Feeding humans is relentless, and meal-planning is exhausting to just about everyone. If you’re trying to avoid most ultra-processed food, it’s a lot of work every day. I happen to think it’s worth it (more on my personal meal-planning method here), but there are a lot of weeks where it all feels like a bit much.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that it’s often a pick-two dilemma:

• affordable ingredients

• nutritious, balanced meals

• ease of prep and cleanup / time

Our exchange made me realize that I have a few dishes in regular rotation that I lean on in moments of desperation or when life gets too busy. Meals that feel like a relief: wow, we’re fed, and that was so easy.

My criteria for inclusion here is simply: would I want to make this and clean it up by myself after I get home from work? If no, I didn’t include it. (Mostly, this means the list has a lot of soups and stews.)

That said, my threshold for easy might be different than yours. In general, I’m willing to spend 30-60 minutes on making dinner. If your threshold is 15 minutes of baking chicken nuggets, that’s fine, but this might not be the list for you.

A lot of these lean on frozen vegetables and canned legumes, which are a regular part of our diet that I feel good about, but you can of course use fresh vegetables or make your own legumes. A few recipes with more expensive ingredients are included at the end.

Honorable Mentions:

• La Cuisine de Geraldine | Finnish Salmon Soup Salmon can be pricey, so I left it off the main list, but I’ve made this soup so many times since I discovered it. I add a little wine in before the potatoes and stock, and it’s totally fine to use an onion instead of leeks. I used dried dill; add it in with stock and taste until it’s your preferred level of dill-y.

• Smitten Kitchen | Burrata with Lentils and Basil Vinaigrette Burrata is a bit expensive for us, but the concept of this dish is fantastic. My changes: I add a carrot to the veggie mix, use a bunch of pesto in the vinaigrette instead of dealing with fresh basil (another use for the food processor above), and I swap burrata for mozzarella balls, adding them at the very end and letting them melt a bit into the lentil mixture. It’s so good. We make this a lot.

• Smitten Kitchen | Zucchini Quesadillas An excellent sneak vegetable dish. There is more zucchini than cheese in here, and the filling keeps for a few days for a quick meal.

• Joy the Baker | One-Pot Hamburger Helper with Sneaky Veggies Disqualified from the main list because it’s more chopping and grating than I think qualifies for this list and is pretty pasta-heavy, but it’s not that difficult and it’s very good, so you should know about it!