The Case for Simple Cooking

There’s a genre of cooking content that I find simultaneously impressive and useless. You’ve seen it: weekend-project recipes with 27 ingredients, specialized equipment, and techniques requiring practice. The results look magnificent. The likelihood of me making them is zero.

What I actually need, and what I suspect most people need, is the opposite: simple recipes that become automatic. Meals that take twenty minutes and use ingredients you probably have. Food that’s good enough to look forward to, not so complex that it becomes a performance.

The Twenty-Minute Rule

If a weeknight dinner takes longer than twenty minutes of active effort, I probably won’t make it consistently. This isn’t laziness; it’s acknowledging the reality of tired evenings, competing priorities, and limited mental bandwidth.

The constraint of twenty minutes forces useful creativity:

• Pasta with garlic, olive oil, chili flakes, and parmesan — Maybe some broccoli if you have it. Ten minutes, infinitely variable.
• Sheet pan chicken thighs with vegetables — Fifteen minutes prep, then the oven does the work while you do something else.
• Rice bowls — Whatever protein you have, whatever vegetables, a sauce you mixed once and kept in the fridge.

None of these will impress at a dinner party. All of them will make your actual life better.

The Pantry Principle

Simple cooking requires a stocked pantry. Not a cluttered one—a curated one. The goal is having enough staples that you can always make something without a grocery trip.

My minimal list:

• Olive oil (good quality; you’ll taste it)
• Salt, pepper, chili flakes
• Garlic (always)
• Lemons
• Parmesan or pecorino
• Soy sauce
• Rice or pasta
• Canned beans
• Eggs

With these ingredients, you’re never stuck. Add whatever fresh vegetables and protein you have, and dinner exists.

Technique Over Recipes

The dirty secret of cooking is that technique matters more than recipes. Learn to properly salt food, develop a sense for when things are done, understand how heat behaves in your specific pans—these skills transfer across every meal you’ll ever make.

Recipes, by contrast, are often oddly specific. “Cook for exactly 4 minutes.” But your stove isn’t my stove. Your pan is different. The only universal truth is: it’s done when it’s done. Developing the judgment to know that is worth more than any recipe collection.

A few techniques worth drilling:

1. Properly salting pasta water — It should taste like the sea. This is the only chance to season the pasta itself.
2. Building fond — Those brown bits stuck to the pan aren’t burned; they’re flavor. Deglaze with wine or stock.
3. Resting meat — Walk away for five minutes. The juices redistribute. Cutting immediately wastes everything.

The Ritual Value

Beyond nutrition, simple cooking serves another function: it creates ritual. The act of preparing food, even something modest, provides a transition between work and evening. It demands just enough attention to quiet the mental chatter without requiring exhausting focus.

Elaborate cooking doesn’t work for this. It’s stressful, demands planning, and carries stakes. If your soufflé falls, the evening is colored by failure.

But if your pasta is merely okay? You eat it, you move on, you try again tomorrow. The low stakes are the point.

A Permission Slip

Consider this a permission slip to abandon culinary ambition on weeknights. To make the same three dinners on rotation without guilt. To value consistency over impressiveness.

The most important meal is the one you’ll actually make.