Not sure if this should go in the cooking thread or elsewhere, so neg me if you feel the need.
I am temporariy in an apartment for 3 months and I'm looking for meals I can cook in a small kitchen somewhat quickly. Maybe stuff I can eat the next day. It's a nice kitchen but it's not what I am used to cooking on. It's all electric of course even tho they bill it as a "luxury apartment", but whatever.
I could eat out every day for lunch if I desire and it's on the company bill for the next 3 months but that gets old kind of quick. I have an hour for give or take and have a <5 minute commute currently so coming home is always an option. But would like the idea of cooking a meal and just taking left overs, or eat them at home the next day during lunch. However most of my "cooking" normally revolves around much larger meals.
I really don't know where to begin since I normally cook more "elaborate" meals being part coon ass. I am making jambalaya for tonight and that will be 4+ meals in itself.
Small/quick ideas that don't involve just nuking everything in the microwave?
Caveat: I had a rice cooker that could keep rice good for ~4 days, but when I was living alone once for a while I got in the habit of making multiple marinades for chicken, splitting them up into one size servings, and fridge them. Take out, cook, put on already made rice, garnish with fresh herbs/acid, eat. Very fast, already portioned, etc. That was lunch every day.
Since I did the marinades in batches I'd cut up garlic/onions/aromatics and sweat them, then add right to the bag, the double cooking and a fine mince usually resulted in them completely disintegrating as the chicken cooked, resulting in a pretty nice sauce for the rice. So I did prep/portioning on the weekends and then the weekday was easy. Hopefully I'm making sense, I'm a little loopy from lack of sleep. You can do endless combinations of oils, spices, etc., to get a ton of different marinades.
On a related note, the Flavor Bible is a book I reference a lot but keep forgetting to mention. It isn't a cookbook per se, basically you look up an ingredient and it gives you all the matching flavors+combinations. It was based on interviews of hundreds of chefs and lots of research into nearly every major cultures traditional recipes/flavor combos. Very, very useful when making things up.
