Experiment run: 2 February to 15 March 2026 · Published: 28 October 2026 · Last updated: 28 October 2026 · Reading time: ~12 minutes · The cooking log and all photographs are my own.
Most recipe posts tell you what someone cooked once, photographed carefully, and never made again. This is the opposite of that. For six weeks I wrote down every dinner I cooked on a weeknight, how many times I made each one, and whether I would make it again. Then I looked at the list and retired the ones that had been sitting there, unchosen, for weeks.
This started because of my 15-minute reset. Clearing the counter meant I could finally use it, and I went from cooking twice a week to four times. That was great until I noticed I was rotating the same four dishes while ignoring a folder of about sixty saved recipes. So I counted. Nine recipes made the list. Four survived, three were retired, and two are still undecided. The reason some survived is not the reason I expected, and it has almost nothing to do with how good they taste.
Why weeknight dinners need their own list
I have a folder of about sixty saved recipes. On a Tuesday at 7pm, with forty minutes and no interest in cooking, I use four of them. The other fifty-six exist in a fantasy where I have time to zest things and a second pan that is not in the cupboard behind the first one. So I stopped asking "what should I cook this week" and started asking a different question: which of these do I actually cook when nobody is watching and there is no photograph to take? That is a much smaller list, and it is the only list that matters on a weeknight.
One rule did most of the work. I counted ingredients with a single test: anything I would have to buy specifically for this recipe counts. Salt, oil, pepper and stock cubes do not, because they live in my kitchen permanently and I never buy them for one dish. That rule looks trivial. By the end of this post you will see that it predicted almost everything.
The nine recipes, and what happened to them
Six weeks, Monday to Friday only, is 30 weeknights. I cooked on 24 of them and ordered food on five. One night I ate at my sister's, which I have left out of the counts because it was not a decision I made in my kitchen. Twenty-four cooks across nine recipes is what the table below adds up to.
| Recipe | Times made | Ingredients to buy | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garlic butter chicken with frozen peas | 6 | 3 | Kept |
| Tomato and white bean stew | 4 | 2 | Kept |
| Egg fried rice | 6 | 1 | Kept |
| Sheet-pan sausages with peppers | 3 | 3 | Kept |
| Mushroom risotto | 1 | 6 | Retired |
| Fish tacos with slaw | 0 | 7 | Retired |
| Homemade ramen | 0 | 9 | Retired |
| Lentil soup | 2 | 4 | Still undecided |
| Baked pasta | 2 | 5 | Still undecided |
The column that surprised me is not "times made". It is "ingredients to buy". The four recipes I kept average 2.25 bought ingredients. The three I retired average 7.3. I did not plan that, and I did not see it until I put the numbers in a table for this post. I had spent six weeks assuming I was making decisions about food, and the column quietly making the decisions for me was the shopping list.
The four I kept, and what they have in common
Garlic butter chicken with frozen peas: 6 times
This takes 22 minutes from fridge to plate and I have timed it three times. The reason it survives is not the flavour, which is fine and no more than that. It survives because nothing in it is time-sensitive. If I wander off for four minutes to answer a message, the chicken is still fine. The sauce is forgiving and the peas are frozen, so they cannot overcook into grey mush. That tolerance is worth more to me than a better-tasting dish that punishes me for looking away. It costs about £2.10 a portion, which is not why I cook it, but it is why I do not feel bad about cooking it often.
Tomato and white bean stew: 4 times
A different reason entirely: this one gives me a second dinner. It makes three portions, it is better on day two, and I box one before I sit down to eat, which sounds disciplined and is actually laziness. Boxing it immediately means I do not have to think about lunch. The bought ingredients are two: a tin of beans and a bag of spinach. Everything else is tinned tomatoes, onion, garlic and a stock cube, which are permanent residents in my kitchen now. It takes about 35 minutes and only four of those need me standing at the hob.
Egg fried rice: 6 times
This one is on the list for a reason none of the others share. It is the only recipe I have that consumes leftovers rather than creating them. It needs one bought ingredient, spring onions, and everything else is rice from a previous meal, eggs, soy sauce and frozen peas. On the weeks when the stew and the chicken had both produced leftovers, this cleared the fridge. It also takes eleven minutes, the fastest thing here. I am aware that "rice from a previous meal" is doing a lot of work in a post about cooking, and I will come back to it.
