I liked to cook with my girlfriend as a fun and easy date activity, and we've continued to do it now that we're married. Also, cooking our own food is cheaper than going out every night, and tastes better than getting takeout.
We try to plan meals for the week and then do a big grocery run on the weekend, and I'll stop by the store after work if we run low on something.
We have a few meals that we run through on a rotation; making pulled pork in a slow cooker is pretty easy. There's a mustard marinated chicken dish that we both like. There are a few pasta dishes I can whip up from memory; we also make simple stuff like fried rice on occasion as well.
Neither of us follow a diet; we're still at the stage of our lives where trying to make generally balanced meals (protein, vegetables, fruit) is enough to keep us pretty healthy.
The only real life hack I have is that it's worth the time to memorize a couple recipes that taste good and are easy to make. Don't worry too much about cooking time; one of the pasta dishes I like to make has to simmer for 3 hours or so, but it's really easy to let that sit on the stove and just check on it a couple times an hour to make sure it isn't burning. Cooking isn't an active process where you have to be paying attention to it and devoting cycles to it every second of the process.
One I actually have in my crock pot right this very minute is dead simple and turns out delicious.
Grab some type of beef roast (I usually get either chuck or round), and two cans of Campbell's french onion soup. Throw it in the crock pot on low over night (about 7-9 hours should do it) and you have delicious tender roast beef and gravy that will feed one person for 3-4 days, all for 5 minutes of prep.
Throw in some veggies if you like (pearl onions are really good, and I personally like mushrooms in there as well as they pair well with meat and soak up the gravy/soup mixture). It also goes without saying that if you can make your own french onion soup, it would turn out even better, but that does away with the whole 5 mins of prep stipulation. :)
If you want to get really fancy, look up a Brazilian dish called feijoada. Most recipies call for it to be cooked in a pot or a pressure cooker, but I convinced my girlfriend (who is from Brasil) to try to cook it in a crock pot, and it turned out being one of the best things I have ever put in my mouth. It's a real bitch getting all of the stuff to make it, but it is utterly fantastic and definitely worth the effort.
I doubt it would win any BBQ competitions, but it's dead easy to make and is pretty delicious. We don't bother making the pancakes that the website recommends; we just grab some rolls from a bakery.
We don't make nearly as much use of our slow cooker as we should, but we're definitely looking for more recipes too. As we move into winter, we'll probably start trying to make stew, etc in it.
We try to plan meals for the week and then do a big grocery run on the weekend, and I'll stop by the store after work if we run low on something.
We have a few meals that we run through on a rotation; making pulled pork in a slow cooker is pretty easy. There's a mustard marinated chicken dish that we both like. There are a few pasta dishes I can whip up from memory; we also make simple stuff like fried rice on occasion as well.
Neither of us follow a diet; we're still at the stage of our lives where trying to make generally balanced meals (protein, vegetables, fruit) is enough to keep us pretty healthy.
The only real life hack I have is that it's worth the time to memorize a couple recipes that taste good and are easy to make. Don't worry too much about cooking time; one of the pasta dishes I like to make has to simmer for 3 hours or so, but it's really easy to let that sit on the stove and just check on it a couple times an hour to make sure it isn't burning. Cooking isn't an active process where you have to be paying attention to it and devoting cycles to it every second of the process.