These Easy No-Recipe Meals Absolutely Count As Cooking — Chefs Can Vouch

These lazy (but legit) meals are homemade as hell, and much more satisfying than takeout.

Somewhere along the way, it seems as though everyone stopped cooking for themselves. The delivery drivers noticed. The restaurants, which deliver three out of four food orders they get, noticed. And while we probably noticed when our credit card bills arrived, many of us kept DoorDash-ing on the reg. In a survey last year, about one-third of American adults said that they ordered food for delivery at least once a week.

While an intention to cook more is a common New Year’s resolution, that good intention often falls by the wayside by February or March. First, you need to make a trip to buy ingredients. Then there’s food that goes bad before it’s even cooked. Or there’s a long, involved online recipe to follow — one that’s more a memoir than a guide to getting a meal on the table. No wonder ordering out starts to seem like a good idea, no matter what the cost.

In desperation, sometimes you’ll make a pot of buttered noodles and happily slurp them down for dinner — but there’s often a lurking sense of guilt that you “didn’t really cook.” But where’s that guilt coming from? You absolutely cooked for yourself, and it should count as a solid effort.

To help convince you of that, we talked to working chefs (who are famously busy people) about the recipe-free meals they throw together when they’re running on empty. Our rules were that everything they shared had to be cheap, fast and incredibly delicious, and that no recipes of any sort — memoir or not — could be involved. Here’s what they told us.

Boiling pasta absolutely counts.