Not every meal needs to be a gourmet experience

Sometimes a cheese sandwich does the job

Turn down your expectations and just enjoy your food!

Lazy cooking means getting a meal on the table with a minimum of fuss and effort. Do you ever spend hours poring over gorgeous recipes, wondering if you have the ingredients (and skills) to cook them? Yeah, not every meal has to be a gourmet experience, even though food bloggers and TV cooking shows would have you believe otherwise.

Let’s break down what eating is

Food is fuel. At its most basic, that’s exactly what it is. We have to eat several times a day for sustenance, nutrition and energy. Because we humans like a bit of variety, we enjoy ramping things up a bit to enhance our enjoyment. But sometimes that can over-complicate life.

But variety is the spice of life!

Of course it is, but variety knows no bounds. Where does it end? For one person, variety may mean choosing between three boxes of cereal in the pantry at breakfast time. For another, it may mean eating a different cuisine every night of the week, either cooked at home, ordered in or enjoyed in a restaurant.

Some people enjoy having the same lunch at work, day after day. Others couldn’t think of anything worse than settling for the same burger, salad or sandwich. But that doesn’t mean that every time we eat, we must expect a gourmet experience.

Turn down the gourmet expectations for a better life

When something fantastic happens all the time, it loses its shine. Are you going to eat oysters and caviar every week for the rest of your life? We all need a bit of light and shade, even when it comes to the foods we eat and the meals we enjoy.

Unless you can afford to splurge on the very best cuts of meat, the finest cheeses and the most expensive artisanal pasta brands for every meal, you’re going to need to temper your expectations. Why put yourself through the disappointment of feeling like you can’t afford this, you don’t have the skills to cook that, or you couldn’t possibly replicate that incredible risotto you just saw on Instagram?

Simplifying your expectations takes the pressure off too

Imagine having to cook a three-course gourmet meal every night. You just wouldn’t do it. There’s nothing wrong with a ham and cheese sandwich for dinner with your feet up in front of the TV. Or a salad poured from a bag tossed with dressing from a bottle. Or a few bits and pieces from the crisper drawer quickly chopped, sauteed and thrown together with some microwave rice.

There’s a time and a reason for cooking up a storm. It’s when you feel like it or when the occasion calls for it, or both. We’ve been taught to believe that the meals we cook at home must be as Insta-worthy as any restaurant meal on your travels. TV shows like MasterChef and Iron Chef make us feel like inadequate home cooks. When was the last time you used a blast chiller or a sous vide in your kitchen?

Keep it simple, keep it basic, keep it tasty

Instead of rising to the occasion, how about we modify the occasion to suit our lazy cook selves? If you’ve got people coming over for dinner, does it have to be a sit-down affair with a starter, a main and a dessert? What if you could enjoy your guests’ company over a bowl of pesto chicken pasta and a glass of chilled white wine?

When you’re hosting friends for a barbecue, do you really need to spend hours threading beef and vegetables onto skewers, making three different types of salad and concocting an intricate dessert? How about a good old ‘sausage sizzle’ or MYO (make-your-own) hot dog station? Put out a selection of salad vegetables, some cheese, some ketchup, chilli sauce and mustard and tell everyone to customise as they like.

Keep food simple and everyone will enjoy it

And for simple at-home dinners, a ‘some assembly required’ dinner is the easiest way to get food in your belly without a lot of effort. All it takes is some shop-bought, pre-prepped ingredients like a rotisserie chicken, a bag of salad and some buns or a can of good quality soup, some heat-and-eat garlic bread and some frozen vegies and you have yourself a perfectly respectable meal.

Remember the other special things about food

Aside from fuelling our bodies, food is for socialising, for coming together, for comfort, for celebration. It’s a way of showing love, to others as well as ourselves. It can represent our faith or culture, make us feel at home or transport us to somewhere else in the world.

Not every meal has to be a gourmet experience.