I've thought about putting together a brief founders' cookbook with a dozen or so of the recipes for things that I survived on in the lean days that you can make for about a buck or two and in about 20 minutes.
The real trick is not buying prepared foods at all. Things like flour, rice, eggs, beans, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, yogurt, cheese, ground beef, fish filets and chicken breasts are all reasonably cheap and you can have a lot of variety with a relatively small set of ingredients on hand. With some practice you get to where you know how to parallelize the cooking steps so that you can get everything done and even cleaned up faster than you could run out for fast-food.
Secretly I want our next office to have a full kitchen since one of the things I miss when I'm at our office is being able to cook in the middle of the day.
I have looked at it actually, and it's pretty neat, but for the way that I do things it has a fatal flaw: the ingredients are exotic (i.e. where I live they're expensive and you'd need to go to a specialty shop for some of them) and don't overlap much between recipes.
From the looks of things, he's a much better cook than me. The stuff I make is far more ghetto, but revolves around like 15 ingredients or so that I basically buy every time I go to the grocery store. That keeps me from having to actually plan meals. I usually cook in the opposite direction -- I look at what I have on hand and figure out what I can make from that.
My gut sense is that that would be more approachable for folks that are transitioning from fast-food and frozen pizzas.
the ingredients are exotic (i.e. where I live they're expensive and you'd need to go to a specialty shop for some of them) and don't overlap much between recipes.
I had a housemate who kept a copy of the Wycliffe International Cookbook. It was originally meant for overseas missionaries, written with the expectation that the user would have trouble getting access to the wide variety of ingredients specified by most cookbooks (which also made it useful for a college student kitchen).
To use the cliche - there's an app for that. It's called Epicurious and it's great. Not daily/weekly breakdowns but you can type in what you have in your fridge and it'll tell you what you can make with it. Of course if you have a smartphone or a tablet you also have google. Got a mind-blowing recipe for marinaded steak online that everyone loved :)
A few of those things are not particularly cheap in Australia: fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, cheese, chicken breasts. Eggs are also fairly expensive presuming you buy free-range.
3L of milk is about $3 if you buy generic/big-brand and $4.50 if you buy "Dairy Farmers" - many people (myself included) avoid the loss-leading by the major brands as they are trying to squeeze out smaller producers.
The real trick is not buying prepared foods at all. Things like flour, rice, eggs, beans, pasta, potatoes, fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, yogurt, cheese, ground beef, fish filets and chicken breasts are all reasonably cheap and you can have a lot of variety with a relatively small set of ingredients on hand. With some practice you get to where you know how to parallelize the cooking steps so that you can get everything done and even cleaned up faster than you could run out for fast-food.
Secretly I want our next office to have a full kitchen since one of the things I miss when I'm at our office is being able to cook in the middle of the day.