Reading this made me want to stab everything in front of me and set fire to an Orphanage.
This is your fault!
If you're referring to the multiple steps over time, then allow me to provide a key (imo) learning experience for you here: (srs)
I grew up with very basic food. We used salt, pepper, and Mrs. Dash. Lots of casseroles, lots of dry chicken. My family was not a group of foodies. I never really learned how to cook all that much growing up - just a few items here & there. I eventually became a very reactive cook - if I was in the mood to make, say, cookies, I'd furiously whip up a batch of cookie dough, cook all of them, and chow down until I was stuffed. Same with Kraft Mac & Cheese, pancakes, etc. I didn't cook at home consistently & thought you being a great cook was one of those things where you either had it or you didn't. I had no idea how to make great food at home, especially not on a regular basis. As it turns out, nearly every recipe out there boils down to simply following, literally, a step-by-step instructional checklist. You can take all of the work out of it by using stuff like Pinterest & Youtube to find top-notch recipes, so that you can get amazing results while only having to follow the directions. That was a pretty big revelation for me - cooking & baking incredible meals were no longer a barrier out of my reach!
But I still persisted with being a sporadically reactive cook until I got into H&F and started getting into meal prep. Lots of the same meals, but at least I was being more proactive, which had a domino effect - I didn't have to cook every day, I spent waaaaay less money eating out, I ate better-quality & healthier, more natural foods, I lost a bunch of weight, I felt better, and I had a lot more energy throughout the day. But I got sick of eating the same thing all the time, and creating a rotating menu is a surprisingly difficult task to put into practice. Getting into appliance-based cooking, particularly with the Instant Pot, sous vide, and no-knead bread recipes, helped me to create small-batch "gourmet" meals (gourmet here meaning they actually tasted good & I looked forward to eating them, instead of the usual plain chicken & broccoli bowl) & got me started with doing small batches of different food so that I could build up my freezer storage & rotate meals so I didn't get sick of them. Which was huge, because otherwise I tended to just go out to eat instead.
I eventually discovered a few tricks, as well as a key behavior: using snippets of time to create value. Aside from being a reactive cook, I was also very mode-oriented, i.e., if I was in "cooking mode", I could easily spend an hour or two cooking up a big meal for the night with a main dish, sides, dinner rolls, and dessert. The problem was, I was unable to sustain that every night, and would end up eating leftovers the next night, or cereal, or getting take-out. As I learned more about my kitchen workflow, I started to recognize that there were a lot of small, quick things I could do to create solid output with minimal exertion. Call it lazy cooking or call it efficient cooking, but it worked really well. It all started with no-knead bread...pour four ingredients into a big bowl, literally mix with your fingers for 30 seconds, cover with plastic wrap, and let it sit in a corner until you got home from work the next day. Then punch down the air bubbles, roll it into a ball, and let it rise for another 2 hours, then bake for 45 minutes. Voila, a beautiful, delicious bread boule!
The key, in this particular recipe, was using small slivers of time. Each step only took a minute or so, so it wasn't like there was a huge time investment required, day after day after day. And that's something else I kept running into - I needed dinner for tomorrow. And dinner for the next day. And dinner for the day after that. I mean, I love to cook, but I get home late a lot of days & my brain is shot & I just want to eat and not have to do any work, and eating fast-food all the time was not good on my wallet nor my waistline. So that's when I started putting together some meal planning stuff in order to do the bare-minimum required to get great meals at home every day. And that actual hands-on time vs. letting time do the work for you thing, whether it's with no-knead bread or sous-vide or whatever, is really important because there's a mental barrier I run into, especially when I get tired, where I don't even want to think about all of the work required to cook - BUT, I can handle doing a quick minute or so of prep as needed. So in the case of the English muffins, it can be hard to visualize, but here's really how it goes:
1. First day: Get home from work, stir the ingredients together in a bowl, let sit.
2. First day: 4 or 5 hours later, before going to bed, scoop out a dozen dough blobs onto a baking sheet, cover in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge.
3. Second day: After work, spend 20 minutes cooking all of the English muffins up. Then you have a batch that is good for a week at room temp (or a month in the fridge).
So as far as actual work & effort goes:
1. A minute or two to stir the ingredients together, after work.
2. A minute or two to blog out the dough onto a sheet and stick it into the fridge, before bed.
3. 20 minutes to cook them all up on the stovetop, the next day after work.
Now you have a dozen (amazing) English muffins that are good for up to a month if you store them in the fridge. They taste way better than store-bought, are super cheap to make, and don't have any weird ingredients because you made them from scratch. Now, if you don't really care about any of those things, then why bother, but if you do like really really good food but don't want to have to put in a huge time investment, then you can use little pockets of time to spread out the work, because you're going to need breakfast tomorrow, and the next day, and in a week, and in a month, so it helps to figure out some little tricks like this to keep the workflow going so that you can keep providing food for yourself without necessarily need to spend an hour or two in the kitchen every single day. Which is also one of the big reasons I like sous vide - you can vac-seal & freeze your meats & veggies ahead of time & just pick them out and let the machine do the work for you, and you get consistently awesome results with it!
I don't mean to come off as overbearing or anything, it's just that I've come to appreciate the value of spreading out kitchen work over time & doing some minor planning-ahead in order to get top-notch results on a regular basis, instead of getting in a bingo situation & being forced to go through a drive-thru or visiting a vending machine to get sustenance. Which is fine sometimes, but it was becoming a bad habit for me & I couldn't really figure out how to overcome it for the longest time, at least not without eating the dreaded "homemade food" stuff, which in my worldview at the time was definitely not something I looked forward to, haha.
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