Sheet-pan sausages with peppers: 3 times
Three cooks, three bought ingredients: sausages, peppers, a red onion. Eight minutes of hands-on time, 30 minutes in the oven, one tray to wash. But the reason it survives is more specific than "it is easy". It is the only recipe on the list where no single ingredient is load-bearing. Any sausage works. Any colour of pepper works. If the shop has no red onion, a white one is fine and nothing else changes. Every other recipe here has one thing that must be right or the dish does not happen. This one is flexible enough to survive the shop being out of something, which happens more often than I would like to admit.
The common thread is not one pan and one knife, although that is true of all four. It is that none of them has a step that fails if I get it slightly wrong. There is no moment in any of these where being thirty seconds late ruins the dish. That sounds like a low bar. It is the bar that nine recipes out of sixty cleared.
The three I retired, and the two still undecided
Retiring these was not a judgement on how they taste. Two of them I would happily order in a restaurant. They are retired because they were never going to happen on a Tuesday, and keeping them on the list was costing me something. Every week I would consider one, decide against it, and order food instead. A recipe I never cook is worse than no recipe at all, because it wastes a decision I only get once a day.
Mushroom risotto: made 1 time in six weeks
This needs six bought ingredients, and one of them is Arborio rice, which I buy for this recipe and nothing else. So the bag sits in the cupboard, I use a third of it, and the rest goes stale before I make it again. The other cost is attention. It is 25 minutes of stirring, which is not a long time and is not hard work, but it is 25 minutes where I cannot leave the kitchen, start anything else, or answer the door. That is the real expense, and it took six weeks to name it. I made it once, on a Sunday, when I had the attention to spare. It does not belong on a weeknight list.
Fish tacos with slaw: made 0 times
Zero out of 30 weeknights is a strong data point and I am not going to soften it. Seven bought ingredients, and two of them fail the same test: the fish needs buying on the day, and the slaw vegetables are wilted by day three, so this is a recipe you have to shop for deliberately. It also uses three pans and a bowl. I kept it in the folder for six weeks because it is genuinely one of my favourite meals, and every time I looked at the list I considered it and chose something else. That is what a weekend recipe looks like when it has been mislabelled as a weeknight one.
Homemade ramen: made 0 times
Nine bought ingredients, and the broth takes two and a half hours before you have even started on the rest. I am not going to pretend this was ever a candidate. It went on the list because I saved it in January when I was enthusiastic, and it stayed because deleting it felt like giving something up. What I will miss is the broth, which is the best thing I cook all year and worth a Sunday in November. It is retired from weeknights, not from my life. The distinction matters, and I did not make it clearly enough for the first four weeks.
Still undecided: lentil soup and baked pasta
I said in March that I would decide about these two by the end of April. I did not, and that is now a finding in itself. Both are still on the list six months later, which tells you something the table cannot: a recipe that never quite earns a place also never quite loses one.
The lentil soup is genuinely good and genuinely cheap, but it needs four bought ingredients and two are fresh herbs that go off in three days, so it forces a mid-week shop. I tested it with dried herbs and a squeeze of lemon at the end. That version works, and it is still not quite enough to make it a regular. The baked pasta fails for the opposite reason. It is easy and needs five ingredients, but it makes four portions and I live alone, so I eat it three times and I am bored by the third. Halving it before baking helped, and it is still the meal I make when I have forgotten to plan.
The ingredient audit
Across the nine recipes, the four I kept needed an average of 2.25 ingredients I had to buy. The three I retired needed 7.3. The two undecided sit at 4.5. That is a clean split, and it maps almost perfectly onto how often I actually cooked each one. The ramen, at nine purchases, was never going to happen on a Wednesday. The fried rice, at one, happened six times without me ever deciding to make it.
The obvious lesson is "cook simpler food", and that is not quite it. The fried rice is not a simpler dish than the risotto. It is a dish where the shopping is trivial and the cooking tolerates interruption. The stew has five ingredients but only two purchases, because three of them live in my kitchen permanently. What predicts repetition is not the number of ingredients. It is whether buying for this recipe is a separate trip. Ingredients already in the cupboard cost me nothing at 7pm, even if there are seven of them. One thing I have to remember to buy on the way home can cost me the entire meal.
