Minimal Effort Required Recipes

bean fryup:

can of drained mixed 4-5 beans

chuck in frypan high heat

add sliced mushrooms, some sliced cherry tomatoes too if desired

add half a pack of Mexican taco spices

optional: add some spinach leaves if on hand and let them wilt in

make a hole/gap in the mix. crack and egg and cook until it's done to your perfection

serve on its own or on toast

I make these mini cheesecakes with 3 ingredients

1 block of philly cheese (I use Aldi's Manhatten)
1/2 jar of lemon curd (about 175g)
8 butternut snap biscuits

Leave the cream cheese out of the fridge to reach room temperature. Place it in a bowl and mash until smooth then add lemon curd. Stir until mixed through. You can do it by hand, with beaters, a processor or a stick blender.

Place one biscuit right way up into a muffin size patty pan. Repeat with the other biscuits and fill them equally with the mixture. Refrigerator overnight. The biscuit will soften and the mixture with firm up.

You can also use jam instead of lemon curd but it may make the mixture brown so you can add a couple of drops of food colouring. You can also experiment with different biscuit bases.

Pasted from my comment on an older thread:

Microwave potatoes with skin on until completely soft (flip once). Break them up to your liking with your knife or fork.

Broken open or cut in larger pieces - Crack a small tin of drained tuna over the top (I like tuna in oil - add mayo if desired), or top with baked beans. Or add cheese and zap again to melt.

Smashed with a fork or cut into smaller pieces - Stir through oil/marge, salt and pepper, and paprika (smoked, sweet or hot) to season the potatoes.

Otherwise fry the pieces until crispy, push them to the side of the pan and fry a couple of eggs to go with them.

All my recipes are minimal effort (and require even less skill), but I think these 2 are the simplest of all.

Garlic Fish Pasta

The recipe is for Garlic Salmon Linguine, but I often use canned Mackerel, ordinary cheapo spaghetti and dried parsely as it's what I most often have on hand. You could probably substitute any fish, meat or veggies in it, and most types of pasta. Use whatever you have. It's stupidly easy to make, fast and tasty. Good olive oil makes a difference. Aussie EVOO for the win! 😉

2 Ingredient Homemade Ice Cream

This ice cream recipe astonished me that it came out as good as it was with virtually no effort. I expected yuck, but got yum. Add whatever you want to make it whatever flavour you want.

Easy pasta

Pasta Olive oil Salt pepper Lemon juice (bottle) Sundried tomatoes

Not that complicated, just cook the pasta with a bit of olive oil, oil and lemon juice as a dressing, coat thoroughly. Sal and pepper to taste (: can pair with bacon etc for protein.

A few super easy ones that require minimal ingredients:

• Gyeran-bap
• Miyeok-guk
• Omurice
• Stir-fried tomato and scrambled eggs
• Pasta aglio e olio
• Carbonara (traditional style)
• Pasta with olive oil, tomato and basil

Steak sandwiches: get an onion, some sizzle steaks, the thin ones. Bread of your choice, but I think turkish rolls work well. Some salad stuff. Cut rolls and spread one or both sides with condiments of your choosing, eg relish, chutney, or mustard. Fry up the onion, put in a bowl. Salt and pepper on the steaks, and put steaks into the same fry pan. Because the steaks are thin, they will cook very quickly. When done, put the steak and onion into the rolls. Top with cheese and salad items of choice, eg lettuce tomato. To save even more time, skip the onion.

Stovetop one pot macaroni and cheese:

If you don’t want to read the whole thing, ages ago I roughly halved it and converted to cups for a simple version. Not perfect but easy.

This is a good amount for one person and requires one pot, one spoon/fork, and one stovetop burner. Maybe a grater if your cheese isn’t pre shredded.

2/3 cups pasta (I use small elbows or spirals)

1.5 cups water

1 cup milk or soy milk

Cheese (a few handfuls)

Seasoning - a pinch/squirt of mustard, a tablespoon or two of paprika, a shake of nutmeg, or just salt and pepper. Whatever you’re using.

