Today's dish

Why this page exists

By five in the afternoon the day's thinking is mostly spent. The vegetables are in the fridge, the cooker is free, and one question is left: what to make. It is the question nobody in the house wants to answer. Someone says anything is fine, someone says we ate that yesterday, and twenty minutes go by. This page takes the question away. It names one dish for the day, one for the evening snack and one for dinner, so the only thing left to decide is whether to cook it.

How to use it

• Look at it before you come home, not after. If the suggestion needs something you do not have, you can pick it up on the way. Finding out at six is too late.
• The suggestion changes once a day. If you check in the morning and again at night you will see the same dish, so reloading the page is not how you get a different one; use the button for another dish instead.
• When the day is unusual, a fast day, guests coming, someone unwell, do not throw the whole thing out. Keep the snack and change the dinner, or the other way round.
• Treat it as a conversation starter rather than an instruction. Read the name out loud and someone at home will usually say what they actually want, which is the real answer.
• Keep a note of what you cooked. After two or three weeks you will know which suggestions your house eats and which ones quietly get skipped.

Why the decision is hardest at five

Count the small decisions already made by five o'clock: who to wake, what goes in the tiffin, what to deal with first at work, which call to return. The energy to cook is usually still there at five; the energy to choose is not. That is why deciding can feel heavier than the cooking itself, and why the same three or four dishes keep coming back. When the choice arrives from outside, the work does not get shorter but it stops being preceded by an argument, which is the part most people dread.

More options do not make the choice faster

Opening a full recipe list rarely settles anything. Fifty dishes means fifty small doubts: do I have the ingredients, do I have the time, will everyone eat it. One name means one doubt, yes or no. Often the answer is no, and that is still useful, because a no usually comes with somebody in the house saying what they would rather have. A closed question moves faster than an open one, which is why a single suggestion works better at five than a menu does.

Deciding the night before

The easiest improvement is to look at tomorrow's dish tonight. You are tired but not rushed, and that is when dal can be put to soak, a batter can be left to ferment, and something can be moved out of the freezer. In the morning the answer is already there. Plenty of dishes never get made in a house simply because they are thought of at six in the evening, by which time soaking and fermenting are no longer possible.

Questions people ask