You need an Instapot and convection toaster oven, you're welcome. Throw stuff in a pot/on a metal sheet hit a button and you're done. I spent way too many years without making my own food. Also a new nonstick pan to easily make omelettes with any ingredients you have left over.

If you are super intimidated to start cooking in an Instapot, it's fine to get meal kits like this.

Literally dump it all in with a slow-cooker spices packet and 6 hours later you have days of food. Then start adding more of stuff you like such as extra onions or potatoes.

Tyson Ready for Slow Cooker Boneless Beef Roast with Vegetables Meal Kit, 3.9 lb https://www.walmart.com/ip/21553448

And you don't need every ingredient or a recipe for lots of slow cooker things. Today I'm just putting left over stuff. Onion soup mix, brown gravy mix, pre-cut chuck roast beef pieces (which I optionally browned in a pan first), an onion, mushrooms, and a bunch of garlic cloves.

It's really hard to fuck it up. I've decided I used too many mushrooms but guess what I just won't eat all of them. It's a soup you have a fork.

When you make your own food at home you realize how little meat and other premium ingredients you get in prepared food. Like $10 of chuck roast at Walmart could be the same amount of meat as $150 of DoorDash.

I know this is basic but no harm in being approachable. Been doing this for years now I wasted so much money on restaurant food.

Potatoes and onions when slow-cooked are amazing sponges of flavor and super cheap to bulk up a soup as much as you want.

Also foods quickly cooked+crisped in a convection oven taste and texture better than the same thing in the microwave. It's really not actually that much longer with the active heat circulation fan.

Instapots are (optionally) pressure cookers but the reason they're so popular is they introduced a series of clever designs and that interlock to make them very safe with all the benefits of cooking under pressure. Including an overpressure valve for the outer vessel and other governors. You can find occasional stories about them failing but if it was a real problem they'd quickly be a social media pariah. I feel totally safe.

Just be mindful of not crazy overfilling where during (unnecessary) manual pressure release you allow the liquid to bubble up and sputter out the top. Even then it's designed to be easy to knock back closed. It's not been a problem for me.

Really it's a bunch of cool engineering. The old stove pressure cookers were frankly nightmare fuel.

The modern iteration of historically dangerous appliances are really interesting if you go into understanding them. Natural gas house furnaces are another example where there is a cascade of tests and sensors including fallback dedicated sensors that must all return safe to proceed and continue operation.

@SwiftOnSecurity the history of dishwashers is a particularly interesting one because it is both one of the less laborious household chores and it turns out spraying hot water safely is not an easy problem (early dishwashers tended to explode)

@TindrasGrove @SwiftOnSecurity

Do you have a description of what exploded? (I'm surprised by explosions: _flow_ water heaters had failure modes of starting fires, but ~no way to create large enough pressure to explode. I'd rather expect fires and scalding.)