Why I Started Dinner is Easy
I didn’t mean to become a DoorDash guy.
It happened gradually, the way most bad habits do. A long day at work. A spouse who just finished a 12-hour shift as a nurse practitioner. A 12-week-old who has opinions about being put down. And somewhere in there, the idea of standing at a stove starts to feel genuinely unreasonable.
So you open the app. Again.
For us, it was never one big decision. It was a hundred small surrenders. Tuesday was crazy. Wednesday she had a late patient. Thursday I was on a deadline. Friday we said we’d cook on the weekend. The weekend came and it was more of the same — except now the tweens were visiting, everyone had different opinions about dinner, and build-your-own-pizza from DoorDash suddenly seemed like the path of least resistance and maximum peace.
I told myself it was temporary. Newborn phase. We’d get our footing.
Then one Sunday I actually looked at what we’d spent the previous month.
I’m a Director of Finance. I build cash flow models for a living. I can tell you the debt service coverage ratio on a commercial loan without blinking. And I sat there staring at my phone like it had personally wronged me.
It had not personally wronged me. I had done this entirely to myself.
Between my spouse and I, the two of us we have more letters after our names than sense, apparently. And somehow neither of us had stopped to do the math until that Sunday.
The number was enough that I put the phone down, opened my laptop, and started building a system — because that’s apparently what I do when I need to solve a problem.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about ordering delivery constantly: it’s not just the money. It’s that you stop knowing how to cook. Not technically — I haven’t forgotten how a pan works. But the habit erodes. The mental library of “things I can make tonight” shrinks because you never practice accessing it. After a few months of heavy delivery, standing in front of the fridge at 6pm feels like being asked a question in a language you used to speak but haven’t in a while.
That’s where we were.
So this site is my answer to that. Not a grand lifestyle transformation. Not a clean eating manifesto. Just a working dad with a new baby, a spouse who comes home exhausted from keeping people healthy all day, and two kids every other weekend who will absolutely notice if dinner is weird — trying to build back a library of real dinners we can actually pull off.
The rule I set for myself: if one of us has to be holding the baby while the other one cooks, it still has to work. That’s the bar. That’s the whole brief.
Everything on this site clears that bar. Some nights barely — but that counts.
If you’re here because your own delivery app total recently made you put your phone down too, you’re in the right place. Let’s figure this out together.