There is a wrinkle in my own method worth flagging, because it makes the numbers slightly generous. Two items got promoted to permanent residents partway through the six weeks, tinned beans and frozen peas, after I noticed I was buying them every week. Once they were permanent, they stopped counting as purchases. So the stew's score of two is a week-six score, not a week-one score, when it was really four. The chicken's three is likewise a week-six figure, because frozen peas stopped counting around week three. The pattern holds, but the audit rewards stocking up, which is a separate skill from cooking.
The thing I got wrong
I assumed I was retiring recipes because they were too much work. Six weeks of tallies says otherwise. The risotto is not hard. It is 25 minutes of stirring, which is not much work at all, and I stir it standing up with a podcast on. What it is, is 25 minutes where I cannot be doing something else. That is a completely different currency.
I had been measuring my weeknights in effort when I should have been measuring them in attention. Once I saw that, the list reorganised itself without me changing a single recipe. The ones I keep are the ones that let me be slightly absent. The ones I retired are the ones that need me standing there, present, at the exact moment I am least able to be. The ramen needs two and a half hours of my attention. The fried rice needs eleven minutes of it. I did not choose the fried rice six times because it is better. I chose it because I had eleven minutes.
The uncomfortable part is what this says about the recipes I kept for years and never questioned. They were not on the list because they were good. They were on the list because they were the only ones that fit the shape of a weeknight, and I had mistaken that fit for a preference.
What I would do differently
Two things. I would have started the log a month earlier, because six weeks is barely enough to see a pattern. I spent the first two weeks cooking what I thought I should cook rather than what I actually cook, and those weeks are in the data, skewing it.
And I would have written down the nights I ordered food, because I did not track those and in hindsight they are the most interesting thing in the experiment. I can tell you the count from memory: five takeaways, three of them on a Friday. What I cannot tell you is what I was about to cook on those nights, because I did not write it down. I remember that at least three of them followed a few minutes of standing in front of the open fridge, considering a retired recipe, and closing the door. If I had logged that, this post would have a much stronger ending. The takeaway is not the failure in that sequence. It is the second-to-last step.
Should you do this in your own kitchen?
If you have a folder of saved recipes and you cook four of them, this is worth six weeks. Write down what you actually make, tally it, and count the ingredients you had to buy. You will retire things you thought you loved, and the reason will probably not be the one you expect. If you already cook a stable rotation and you are happy with it, you do not need this. You have already done it, you just have not written it down. And if you are looking for a way to spend less on food, this is not that post. My weekly spend barely moved. I bought fewer ingredients and more of the same ones.
Frequently asked questions
Did you really count salt and oil as free?
Yes, because I never buy salt or oil for a specific recipe. They are always in the kitchen. It does mean a recipe with ten spices looks cheaper than it is. If your spice rack is thin, count them, and expect your numbers to look worse than mine. The rule should match your actual kitchen, not mine.
What counts as a weeknight?
Monday to Friday, which gave me 30 nights. In practice Friday behaved differently, since three of my five takeaways were Fridays. If I ran this again I would split Friday out and treat it as its own category. Saturdays and Sundays I did not track at all, and I cooked properly on most of them.
Did you change any recipes to make them survive?
Only one. I started boxing half the stew before I sat down, which turned four cooks into twelve meals. That is a change to the process, not the recipe. I also tested the lentil soup with dried herbs instead of fresh, and that version works, though it still has not earned a permanent place.
What do you eat on the nights you do not cook?
Honestly: a takeaway, or toast, or cereal standing up in the kitchen. Five takeaways in 30 weeknights, which is not a moral failing and also not a habit I want to grow. The nights I do not cook are almost always nights I spent too long deciding what to cook.
About this post
Written by Maha Alkumaish. I write about the routines and systems that survive a real working week, tested on myself before they get written about. The six-week cooking log behind this post is my own, kept in a notebook and photographed as I went.
All photographs in this post are my own, taken in my kitchen during the six weeks. I was not paid or sponsored by any brand mentioned, and no links in this post are affiliate links. More about me and how these experiments are run.
Related reading on this blog:
- I logged everything I threw away for six weeks, the experiment that followed this one into the bin and found the same unattached purchases
- The 15-minute daily reset that kept my apartment livable for a month, the experiment that gave me a counter to cook on in the first place
- More Food & Kitchen experiments
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