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Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

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Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

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Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

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The smoky, cheesy lentils I keep making

And other cozy skillet dinners for expensive times

Published May 19, 2026 10:30AM (EDT)

A version of this essay first appeared in The Bite, Salon's food newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this, plus recipes, food-related pop culture recommendations and conversations about what we're eating, how and why.

So much aspirational frugal cooking quietly assumes you have endless time, energy and executive function to devote to homemade bread, all-day braises and deeply involved kitchen projects. Sometimes what you actually need is a recipe that respects your exhaustion while still delivering something nuanced, comforting and genuinely craveable.

This week, I have three I want to share with you, all built with pantry ingredients and budget in mind, and all actually cooked in a single skillet. They each come together in an hour or under, perfect for weeknights.

And, best of all: Each one concretely teaches a tip about budget cooking that can be applied to other meals. Let’s start with the easiest (and my current favorite): Smoky, cheesy one-skillet lentils.

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Smoky, cheesy one-skillet lentils

Time: 30 minutes Serves: 3-4 Tip: Buy spices in rich seasons; lean on them in lean ones

There’s a certain kind of gray, witchy spring day where dinner needs to feel less like a project and more like a rescue mission. You know the weather: warm wind, faint smell of rain, the vague sense that a storm could roll in at any minute. These smoky lentils were born on one of those evenings, during a week where time, energy and grocery options all felt somewhat limited.

What I did have, however, was a very specific collection of kitchen stragglers: red lentils, half an onion, half a tomato, a few slices of bacon, tortillas, white American cheese and a reasonably stocked spice cabinet — which, frankly, is one of the true secrets of budget cooking. Buy spices in rich seasons; lean on them in lean ones. Not because spices make cheap food merely tolerable, but because they’re often the difference between a meal that feels like compromise and one you genuinely crave again a few days later.

(For what it’s worth, some of those ingredients — the tomato, onion, bacon and white American especially — had already had one excellent run earlier that week tucked into homemade smash burgers. I’ve long suspected this is another one of the real secrets of good budget cooking: not austerity, exactly, but learning how to let ingredients drift gracefully from one craving into another.)

The whole thing comes together in one skillet: bacon crisped until smoky, onion softened in butter, tomato cooked down with chili powder, paprika, oregano and cayenne until the kitchen smells vaguely like your favorite chef’s favorite café hosting a cheeky Taco Bell-inspired pop-up. The lentils simmer in stock — or broth, or water and bouillon — until soft and stewy, and then comes the ingredient that makes the entire recipe sing white American cheese. I know. Stay with me.

You could absolutely use feta, goat cheese, mozzarella or cream cheese depending on what’s in your fridge, but there’s something uniquely satisfying about the melt of American cheese here. It disappears seamlessly into the lentils, turning them creamy, smoky and rich with almost no effort at all. Once the cheese melts, some of the lentils get mashed with the back of a spoon until the whole skillet lands somewhere between queso blanco and refried beans.

Spooned into warm tortillas and topped with cilantro, green onion and........

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