By “cottage cheese,” do you mean tvorog (so-called “pot cheese”)?
If not, do you drain the whey before adding it to the pot?
Stovetop cheesy tuna casserole:
Get one box of store brand mac and cheese and one can of the cheapest tuna in oil you can find. Boil the macaroni, drain. Add the whole can of tuna and the oil and the cheese packet. The oil subs for the butter and milk. Stir. Eat.
One of our quickest favorites is caviar spaghetti:
- Cook the spaghetti.
- Add butter to taste.
- Add caviar to taste. A teaspoon per person is probably more than enough.
Enjoy!
I use standard cottage cheese found in any grocery store. Large curd is better as it holds up with the heat of the noodles.
I don’t drain anything from the container.
I’m guessing eating peanut butter by the spoon fails to qualify as a “meal”.
So for three steps:
- Place several rows of nacho chips to cover tray.
- Add desired cheese, meat, veggies, hot sauce.
- Cook for five minutes or until cheese melted.
Beanie weinies: Get some hot dogs out of the freezer, around two per eater. Slice into thin disks and throw in skillet. (If you use all poultry dogs, you might need to add a bit of fat/oil to keep things from sticking.) Fry for a bit, stirring occasionally until the disk start getting crispy surfaces. Open a can of baked beans and dump over the hot dog disks, continue cooing/stirring until the beans are bubbly hot. Eat.
If you end up with left overs, spread them cold on toast the next day for an insta-lunch.
We call em ‘Whack-biscuits’
My mother made this, except leaving out the butter and onion because that would add flavor.
A really uncomplicated meal for me is to boil up a pot of macaroni, then add enough butter to clog an artery, salt. Eat. Loved it since I was a kid.
That’s the base, but I modified it with barbecue sauce instead of ketchup and by adding bacon.
Last night I made Rana pasta tortelloni (which doesn’t count) but I made a quick sauce for it. Cook some chopped up bacon in a frying pan, when it is crispish remove it with a slotted spoon, drain some of the fat, then cook a big shallot chopped and two cloves of garlic chopped, with some Italian seasoning. When done return the bacon, turn off the heat, and add some butter. (We have an electric stove so it stays hot.)
Very simple butter sauce for the tortelloni. It’s kind of based on the Amatriciana sauce in the Times no recipe recipe book (a good place for this kind of thing) which however is a tomato, not butter, sauce.
One hack for any sort of un-complicated meal while keeping flavor is Rotel - god of semi-prepped food.
Sadly, my local Kroger only carries 2-3 of the varieties, but you can take nearly any protein, cook it / par-cook it, and then simmer in Rotel, add cheese or other seasonings/toppings, and you have a winner.
To the point that I always have at least 2-4 cans in the house for quick easy dishes.
Seconding this. Nuke a chicken breast 3/4 of the way done, then toss in a pot with Rotel and a cup of Minute Rice. When the rice is done, dinner is ready.
Looking for something to make for breakfast this morning… there’s some bacon… had eggs yesterday… don’t feel like oatmeal… Hold on! A can of whomp biscuits!
Made the bacon and the biscuits together in the oven (different pans). The bacon took a few minutes longer.
This slayed me. I’m still giggling! Thanks for a nice laugh today! 
@SDWC, my Ukrainian grandmother made varenikis that represented these wonderful flavors. Lovely large dumplings stuffed with pot cheese, first boiled then sauteed in butter with onions and sour cream. A complete heart attack in a bowl, but oh, so delicious!
Cooking on easy mode tonight: cook six or seven pieces of chopped bacon in a large pan, then without draining the grease, add a can of diced tomatoes, and some cooked pasta. Serve with parmesan cheese and a salad. I also will toss in whatever else strikes my fancy: leftover spaghetti sauce, capers, chopped green onions, etc. But that’s the gist of it.
I have done that. A little parmesan doesn’t hurt.
Back when I was in grad school, in the mid-70s, Birdseye had a line of “International Vegetables” frozen in 10 oz boxes. They had a recipe for the Italian ones where you threw in some ground beef and spaghetti sauce with the veggies. I miss those things.
I see that ramen has been mentioned only once, so let me mention it again.
If I’m feeling like a snack or light dinner and have the right ingredients for ramen, it’s literally a matter of minutes to have a fancy-looking delicious meal.
Ideally I’ll have something like spicy jerk pork chops in the fridge. Barbecued chicken works, too. Slice into thin slices while the water boils (only about half an inch in the pot). Wash and slice up some brown mushrooms. When water boils, throw in ramen, pork, and mushrooms. When it’s time to turn the noodles over, add the “soup flavouring” of Sapporo Ichiban Original, stir for a bit, and when noodles are tender pour into a pasta dish.
Chop up raw scallions and sprinkle over the dish for crunchiness and a nice appearance. Drizzle soy sauce over all of it. The end result looks and tastes like a dish that’s much more complicated than it really was. 
Lately I have been losing inspiration for what to have for dinner. Last night I looked on the back of Knorr’s Broccoli Cheese Rice, and lo and behold! Inspiration! They had sautéed up some chicken bites, zucchini and yellow squash and cherry tomatoes. I didn’t have cherry tomatoes or yellow squash, but I had mushrooms and a bit of leftover raw broccoli.
I made the rice by the directions on the package, and cooked the chicken and veggies at the same time in another pan. Mixed them up together - voila! Pretty good. I’m not sure it’s THAT simple, at least for this thread, but it worked for us.
This reminded me of the first semi “homemade” meal I ever made myself in college. At home I barely knew how to toast a pop-tart. In my room at college, I only had a microwave, so I got a Pyrex glass bowl with a top. Baked a potato in the microwave. Cut up baked potato. Sliced up kielbasa. Added to bowl with a can of sauerkraut. Heated until palatable. I was very proud of myself for “cooking”.
Another microwave specialty was nachos, which became a late-night tradition to eat while watching Letterman with my college buddies— microwave ground beef in the Pyrex bowl until cooked. Drain grease. Dump ground beef over nacho chips on big plate. Add lots of shredded cheddar. Microwave until melty. Dump a jar of salsa on top. Somehow when I make nachos now, with various spices and chiles now added to the beef, it does not taste as good as I remember the microwave nachos tasting.