The six

This is the second part, and it's the one to do with a pen.

Write down six plain plates you can make without looking anything up. Six dinners, each fifteen to twenty minutes, each made mostly from the shelf, each following the shape in chapter 15, a starch, a protein, a vegetable and something for flavour. If you can't think of six, think of three and borrow three. Pasta with tomatoes, onion and cheese. Eggs on toast with something green. A jacket potato with beans and cheese. Rice with a fried onion, a tin of chickpeas, spinach from the freezer and whatever spice is in the cupboard. Pasta with pesto and peas. A stir-fry with frozen prawns, soy sauce, and whatever vegetable's in. Those are six, and none of them is impressive, and all of them are dinner.

Put the list on the fridge. Not in your head and not on the phone. On the fridge, where the seven o'clock question gets asked, so that the moment you open the door there are six answers in front of you before the app can offer its one.

Make each one once in the first fortnight. Badly, if that's how it goes. The first time takes longer and the onion's in lumps and you'll forget the salt. That's the point of the fortnight. By the end of it, each of the six has been done, and each one has moved from the event to the thing you did last Thursday, and the picture of cooking in your head has been checked against six real plates.

Then stop expanding. Six is enough. You'll get bored of them at some point and swap one out, and that's fine, but the repertoire stays small on purpose. The people who cook every night aren't the people with the most recipes. They're the people with the fewest, made most often. A small repertoire is what makes the deciding easy, and the deciding, as chapter 10 said, is the work. Six things you can make with your eyes closed beat sixty you'd have to look up.

I've written this with one adult in mind. If you're cooking for more, the six are the same six with the amounts doubled, and chapter 16 is about the children.