'Five' ingredients or less

[vass]

My main cooking problem is with executive function/attention/general brain fog. If there are too many ingredients or steps, I just tend not to eat, or to eat junk instead of cooking a meal. I once had a three day brain block when it felt too hard to make a banana smoothie. All I needed was ice cream, a banana, cinnamon, and milk, but I also had to get the blender down and wash it afterwards, and it just seemed too hard.

So, it occurred to me this morning that I should try googling for recipes with five ingredients or less/fewer. I found a lot of recipes, but one small problem: THEY CAN'T COUNT.

Take this recipe for crockpot mashed potatoes: it purports to have five ingredients, but actually has nine. I'm guessing they thought the condiments didn't count. Well, if I were adding salt and pepper to my own taste, they wouldn't count. But if they're a step I have to get over while following a recipe, they certainly do count. If I have to go to the supermarket to buy onion powder, garlic powder, and white pepper, because I've never used those things in my life, then yes, they count.

I used to be a good cook.

Does anyone have any brain fog friendly vegetarian recipes? Preferably not too starchy, since insulin resistance contributes to the brain fog.

Comments

[meghanc]

We eat a lot of chickpeas. If you cook up some quinoa, rice, or couscous (I make all three in batches and keep it in the fridge), you can easily make a meal by heating a skillet with a little butter or olive oil, putting some frozen spinach in the pan, and then adding a tin of rinsed and drained chickpeas. Four ingredients like that, though I often add garlic, lemon juice, or both--but that can totally be done to taste and isn't crucial. Cook the chickpeas and spinach until the spinach isn't soggy and the chickpeas have (hopefully) started to get a bit brown in places, dump over the quinoa, and eat. Assuming that you had pre-cooked whatever, it only takes about five minutes and one pan, which I can almost always manage.

We're also big on roasted veg over [whatever]. The whatever is about the same in the last paragraph, only pasta (or bean pasta, or soy pasta, or whatever) is equally good. The basic formula is olive oil + [veg] at about 400F for 45-60 minutes, then dumped over the [whatever]. We do cauliflower like this the most, but it's also good with squashes (summer or winter, just cut into chunks [w/peel removed if appropriate]), broccoli, asparagus, peppers... Really, just about anything that's in the fridge (or freezer) and starting to look a bit questionable. If you're feeling protein-deprived, adding a tin of chickpeas to the veg is pretty tasty. You can make the food more interesting by adding a seasoning blend, some seasoned salt, garlic cloves (still in the skin--they'll slip out when they're done) or onion to the roasting tray, but none of those things are necessary if you don't have the energy.