Is there a cookbook for those who hate cooking?

[Justkoko]

But know it has to be done and just want all the bloody stress taken out of deciding what and how much and if everyone will eat it and is it easy and not take 15 pans to make.
I have a family to feed. Can't please everyone all of the time but I am so over it. I literally detest cooking anything now. It's not good. I want to enjoy it again.

Meal plan so everyone knows what's coming.
Gousto/hello fresh?
Jamie Oliver 30 minute meals?
I like the Hairy Bikers for tasty family friendly cooking

A dishwasher if you haven’t got one. Then you don’t have to care how many pans are used and you can make the DC unstack it.

Jamie Oliver is good. Batch cooking helps me too - it’s as easy to make double the quantity and bung it in the freezer. You can do the second lasagne for the freezer approach or you can just freeze a meal’s worth of spare meat sauce so you’ve only got to boil spaghetti and you’ll have bolognaise.

I think oven cooking, whilst not the most economic , is the easiest. E.g. roasted meat or toad in the hole or pasta bake or fish pie. Also batch cooking in alliance with slow cooker: so slow cook lamb mince and vegetables and then bake in oven with mashed potato on top- shepherds’ pie. Similarly beef or chicken/leek in slow cooker and then frozen pastry for a savoury pie.
slow cooker chicken curry or casserole also nice and easy but then you are cooking rice separately.
Wherever possible I use frozen veg (eg soffritto base or frozen onions). Frozen mash (pellets of just potato, milk, butter). Also frozen pastry. I freeze batch loads of tomato sauce made from softening soffritto and then reducing tins of tomatoes down and blitzing until smooth. I use this sauce for fish bake (frozen white fish, frozen spinach- both microwaved to defrost and water drained off) or pasta or anything else. I do put frozen meat into the slow cooker with liquids and they always seem to cook v well but not sure if it is officially safe.
so my suggestion is to use your freezer and just think protein/green/carb and then riff around that. Good luck. It’s relentless but I am very grateful for the frozen veg aisle, supermarket deliveries and the wherewithal to fund them.

Oh and i started an index card set with dish on one side and ingredients in the other. Plan was for family members to each select some meals and then to order ingredients accordingly. But I abandoned the project in boredom.

Oh and stuff like: pre cooked rice from one dish and meat from a different meal, lots of sliced up fresh veggies and some sauces (Siracha, Chili oil, Korean mayo, soy sauce, furikake, sesame oil for eg). Then you can use this as another meal: rice bowl.

Or noodle soup, same principle. Waitrose sell lots of different sauce bases in jars. Eg laksa, pho etc..

Yes! It's called something like "How to feed your whole family when you have hardly any time and a tiny kitchen and only three saucepans"

I think a MNer wrote it. It's great and one of my most used cookbooks.

Another vote for Jamie Oliver here.

Jamie Oliver - One Pan, of 5 Things

I would say the three volume delia. How to Cook.

Fay Ripley has done some and they are excellent

The Taming Twins website and accompanying book by Sarah Rossi are really good.

Have you seen the Roasting Tin cookbooks by Rukhmini Iyer ? All ingredients into one tin and into the oven. Saves faffing and washing up.

Jamie Oliver 5 ingredients one works well I think. Or what about one of the Roasting Tin ones?

I used to enjoy cooking before DC, but now I'm so time-poor and worse, the DC all have clashing preferences, so I detest it. What a tedious chore.

I have a spreadsheet tbh, listing all the meals I make that everyone eats. I add notes next to them (like what season they match best with, and easy sides to go with that dish). I find that helps eliminate having to think too much - when weekly meal planning I just pick 7 things from the spreadsheet and can then do it all on autopilot.

We recently bought this book What’s for dinner by Sarah Rossi

it’s got meal plans, shopping lists and nutritional info. Lots of one pan meals and all under 30 mins. Even my teens have cooked some of the meals

Sorry this is the book

Yes I’ve got this too and it is well used. Could do with someone writing a sequel ‘How to feed your family when they are all fussy in different ways…’

Jamie Liver's "One" is all about cooking in just one pan or one tin.
There is a section on batch cooking as well.

Google Traybake recipes. They make cooking so simple.

The Quick Roasting Tin book is brilliant. The original one not so much as there is often extra rice to boil etc.

It's basic but I would recommend Grace Mortimer My First Meals. All recipes are 5 ingredients or less and dead easy to make. The book is aimed at first foods but absolutely is family friendly for everyone I'd say

Not a cookbook. I got the Whisk app. It had made life much easier.

Do you have anyone you can delegate any of the cooking to?
I hate cooking and fortunately dh loves it so I rarely have to do any of it but he’s been away since Thursday and back tomorrow - I’m so bored of it and we also got a takeaway on Saturday!
Dd also enjoys cooking and Monday night is her night to cook. I think thought that she gained her love of being in the kitchen from dh. If it was down to me we’d live on marmite sandwiches.
I do wonder if a box like hello fresh etc might be right for you, takes a lot of the faff out of a few meals a week. Not used them myself but it’s maybe worth looking into.

James May "Oh, cook".

Gousto has taken the stress out of meals for us.