I typically slow cook veg and hunks of meat once a week or so, chunk it down my neck once a day until it's gone, and then do it again. A stick of butter, potatoes, carrots, onions, and whatever else is on hand, often cabbage, rutabaga, or turnips (parsnips will not pass my lips), enough milk to keep it from scorching, and whatever corpse I have recently killed (grouse is a personal favorite, second only to squirrel, but rabbit, venison, and elk (or anything the butcher sells) work just fine), often first browned in a skillet with garlic, salt, and pepper. To keep my immune system operational, I throw a tablespoon of turmeric in and turn it yellow. Salt and pepper to taste, sour cream for the potatoes if I bother, and this is my fare.
Beans are novel and fancy for me. Tomato sauce, paste, chopped, diced, spiced, or however I can find them when I can get them fresh, (onions and carrots go in everything I cook (except sandwiches or fish)) and lots of dead pig. Pounds of pork, ham, bacon, or all three are necessary to a pot of beans for me. Chili is beyond me yet, and still comes out of cans. I've learned to make corn bread, though, so chili will be coming soon. Beans require a bed of rice, and if my meat doesn't come with rice it comes with potatoes. Every other year I get a crop of beets (it takes them two years to seed), and those are good enough boiled I never get further with them than that, a side when I have them.
More than these only come from cans or boxes, and I am excluding factory foods from my diet to the degree possible as time goes on. I have canned my own tuna in recent years, but only recently begun baking my own bread, so haven't done much with it, because making mayonnaise is yet beyond me. I miss smoked salmon, which was a staple in my youth, but though the recipe (half and half brown sugar and rock salt with just enough water to make a slurry to soak the pink flesh in for three days. Cold smoke it over wet alder until it's as hard as a rock and you can see through it. Squaw candy, my father called it) was conveyed to me before I escaped the captivity of my father, a smoker is more than I can manage. It's enough to bake it, squeeze a lemon on it, and pick it from the bones for me. I have managed chicken paprika, but reserve that for mushroom season, when I match the chicken pound for pound with chanterelles, boletes, oysters, or whatever edible turns up in it's season.
My diet is simple, but slowly expanding as I gain proficiency with the tools in a kitchen and my gardens grow. My recent transition to bow hunting has left me with only store bought meat and fish, but I'll have better meat this fall now that I've dialed in the bow. I have enough pasta stored to work on recipes for that, but I haven't learned to make it, and doubt I will before I'm paid in full.
Thanks!
RE: 25 Working Man's Dinners No One Makes Anymore