Although I was never afraid of cooking, when I worked long shifts I never felt like doing much. This was one of my favorite meals.
Take a frozen chicken leg quarter, microwave it for 6 min on defrost, take out, put pepper, garlic powder, oregano, mic on high for 6 minutes.
Make a small pot of rice (1 cup rice, 2 cups water, bring to boil, let simmer for 14 minutes) top with soy sauce and a can of veggies.
Cheap lasagna recepie:
Buy oven-ready lasagna noodles (we can get generics for something like 1.25$ a box, a box makes 2 lasagnas for the two of us, and we eat one supper and one smaller portion lunch each off of one lasagna).
Buy a cheap, premade pasta sauce. We use Hunt’s Four Cheese sauce, and add one cup of water to it (experiment with the water amount if you use a different sauce).
Heat up the sauce, add any additional spices to it, such as garlic, pepper, italian spices etc to add flavour, then layer with the noodles into a suitable oven-ready pan. Use grated cheese between layers or only on top. We tend to sprinkle a bit of parmesan on too, for more flavour. Cook at 375F for 30-45 minutes. Enjoy!
We make our own pasta sauce for other pasta, though. We use half a kilogram of ground beef, an onion, a green pepper, 2 cloves of garlic, some carrots and celery. Cook the onions a little, add the meat, and when it’s all brown, add the rest of the vegetables. Pour in two cans of crushed tomatoes, a small can of tomato paste, spice to flavour (salt, pepper, italian spice, and we even add a touch of ginger), then simmer for about an hour or an hour and a half. We like ours fairly thick, and generally the doneness of the carrots tells us when it’s ready. Keep sampling it until you get what you like. This recepie makes enough sauce for 6 or 7 meals for the two of us - you could eat for a fortnight off it if you’re single! Invest in disposable Ziploc containers. About a third of the sandwich ones is one serving for us.
As a side dish, or a lazy main one, I often cook up some pasta, drain, add olive oil and some of those Club House spices to it, and eat directly. Simple and very good.
When we cook chicken, we often cook more than a meal’s worth. We cooked up 4 the other night, and I have used one of the extra ones in a caesar salad, and will likely find something tonight for the other one. Some of our chicken recepies:
Salsa Chicken: Cook the chicken, add salsa and cheese on top, heat until the cheese melts, and enjoy. I cooked this for my mom and aunt once - they were skeptical, but since then, they say they cook it all the time!
Honey-Mustard-Garlic: Mix 3:1 honey and dijon mustard, add garlic powder if you want. Pour over cooked chicken, or cook it with the sauce (this makes a bit of a caramelized sauce on it).
BBQ chicken: Pour BBQ sauce of your liking onto the chicken as it cooks.
The grocery store where we shop has a lot of very good cuts of pork, so we tend to buy that a lot, too. Roasts are most comon, but we also buy loins for stir-fry or other recepies, and butterfly chops. The chops we marinade in various sauces (either something store-bought or of my SO’s invention) or we use Shake’n’Bake (generic).
Those are the easiest of our recepies, at least that I can think of offhand. Buy a cookbook and flip through it for more ideas.