5 lazy recipes for show-stopping results (the best effort to reward ratio dishes)

And food spending in Q1 2025 (it’s a lot)

Cooking is not always a quick and easy task, despite what professional chefs and food influencers like to tell you. Thirty minute meals never take just thirty minutes, and one pot meals often use more than one pot. At least, that’s been my non-professional cooking experience. Estimated prep and cook times on most recipes you find on the internet? Filthy lies. 

I have also found that some of the best meals I make take a decent amount of time and effort. In chicken dishes, like in the beloved chicken shawarma, I spend forever and a day deboning chicken thighs because the really delicious chicken thighs we buy come with skin and bones. Some of the best baking involves things like overnight chilling in the fridge, using multiple bowls to mix dry and wet ingredients separately, and the use of electrical appliances (not my strong suit). A lot of bread baking involves multiple steps of rising and proofing and you need to figure out your timing for errands, workouts, and school pick-ups just right so you don’t abandon your dough at a crucial moment.

Nevertheless, in these past few years of a lot of cooking from scratch, trying a lot of dishes and recipes (for both baking and meals I hope the children will eat), I have found my best effort-to-reward ratio dishes. There aren’t that many of them. These are the recipes where the results are ‘damn, that’s good’ and that you would happily serve to people who aren’t related to you BUT you feel a bit like you’re cheating in accepting the compliments because they really weren’t that hard to make.

1. Sourdough bread. I start with bread because it’s the food of life. I use the method in this recipe, but mostly follow the ingredients from my friend’s dad. This has been consistently producing beautiful, delicious loaves of bread. They LOOK impressive, like something you’d buy at a farmers’ market or fancy bakery. I gave away loaves over the holidays to the kids’ teachers and everyone loved them. And they’re also surprisingly easy to make, with very little active cooking time. A lot of the work is done by the yeast, overnight.

2. Chicken noodle soup. After bread is the soup course, and this one is one of the children’s favourites. I use the ‘How to Make Chicken Noodle Soup’ recipe from The Kitchn, and it’s the same recipe I’ve been using for years now. I add in more carrots and celery than the recipe calls for (4 stalks of celery and 4 carrots instead of 3 and 3), usually use my own chicken stock, and I salt the chicken thighs in the morning. Sear, simmer, shred, eat. The prep is also not bad because carrots, celery, and onion are on the easy end of the veg chopping scale, and the garlic cloves are chucked in whole and not minced. All these little things add up.

3. Roast chicken. A roast whole chicken definitely looks impressive. The skin is golden and crisp, the meat is tender and flavourful, and although this takes time to cook, a lot of it is hands off time. I use the recipe from Nagi (of Recipe Tin Eats) cookbook, Dinner, and it has never let me down. I salt the chicken in the morning, or the night before if I’ve remembered, and apart from that I follow the recipe exactly. 

4. Brownies. But not just any brownies! The best brownies ever, that I learnt from a YouTube video with Chef Frank Proto. I adjusted the amount of sugar because I don’t like things too sweet, and wrote down the recipe here. It wasn’t quite a one-bowl recipe but it was still reasonably simple as far as baking goes. No electrical appliances involved, no creaming of anything, no waiting for anything to chill or proof. Mix, bake, eat. 

5. Choc chip cookie bars. I use the recipe from King Arthur Baking (but I only use 80% of the sugar they call for because again, I don’t like my desserts overly sweet). They retain an excellent chew and texture for days. They’re like the best chocolate chip cookies for lazy people. I honestly don’t know why I would make chocolate chip cookies again now that I have these. And the best part is all you need is one bowl and one wooden spoon, and then the baking pan. This might be the baking recipe that wins the great honour of ‘fewest bits of equipment’ used.

There you have it, a full multi-course meal (plus a snack) if you’re lazy but want to impress people. Or just want to eat good food but don’t want to faff around with a thousand bowls and chill, proof, rise times. 

Food spending, Q1 2025

For those of you who are new to my Substack, hello and welcome. I’m so pleased you’re here! In case you didn’t read the ‘about’ page or go through the archives, there’s one little thing about my interest in food you might want to know: since 2019, I’ve kept a spreadsheet where I track every cent our family spends on food: what the item was, where it was purchased, when it was purchased, and how much was spent. I also tracked eating out: where we ate, the date we ate there, and how much we spent. Regrettably, I didn’t track quantity for groceries, or how many people were present for eating out. I’m about six years late for those regrets now. 

Regardless, it is a formidable spreadsheet that shows our trends in food spending over the past six years (the main trend is up. And up and up and up). Seeing as the first quarter of 2025 has drawn to a close, I wanted to see how it compared to previous years. Specifically, I wanted to know how it compared to 2024, because these two years were the most comparable in all the years of tracking in terms of how much the kids ate, where we shopped and the kinds of food we bought, and how much cooking we did.

Groceries

As a quaint little historical data point, in 2019 we spent $1,547.53 on food groceries in the first three months of the year. In terms of our personal lives, we only had one child (she wasn’t even two then), we were shopping mostly at Costco, Vons, and Trader Joe’s, and not buying organic or premium ingredients. In terms of world events, this was before the pandemic and the supply chain disruptions, before the war in Ukraine. Back when the world was relatively stable and news was boring-ish.

In the first three months of 2024, we spent $4,090.53 on food groceries. We shopped a lot at the farmers’ market, we bought a lot of organic, pasture-raised, grass-fed, high quality ingredients. We were several years into our mission of voting with our forks. We were also a few years post-pandemic, a couple of years into the war in Ukraine, and a couple of years into the major news story of food inflation and a cost of living crisis. So the stark difference between 2019 and 2024 spending doesn’t come as a huge surprise, really.

Which brings me to 2025. In the first quarter of this year, we spent $5,050.43 on food groceries. The biggest difference between this year and last year was that I started buying fish at the farmers’ market, which adds about $20–30 per week, but apart from that our habits in terms of what we buy and where we buy it from were largely unchanged. A $1,000 increase is quite a pretty penny, and our eating out numbers explain it a bit.

Food away from home

In 2019, we spent $1,111.22 on eating out in the first quarter. We ate out on average four times a week (there was some travel that quarter which brought it up a bit), and ate at mostly fast casual places. In 2024, we spent $2,128.85 on eating out in the first three months. A lot of that was spent on lunch at the farmers’ market, and there were a few meals out at proper restaurants. The kids are older now and eat more, and tipping is also a lot higher at restaurants than at fast casual places. 

In 2025, I tried to cook a lot more and eat out a lot less (including less lunch at the farmers’ market) and happily, our eating out number for Q1 2025 is $1,267.70. Almost half of what it was a year ago, and actually almost back down to 2019 levels. This is why food groceries went up this year compared to last year — even more cooking at home, and significantly less eating out. 

In terms of total food spending (groceries plus food away from home), for the first three months of the year, we spent $2,658.75 in 2019, $6,219.38 in 2024, and $6,318.13 in 2025. Massive difference between pre-COVID and pre-voting with our forks, but actually impressively similar between this year and last year. My two big takeaways from this? Cook more; it’s cheaper (even if you use the best ingredients). And 2019 is already feeling like the good old days to which we will never return.