your hands on our highest-level chicken technology. But it’s not going to happen on Alton Brown’s watch.
I’d skip the butter and Worchestershire sauce and go with a can of tomato paste and some red wine.
Chicken, blue cheese, and hot sauce - Buffalo chicken mac and cheese. Ground beef, nacho cheese, and taco seasoning - Mexican mac and cheese. Or if you’re feeling fancy, get a package of lobster or crab meat - the cut-up stuff they sell for making chowder and such which isn’t too expensive - and add that to mac and cheese.
He’s asking for advice for dishes with “ease of preparation” and “not too many ingredients”, so I doubt that he’s interested in roasting his own chicken. Especially given that ready-to-eat hot roasted chicken is already available for a good price in the supermarket.
Kraft Mac & Cheese + ground turkey. I first brown the turkey in olive oil and then at the end add some butter for flavor and to get it to that cracklin’ state. Mix it all together, add a little sour cream and voila, it’s easy and awesome.
How much effort are you willing to put in, Grey area?
Pasta and sauce is dead simple, and really good if you find the right sauce. I have a favorite local/regional brand, but even then I’ll often doctor it up with a little garlic or hot pepper, or sausage (which involves chopping up said additional ingredient, and putting it in a sauce pan on the stove with the jar of tomato sauce and letting it simmer for a while).
Thanks for the suggestions everyone.
I will seriously consider investing in a crockpot since cooking once and getting several meals sounds very appealing.
More suggestions are welcome!
I second the pasta option. It’s my one exception to the ‘one microwaveable bowl’ rule.
However it does require careful selection of a pasta sauce or preparation of something sauce-like in your crock pot. Rao’s is a popular brand around here but it’s like $7 a jar and I don’t think it’s that much better that it deserves the premium but many would disagree.
There’s also the issue of BPA in can linings from canned tomato paste and sauces. Supposedly the acidic nature of the sauce tends to leach more of it out of the coating than other foods. I don’t know if this is a real thing or not, but I always get my sauce in jars to be safe.
Barilla is my personal choice for pasta since I like it al dente but again, this is a personal choice thing. It gives you a fairly nice window to avoid over cooking. But also consider things like ravioli stuffed with various fillings. It alleviates the need for a more complex sauce and makes for a tasty entree.
I used to cook brats in beer, then chop them up into some Zatarain’s Jambalaya. If I were splurging at the store, I’d toss in some precooked shrimp. Pretty much lived on that and Totino’s pizza for almost a decade.
My bachelor son loves what I call Mexican lasagna. it’s easy and doesn’t take too long to put together.
Fry two lbs. hamburger with chopped onions and whatever kind of peppers you want. Season with salt, pepper and cayenne pepper if you like hot.
Stir in 1 pkg. taco seasoning mix and about half a cup salsa. Add one can refried beans and a can or drained corn.
Line a greased 9X13 cake pan with six corn tortillas on bottom. Then one third of hamburger mixture. Sprinkle shredded cheese. Repeat two more layers ending with cheese.
Bake at 325 degrees uncovered for about half an hour. Serve with salsa, sour cream guacamole.
I almost forgot. If you have any dietary restrictions, like some people I know with diabetes who have to restrict their starch intake, Dreamfieldsmakes a low carb pasta. Yes, low carb and pasta in the same sentence. I don’t know how they do it but it’s quite good. It can be difficult to find but if you can’t find it at your supermarket, I’m pretty sure that you can order it direct.
Delia Smith’s One Is Fun is the go-to book here.
Here’s a super-simple recipe:
Parsley
1 smallish onion or equivalent shallots
Spaghetti
Frozen cooked mussels
Cream.
The evening before, set one portion of frozen mussels to defrost in the fridge.
Start to cook the spaghetti as you usually do.
Finely dice the onion and cook on a medium heat to soften then set aside.
When the spaghetti is done, drain.
Add in the cooked onion and the mussels and pour in cream to taste. Heat thoroughly.
Serve with a garnish of chopped parsley.
This scales.
From my bachelor days:
Zatarain’s Dirty Rice mix. Just add ground beef.
Stouffer’s Lasagna with Meat Sauce
Elbow Macaroni with Ham: Cook pasta al dente. While draining, melt a tablespoon of butter in the same pot used for pasta, add torn up pieces of ham (or pancetta if you’re feeling fancy), cook until you get a bit of the maillard thing going on, add pasta back and let it toast just a bit while stirring. Salt/pepper to taste, top with grated parmesan.
Peanut butter and honey on toast
Buy whole roasted chickens from your grocer’s deli. Leftovers can be torn into pieces and added to cup-a-soup, salads, etc.
If you’re trying to impress someone, such as date, it’s the little things that matter. Instead of just tearing up iceberg lettuce with a bottle of ranch, use baby spinach, add jicama strips, strawberries and walnuts or pecans (toasted is even better) and serve with balsamic vinaigrette (bottled is fine, but homemade takes just a couple of minutes).
Learn to fry chicken and make spaghetti sauce on your own. My spaghetti sauce is basically italian sausage, tomato sauce, basil, oregano, rosemary, with salt pepper and a bit of sugar. Toss in mushrooms if you’re feeling fancy. Both the chicken and the spaghetti sauce make great leftovers and this comes from someone who hates leftovers. Hell, I eat the fried chicken cold, straight out of the fridge.
Do you have a Costco membership? If you don’t, you need to get one. Not because you need to be buying things in bulk but because their prepared foods section is some of the best I’ve ever found. They have a chicken pot pie that is so good I’d punch your mom for one (not my mom though, because if I’m nice she might buy me a pot pie) and a chicken penne alfredo that is dang tasty. Their calzones are excellent too. They have a ton of stuff like that and though it is more expensive than McDonald’s it is about a thousand times more delicious and is the kind of thing you wouldn’t be ashamed to serve to guests.
Given that you have to pay fifty bucks a year for a Costco memberships and buy food in large quantities, I don’t think that the OP should become a member. He lives with one roommate. The product sizes are much larger than he needs.
Fried rice. I do this with leftover white rice, usually. Very easy, and you can double the ingredients or more to make several days worth:
Ingredients:
1/2 to 1 onion, diced
any other veggies you like (I like mushrooms and a half pound frozen peas)
1 to 2 cups of cooked leftover white rice
2-4 eggs
some sort of meat/fish/shrimp (optional)
some cooking oil (olive is fine)
soy sauce
salt, pepper, seasoning- a seasoning mix is fine… my favorite is Zatarain’s Creole seasoning
Heat up oil in a big pan. Saute the diced onions (and ground beef/meat or chicken, if you’re using that- if you’re using fish or shrimp, add that near the end for about 5-10 minutes) at med-high heat for about 5 minutes. Add the white rice, stir fry for about 5 more minutes. Pour on a bit of soy sauce. Add the frozen peas, and stir fry for another 5 minutes or so. Add some seasoning- not too much salt, since the soy sauce is very salty. Break the eggs on top and stir-fry for another 5 minutes or so, until the eggs are cooked as much as you like.
I taught myself this recipe through trial and error, and it’s a big hit with my wife and I. All the ingredients are cheap (especially if you cut out the meat), and it’s quite tasty.