"I'll cook properly at the weekend"

This is the event, wearing a Sunday outfit. The plan is that the week is for ordering and the weekend is for real cooking, a roast, something from a book, a shop done on Saturday for it. And sometimes the weekend arrives and the roast happens, and it's good, and on Monday the question is back and the roast is gone.

The belief is that cooking is a thing you do properly or not at all. Properly means the event. Not at all means the app. And the six weekday dinners fall on the not-at-all side because they don't deserve the event, which is right, they don't. What they deserve is the plain plate, which is neither. The weekend cook who orders all week isn't a person who cooks. They're a person who does an event once a week and eats out of boxes in between, and the event, because it is one, gets skipped on the weekends when there's something on.

There's a version of this belief that works, which is batch cooking, a big pan of something on Sunday that becomes Monday and Tuesday. Lavelle's interviewees mentioned it as one of the things that helped them cook with basic ingredients, and if it suits you, do it. But I'd be careful with it, for a reason that's my own view. Batch cooking is still the event. It needs the Sunday, the shop and the hour, and on the Sunday when those aren't available, the week has no dinners in it at all. The plain plate doesn't need a Sunday. It needs fifteen minutes on the night, and it can happen on a Tuesday after a Sunday that went wrong.

Cook at the weekend if you like cooking at the weekend. But don't let the weekend carry the week. The week needs its own cooking, and the cooking the week needs is small.