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I'm bad at cooking, but I'm also not a terribly picky eater, so it mostly works out. Some fun bachelor recipes:
Tamale pie. Get a shallow oven-safe pot or burner-safe pan, brown ground meat, toss in canned veggies (usually corn, green beans, cubed tomatoes) and beans, spice to taste or use a generic chili spice packet, simmer for five minutes while mixing. Smooth flat, then layer top evenly with cornbread, bake until golden brown. Top with sour cream and salsa. Serves well with spinach, zucchini, or watermelon salads.
Bachelor Risotto. Cook short-grained rice with beef, fish, or veggie stock at a 1:1 ratio, either stovetop or rice cooker. If stovetop, add two more unit stock as it boils down. Brown slices of kielbasa sausage or smoked sausage with canned sliced mushrooms and a bit of garlic. Dump them in with butter and a parmesian or cheddar cheese to taste. Serve with ricotta, goes well with roasted chicken or vegetables.
Skewers. Pick a red meat to your preference, marinade for about an hour. Whole mushroom, tomato, sliced onions, on a stick. Grill if possible, drizzle with oil and bake on a pan if not. Serve with browned naan or pita, fruit chutney if you can find a decent one.
DIY Sushi. Cook short-grained rice without rinsing it first. For each one cup raw rice, make a seasoning at a ratio of 2 tbps rice vinegar, 1 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tsp salt (or you can just buy pre-mixed as 'sushi rice seasoning'), mix it into the cooked rice. Spread over a nori seaweed sheet, add strips of smoked salmon, cucumber, cream cheese, (avocado and mango if in season), roll (you can get 'bamboo' mats specifically for this, but in a pinch a hand towel in a plastic zip-lock bag works as well or better. Cut into slices, or keep as a sushirito. Serve with pickled ginger and wasabi, soy sauce or eel sauce. There are dessert variants, but they're a little more finicky.
Shakshouka. LemonDrop does it fancy, but you can absolutely one-pot it like the Tamale Pie.
Savory pies. Either cut pie crust dough into pieces to make hand-pies, or spread all over one piece to make a single giant (and admittedly a little messy) pastry. I've got a version of this with chicken, apple, and goat cheese I like, but would recommend trying your own.
And yeah, for a lot of the last decade-or-so, it's been far easier to get away with ordering takeout all the time, especially for smaller families or singletons. There's just wasn't that big a margin between fast food or even some lower-end sitdown restaurants until recently, unless you make big batches.
Dude, I love DIY sushi. The first day I ordered takeout sushi I found out that it was like $10 for even a simple roll and thought "there's no way this shit costs that much to make". I've found some pretty simple salmon rolls (I cook the salmon, I'm no sushi chef) are pretty damn awesome for the extremely minimal effort put in. Only recently did I discover that we should have been packing in dramatically more rice than we were. To that end we've started cooking 4 cups of rice instead of 2, though we use medium grain rice to save some money. I use this sushi rice recipe. Also if your avocados are perfectly ripe, the more you put in a roll, the better it gets. Generally I try to not put any eel sauce or spicy sriracha on at least the first few rolls I make; I typically like to dunk about 25% of the piece I am eating in soy sauce. I also like shichimi togarashi or sesame seeds on mine.
I feel like your recipes are significantly more adventurous than most Americans are in the kitchen. Those seem like somewhat complicated recipes too, so I don't think I'd describe you as being bad at cooking if you made even half of those. If you really are bad at cooking, my condolences!
Yeah, sushi's a blast, and one that people expect to be a lot harder than it is. Even without a rice cooker it's pretty easy; with one it's almost set-and-forget.
There's a few types of commercial roll that are either extremely messy to make well (eg tempura spatters oil a lot), finicky to prep right (real crab), or just obnoxious to supply (good luck finding a variety of sushi-grade raw fish), but if you're working with cooked or smoked fish and vegetables, you can easily get closer to 1-4 USD / roll and be grinning the whole time.
They're adventurous, but they're very forgiving. Wrong ratio of sushi seasoning to rice, or use long-grained rice? Still pretty good, if a bit messier to pack together. Forget the egg in your cornbread mix, or didn't preheat your oven for tamale pie? Will come out a little denser, but it's fine. There's a lotta goofs with risotto that will disappoint an Italian grandmother -- some purists will argue against meat or mushroom at all, and even to normal people overabsorbed rice is 'wrong' -- but it'll all still be edible and delicious. All of the recipes can be 'over'- or 'under'-spiced by at least a tablespoon and still have a decent flavor profile, with shakshouka's cumin being the most sensitive.
About the only one I'd have to warn about novice cooks about are the meat skewers: if you cube or slice your meat too thick, or don't preheat your oven or grill, you end up with a really narrow time window where the veggies haven't been charred, but the meat's not mooing(bleating, whatever). Dunking veggies in the marinade before skewering them helps a bit, along with adding some flavour to the mushrooms, but it is still a failure mode.
One trick I learned a while back, but don't know where my link is at the moment to get the specific temperature number, is that you can "cook" your fish in a sous vide, but at a surprisingly low temperature (something like 105-115), which will help with safety but retain that 'raw fish' texture. It then cools down a bit while you're finishing the prep, so it really does seem like it's just the same.
Also, IIRC, "sushi-grade" isn't really a thing. It depends on species, but for many species, all fish that is sold (at least in the US) is required to be flash frozen to kill parasites. I've seen videos of the commercial operations, where they have the fishing boats that go out and catch the fish, then, while they're still at sea, they transfer their catch to a processing boat. On this boat, while at sea, they do the flash freezing and cutting; I can't remember whether or not they included much packaging on the boat or if that was delayed. But the upshot is that for all of the fish that is caught by these large operations, it is completely impossible for you to get a non-frozen fish; it's frozen long before it comes to dock. You'd pretty much have to have a source that is a local, small-time fisherman who is willing to sell you stuff individually right at the moment he comes back in.
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I love my sushi deep-fried.
This is doubly a joke because I can't stand fish (or most seafood).
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