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The dinners I come back to when I’m running a business, feeding a family, and trying to look after myself too.
I’ve been writing recipes for over ten years, and I still cook the same twenty dinners.
Not because I’ve run out of ideas. Because at six o’clock on a Tuesday, with a thyroid condition and a day already behind me, I don’t want to decide anything. I want to open the fridge and know.
These are those twenty. Some take twenty minutes. One takes an afternoon and I make it anyway. None of them ask me to be a better version of myself than the one standing in the kitchen.
I’ve grouped them by what’s in them, so you can find what you’ve already got.
Chicken
The four I rotate without thinking. One roasts, one simmers, two go in the oven and let me sit down.
1
Whole Roast Chicken with Potatoes
The Sunday one. It fills the house with the right smell, it feeds everyone, and what's left becomes Monday lunch without any further thought from me.
Creamy, sun-dried tomato, the kind of dinner that looks like it took longer than it did. This is what I make when someone's coming and I haven't planned.
Where I go when the week has been long and nobody wants something light.
5
Juicy Baked Beef Meatballs
Baked, not fried — no spitting pan, no standing over it. I make a double batch and freeze half, and the half in the freezer has saved more evenings than anything else on this list.
The fastest dinner on this list and the one that looks the most like a restaurant. Fish is what I cook when I want to eat well and I have no time at all.
Cabbage is the most underrated thing in the vegetable aisle — it keeps for weeks and costs almost nothing. This is what I do with it when the weather turns.
Not for a diet — these are just dinners that happen not to have meat in them. Three are soups, which tells you something about how I eat from October onwards.
15
Bulgarian White Bean Soup
The dinner I grew up on. In Bulgaria this is a whole meal with bread, and it's still one of the most satisfying things I know how to cook.
Vegetables cooked down slowly until they stop tasting like vegetables. Good hot, better the next day, and it turns into lunch without any effort from me.
A proper dinner in a Balkan house — with bread and yogurt, nothing else needed. It took me years of living in America to stop calling this a side dish.
One dinner on this list asks for real time. I make it anyway, and I never regret it.
20
Stovetop Osso Buco
Hours, mostly unattended, and the result is the best thing I cook. This is the one I make when I want to remember why I like cooking — not because it's quick, but because it isn't.
I don’t plan a week. I keep these twenty in my head and pick in the morning based on what’s in the fridge and how I feel.
Roughly: two nights of chicken, two of beef, one fish, one soup, one vegetarian, and one where somebody eats leftovers standing up. That’s not a meal plan, it’s a habit — and the habit is what stops me standing in front of the fridge at six o’clock with nothing.
If you’re building your own version of this, start with five. Five dinners you can make without a recipe is worth more than fifty saved and never cooked.
I share simple, mostly low-carb and Keto recipes, that don't take a lot of time to make and use mostly seasonal, easy to find ingredients. I'm a supporter of healthy eating, but you'll also find some indulgent treats too.
