I don't know of many doing day-to-day cooking for "fun". Its a bother. However, if you're okay without requiring gourmet meals, its not too bad. There are shortcuts.

1. Learn a total of 5 or 6 meals total, thats it forever. Then repeat them. You'll always know the ingredients, and you can buy in larger quantities so it doesn't break the bank.
2. Choose fairly simple preparation things. Sure fancy food is nice, but a PITA to prepare. Keep it simple.
3. A meal is 3 things: a single serving of protein, a single serving of vegetables, a single serving of starch. A serving is a portion about the size of your closed fist. Example: pork, green beans, potatoes. Thats a meal.
4. Choose ingredients that are fairly cheap or easy to substitute.

Pulled pork is one of the easiest, cheapest, and tastiest meals you can make.

Ingredients:

3lbs (or 1.3Kg) Pork - any of these cuts is fine, buy what's cheap:

• shoulder/butt
• loin
• "country ribs"
• "cutlets"

Buns

Green beans (can is fine to begin/fast, frozen when you want to up your game)

Bottle of BBQ sauce

Instructions:

1. Plug in a crockpot (if you don't own one, they're cheap new and even cheaper second hand, expect $10 to $20 to buy one)
2. Set it for "slow" or "long" or "6 hours" or "low" labels vary, its all the same setting
3. Turn on your kitchen fauct. Put a cup under the water for 3 seconds. Pour that water in the crockpot.
4. Put in your pork
5. Put 1/2 of your bottle of BBQ sauce in the crock pot on top of the pork.
6. Walk away for at least 4 hours. If its 6 or 8 hours, thats fine too.
7. When you come back take two forks and pull the meal apart. It will be very soft. Us this time to remove any bones if your pork cuts had bones. Meat will fall off the bone easily. Use your two forks to pull the meat apart, shredding it. Do this until all the meat is shredded. If you came back at the 4 hour mark, leave again for another 2 hours or so. If you're already at the 6 or 8 hour mark, You're done!

Empty your can of green beans in a Microwave safe dish and put it on high for 2.5 minutes or until they're hot. Green beans in the can are already cooked when canned, so they're safe to eat at any temperature.

Get a bun, pull out some wonderful pulled pork on it, add some more of the BBQ sauce from your bottle. You've got a protein, a veg, and a starch.

That 3lbs will feed you for almost a week. You can freeze some on day two or three for meals for future weeks.

if it makes you feel better I was raised in a house where my mom cooked. But she was not real great about it. Actually she could make some great stuff on holidays so more limited budget combined with limited effort really. Im not sure she liked to cook really but she pretty much had to. Typical week was chili, spagehetti, chilimac, shakeNbake leg quarters, macNcheese. Anyway Im not a very good cook. I don't necessarily loathe it, but im not good. Particularly at seasoning. that is the tough part. I can bake decently. Usually that is just following the recipe exactly and can grill decently.

All 3 of our kids that are still at home can cook well & we take turns doing it throughout the week. Been 6 months so far & it's working out great.

Cooking lets you off dish duty for the evening, too :D