What are your"too lazy to cook" recipe ?
I mean the one you do when you want something easy to do, but not when you're tired at the point you microwave a frozen-meal, or just cut down a piece of cheese and put it in a bread
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Carbonara.
Cook some chopped up bacon until crispy. Boil some pasta until cooked. Dump half cup of pasta water into bacon, mix. Mix 3 eggs with a half cup of parmesan, drip in a few tablespoons of pasta water while mixing. Turn off stove, dump pasta into bacon, mix for a few minutes, dump egg and parmesan in, mix vigorously. Eat with a big chunk of crusty bread. Should take 20 minutes from turning on the stove to eating.
How is this not just regular cooking?
It is. What constitutes "cooking" for the purposes of "what can I be assed doing" is a tricky question, though. Carbonara is arguably a simple recipe, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily low effort...
If your idea of "cooking" is just throwing a bunch of stuff together in a frying pan, then yeah I guess this is cooking. My idea of cooking involves more technique than just stirring a few things.
If you want dead simple, boil some pasta, drain, dump in a can of Catelli meat sauce, stir, serve. I did this a lot in college.
If you want dead dead simple, dump bag of Green Giant Garlic Pasta into pan, cook until warm, serve.
How low effort does it have to be? I thought 5 steps was low effort. Even if this is a huge effort for you because you've never done it before, do it once or twice and you'll want to do this from now on before reaching for the blue box.
Because regular cooking is a lot more involved than just sitting back and watching bacon and pasta cook. Seriously, I don't do anything for most of the 20 minutes.
I mean, there's chopping, mixing... Hell, even some vigorous mixing!
Most of these comments say to boil pasta. The majority of the effort is just mixing stuff. I don't even measure anything...I just go with what my heart tells me. At most, it's 5 minutes effort and 15 minutes waiting.
I knew if I said carbonara people wouldn't believe me but it's true. Bonus points if you chop the bacon with scissors instead of using a cutting board. It's very very easy and people think it's magic because you're "making your own sauce". It's as easy as any of the other one ingredient pasta suggestions, and only slightly harder than the instant ramen suggestions.
Keep on bacon'on.
An even lazier option is just to buy pre-cubed pancetta. I keep it in the freezer, then just dump it in frozen. But most people buy bacon more than they buy pancetta.
Not sure they keep that in stock around here but given the scissor method, it's really a non issue. I do that with adding bacon to Mac and Cheese too, along with a frozen veg (like green beans) for minimal effort and cleaning. If anyone ever gives me trouble I tell them it's the Korean BBQ way.