When one of us has a hobby taking up the evening at least four nights a week, dinner needs a little consideration before we're standing in the kitchen asking about it.
I don't want the answer to be that we stop doing the things we enjoy. I want something in the refrigerator that is, as I put it when I started thinking about this, “kinda ready to go.”
Not a spectacular ambition. A useful one.
There is a difference between wanting to cook and wanting to begin every part of dinner after a full day. I can enjoy making a meal and still appreciate not having to make every decision, find every ingredient, and start every task at the moment I'm hungry.
Make one part easier
The approach I want to try is smaller than preparing an entire week's identical lunches in matching containers. Choose a meal, look at what makes it awkward on a busy night, and move one suitable job earlier.
That might be making the dressing. It might be deciding what we're having and checking that the ingredients are actually here. It might be choosing something that lends itself to preparing ahead instead of insisting on a meal that needs constant attention at the last minute.
The point isn't to win Sunday. It's to make Wednesday less irritating.
Decide what the last job will be
“Something ready” is vague. “The dressing is made and the salad ingredients are here” is useful. So is knowing which part still needs cooking, which part is assembly, and whether the two of us will even be eating at the same time.
That is the standard I want to judge this by: does the earlier work actually make dinner easier when we need it?
If the arrangement takes more organizing than the dinner it was supposed to simplify, it needs adjusting. If it works once but neither of us wants to eat it again, that needs adjusting too.
I haven't settled on a system, and I don't need to pretend that I have. This is a kitchen problem worth working on: making good food fit the life we're living instead of waiting for a quieter week.
A little less to do at dinnertime would be a good start.
While you're here
Getting Ready: Think before the heat — a simple way to see the order of a meal before you start cooking.