Bonus points for healthy/low carb. Omivore, vegetarian, vegan, I eat all the things but my autistic ass is very low on spoons. I’m a good cook but even the thought of cooking instant ramen sounds daunting sometimes.
Easy things I’ve incorporated are protein shakes with coffee, flax milk and chia seeds during the morning. Keeps me good til 1pm or so since breakfast grosses me out during the weekdays and it takes like 2 minutes to prepare
Also wraps. Throw a protein on, condiments or a sauce like pesto or something, rip up some lettuce with your BARE HANDS, and that’s it. Or if you’re feeling fancy, slice up some cheese/veggies. Less than 5 minutes with minimal clean up, just a cutting board knife, plate and maybe a spoon or butter knife. Sometimes if I’m not cutting much ill just do it carefully in my hands or on my plate to avoid washing the cutting board
If you get one of those salad chopper devices, the ones that are hinged like a mousetrap (or a wide guillotine I guess lol) which has the catch area below it you can use that to slice/dice whatever vegetables you have on hand. The same can be done with tofu, feta, boiled egg (ick but you do you) etc.
You can eat straight out of the catch container. Obviously throw in some lettuce or other leafies if you’ve got them, drain a tin of beans if you feel inclined, and whatever salad dressing or sauce you feel like.
Home salads are rarely sufficiently well-salted btw.
You can also do nachos or a burrito bowl - rice, vegetables of your choosing, and a tin of black beans plus some salsa or hot sauce goes over well. Cheese and sour cream too, if you’re dairy-inclined. It’s definitely bachelor chow-tier but there’s no shame in it. As someone who makes their own corn tortillas from scratch, I still do the bachelor-chow food because executive dysfunction and autistic burnout absolutely kicks my arse.
You should get your hands on dried garlic granules and dried onions. Half of the battle of cooking most dishes is chopping and cooking those guys down. Because of how they are processed, the sharp flavours of the onions and garlic are mellowed out to the point where you can throw them in the pan last, give them a minute to rehydrate, and you’ll be good. I often use these to boost the flavour of a dish towards the tail end of cooking if it’s lacking in either department.
If you can throw some ground meat in a pan, then some dried onions and garlic, maybe a diced pepper and a tin of tomatoes plus some seasonings or sauce of whatever you feel like, and maybe some frozen peas or other vegetables then you’re pretty much all the way to a dish but in like 15 mins.
I also think it’s worth giving a shout out to TVP granules - you can cut ground meat 50/50 with it and you won’t notice. You can go 100% TVP and rehydrate it directly in the flavourful liquid or sauce that you’re cooking and it’s soft and tasty within like 2 mins. If you combine this with dried onions and garlic granules, you basically just need to throw a sauce or some tomatoes, or perhaps a soup base like pumpkin soup or mushroom soup, into a vessel to heat up. Throw in the TVP, garlic, onion and some water or stock because all those ingredients are dry so they’ll soak up a lot of liquid. Maybe some frozen vegetables or rice. It doesn’t even have to be a proper dish it can just be a take on minestrone or some thrown together otherwise-unspecified casserole.
Also sweet paprika is just dried bell pepper that has been powdered, and celery seed provides a distinct celery flavour to your dishes - with dried garlic, dried onion, sweet paprika, celery seed and maybe some broth or bullion powder and you’ve got yourself the base for a vast array of dishes except it’s already prepped so basically all you need to do is to rehydrate this for the few minutes it takes to warm things up and add some vegetables, some protein, and some carbs along the way and you’ll legitimately have a 10-minute meal.
The chopper device is something I thought of using in the past but haven’t been sure about how effective it would be. I worked at an organic hippie grocery so I’m pretty spoiled about needing fresh veg so this sounds like a great alternative to frozen veg or chopping for 50 years lol.
I think if you get a decent one they’re pretty good for smaller 1-2 serve salads as a main, depending on what you put into it or maybe 3-4 serves as a side.
They aren’t a workhorse though.
If you wanted a step up it would be a mandolin and one of those orange korean julienne slicers, but then you’ve moved out of the low energy, low cleaning burden and into a completely different realm of cooking because suddenly the amount of dishes piles up significantly. (Although if you love carrot and you want the right texture, a julienne slicer is second to none.)
The other alternative is one of those electric salad shooter-type rotary slicer/grater appliances, the ones that rest on your bench top are a better design imo, but what you save in prep time you probably pay for in cleanup time. If you were planning on making and eating lots of salad in the coming days as your main meals though, that’s where you’d hit a sweet spot of them being an efficient use of time and your energy.
In that use-case it would be something where I personally would prep my veggies and throw them into individual containers so I’d be able to make a salad at a whim for lunch and then I’d use that same container of sliced peppers and grated carrot to put as the side vegetables for a burrito bowl while combining the diced/grated tomato with the diced onion and a bit of lime and cilantro into a pico de gallo. Or basically the same, except for nachos or tacos.
If you bulk prep each veg and keep them separate then you’ll probably find that they’ll keep longer, if one thing is more delicate and it goes bad it’s not going to ruin all the other veg, and it would help give me the guise of variety while riffing on the exact same base ingredients of fresh vegetables, except served in different configurations in different dishes.