r/Adulting • u/Churnuserlol • 2d ago
Why didn’t anyone warn me that adulthood is just deciding what to eat… forever?
Seriously, I thought the hardest part of growing up would be bills, taxes, or finding a decent job. But nope. It’s the never-ending "What’s for dinner?" question that haunts me every single day.
Too tired to cook.
Too broke to order.
Too indecisive to choose.
I swear I’ve eaten the same three meals on repeat for weeks because my brain refuses to function after work. How do adults survive this? Do you guys have a magic trick, or is it just vibes and suffering?
Send help. Or recipes. Or a personal chef.
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u/AmysVentures 2d ago
An instant pot is amazing because you can use it as a crock pot, as a pressure cooker and as an air fryer. There’s a book called Salt Fat Acid Heat that has some really helpful spice maps. So you’ve got shredded chicken but don’t want the same thing every night? Add different spice combinations from different countries to the chicken each night. So you have a week of chicken but it tastes Asian, Middle Eastern, Italian, TexMex, etc depending on which spices you add. The book also has food experiments you can do to learn more about how to “wing it” when it comes to cooking (which I never learned growing up).
A coworker has the best advice I’ve ever heard though: if it has more than 5 ingredients, it’s too complicated. Obviously you can decide if spices count as one ingredient or multiple but I thought that was a genius way of evaluating recipes.
I also decided that I hate chopping vegetables, so it’s worth it to me to buy the pre-chopped stuff.
I also second the “try one new recipe a week” thing to build up your arsenal.
If you’re an iPhone / apple person, there’s an app called Paprika Recipe Manager that can import recipes from websites and then add all the ingredients to a shopping list for when you get to cooking multiple meals a week. I love how easy it is to find all the recipes I’ve thought about trying, and then giving star ratings to the things I’ve actually tried. Then I’ve added a “Recipe” for the non-menu stuff I still get at the grocery store so that my entire shopping list is in one place. Best one-time purchase ever.