Cooking exhausts me before I even start

People say just cook something simple. They do not hear the committee meeting that sentence calls to order.

• What do I feel like? No answer loads.
• What do we have? Unknown; check three places.
• What expires soon? A genuine mystery.
• How long does it take? How many pans? Is it worth it?

By decision twelve I am horizontal on the couch, drained, ordering food I did not even want. The meal never stood a chance.

The worst part is that every option spawns sub-decisions. Pasta means checking for sauce, checking the date on the sauce, and locating a colander that could be anywhere in this kitchen.

Cooking never tired me out. Deciding did. The chopping and stirring are fine, sometimes even pleasant, once a plan exists.

The problem is that dinner arrives every single day, and every single day it demands a fresh round of executive function from a budget I already spent at work by 3pm.

Takeout was never a food choice. It was a decision-avoidance strategy with a delivery fee.

By the time I stood in front of the open fridge, I had nothing left to decide with. Staring into the little light was not a meal plan.

So I stopped deciding at dinner time. I built a matrix exactly once: five meals I actually like, that I can assemble half-asleep, from ingredients that keep for weeks.

• Each meal is one row: name, ingredients, three steps.
• The pantry stays stocked for all five, always.
• Dinner is pick a row, not plan a meal.

One decision survives an exhausted brain. Seventeen do not.

The matrix took one boring hour on a Sunday to write. It has saved me roughly an hour of dithering every single night since.

Is it repetitive? Deeply. Do I care at 7pm on a Wednesday? Not even slightly.

Novelty moved to the weekend, where it finally has the energy budget to be fun. Weeknight dinner is a solved problem, and solved problems are my favorite kind. Some weeks I eat the same row three times, and nobody is grading my variety.