I am all about laziness—I mean, industriousness—and because of that, I love making dinners that I can use as leftovers later. Some things (salads) don’t keep quite as well as others (fruitcake), but it’s usually possible to find recipes that occupy a happy medium and can bail you out in a time crunch.

If you find yourself without the time to cook 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, these dishes are perfect for you. Get in the kitchen once and eat for days.

Door Number 1: Soup

Soup is a classic for good reason. It’s quick to make, it stays well in the fridge or the freezer, and it’s extremely simple to cook up a giant batch and use it for meal after meal. Soup is also incredibly versatile—in almost any soup recipe, you can add or subtract basically whatever you want (don’t like celery? Try some zucchini!) and it will still turn out tasting great. Plus, you don’t even know how much better it is than soup in the can until you’ve made it yourself and experienced the difference. A good starting point is this potato soup, which is All Recipes’s highest-rated soup recipe.

Door Number 2: Rice

My personal favorite thing to do with rice is to cook a huge pan of fried rice with tons of vegetables and bits of chicken or tofu, and then keep the leftovers for my lunches all week. Following this recipe will give you great Chinese fried rice. If you prefer a more Indian flava, leave out the soy sauce, sub the sesame oil with another type of oil (canola or mustard is good), and add turmeric, cumin, chili powder, and pepper. Read More »

At least once a week, I find myself with less than a half-hour window to make and eat dinner. I guess I could just grab a sandwich or some Chinese takeout or something, but I have this annoying insistence that most of what I eat taste delicious and have recognizable ingredients. Yeah, I know, I’m a tough customer.

Since there’s no way I’d have time on those days to do more than punch a few buttons on the microwave or set the dial on the oven, I rely on three staple dinners that I can freeze and pop out of the freezer whenever I want. I usually make giant batches of each and then separate them into single portions that I can easily grab from the icicles. Read More »