There are a lot of instructions in the original to avoid burning or gumminess.

But basically just add the water and boil the pasta til it begins to soften (stirring as it sticks), add the milk and butter, then turn it down to low to simmer. Keep watching and stirring so it won’t stick and burn. When it’s thickening but there’s still some liquid left season it and stir the cheese in.

If pasta is still a bit hard in the middle (pull out a single noodle with a utensil, blow on it to cool and bite it) add extra milk and keep cooking. If it’s too liquid give it longer to cook down. It thickens a bit as it cools so don’t worry too much.

Alterations:

It can be made vegan/dairy free with plant milk, spread, and/or nutritional yeast or cheez. Add drained tinned/frozen peas and corn at the liquid stage and gently heat through. Or stir in leftover pumpkin puree.

 

For easy cleanup:

Cook it using your eating utensil and after a few minutes to cool, eat directly from the pot. (Note - Avoid using metal utensils on nonstick pans. Use either a non-metal utensil or a stainless steel pot.)

Scrape out the pot with a spatula or wipe it out with a paper towel immediately after finishing the meal, and scrub it out immediately with a soapy sponge or dish brush. (Do the spoon or fork too.) Rinse and leave to drip dry in rack overnight.

 

Frozen stir fry veggies, hokkien noodles, some fried up scrambled egg cut into stripes, some kind of meat if you want it, and a sauce, usually black bean or teriyaki

Bacon and rice.

• Chop up bacon in microwaveable bowl and season. I like to do cajun but salt and pepper works.
• Cover bowl with paper towel or anything to prevent splatters (twisting the paper towel from the center makes a nice inverted cone that sits inside the bowl easily). Cook for 1:30 minutes or more, to desired doneness.
• Add cooked rice on top, preferably leftovers. Microwave again to heat up the rice.
• Garnish if desired, maybe furikake rice seasoning, sushi vinegar or kewpie mayo.
• Mix and enjoy the flavoured bacon grease coated rice.

Bread is easy to do in a pan. I once had a very small kitchen and tried to do one-person meals with a single pan and minimal prep or washing up.

I would cook a few fried eggs then push them over to the side (moving that half of the pan a little off the flame) and fry the unbuttered bread on the open part directly over the heat. Toasting the bread like that soaked up the leftover oil from the eggs for easy cleanup and kept everything warm. Cheese is a good addition, but salt and pepper (and maybe dead horse) is enough.

You can also microwave a potato til soft and roughly chop it up. Serve with butter and seasonings (salt, pepper, and paprika), or a little tin of tuna drained of oil. Or fry the pre-zapped pieces to brown them and push them to the side to do some eggs.

If you’re careful you can cut and stir/flip with only a fork, season the food in the pan or bowl, and eat straight from what it was cooked in. Leaving you to wash only one pan and one fork.

Also try frypan toasted sandwiches https://aussie.zone/post/9662764

Red beans & rice. Soak beans overnight. Fry onion& garlic. Add beans, bay leaf, pepper, thyme, stock cube. Boil rice. Add diced green capsicum at last minute..done.

Chicken and Red Lentil Yellow curry. Meal Prep. About a dozen serves.

1kg red lentils, soaked 2-24hr then rinsed. Whisk lightly while rinsing. 1 whole chicken. Boil 1hr. Separate into meat, bones and broth. Bake bones 40 mins then reboil in broth, re-strain broth, discard bones. 5+ litre pot required. Mines 6.7L. In the big pot, four diced onions, 50g cooking oil, 150g MaePloy Yellow Curry Paste, 5g salt/citric acid/msg, stock. Simmer for about ten minutes. Then add drained lentils, chicken meat and enough water to cook it all. Not too much, you don't want the tasty oil to rise to the top and overflow. Simmer until the lentils are cooked to your taste, I cook them into a mud in a little over an hour.

It's a big days cook, but if you plan it out, it's a bunch of 5-10 minute jobs throughout the day.

Usually comes in at under $2 a meal. Leave the chicken out if you want vegan (yellow curry paste is the only one without shrimp). Add any leftover veggies in or bags of frozen veg.