(Hi everyone, it’s Yossi—I started writing a newsletter about scratch cooking for busy people. More below!)

There was a time when I'd devote every Sunday afternoon to meal prep: cooking three or four big pots of food for the week. I don't do that any more. Instead, I do Sunday vegetable prep and you should too.

It's maybe 20 minutes of knife work, but having a few veggies ready to throw directly into a pan or a salad when I get home at 6pm and the kids haven't eaten since 11:30 can mean the difference between dinner being real food or a bowl of Cheerios.

So most Sunday evenings I dice a couple of carrots, a couple of celery sticks, and a large onion and put them in small deli containers in the fridge. If I've got kale or chard or another stemmy green I'll slice the leaves off the ribs, dunk them in the salad spinner, and then pack them into Ziploc bags with a damp paper towel. Melons get rinded and cubed. And then I wipe down the counters and I go to sleep.

The veggies go into anything—a sauce, a braise, a stir-fry, scrambled eggs. If they’re still sitting around on Thursday I’ll add them to a salad to get some crunch and color. The point is to give yourself a little bit of head start, which can make all the difference when you are tired and hungry. The melon is an easy dessert or goes straight into a smoothie.

Having batches of food for the week was great—sometimes. But there were too many Sundays when I was despondently staring down a pot of beans that still hadn’t softened at 11pm. And then on Tuesday plans would change and we just wouldn't eat the stuff. By Thursday what seemed like abundance felt like a burden.

By contrast I've never regretted pre-chopping a few veggies. Is a carrot you sliced on Sunday going to taste as good on Wednesday? No, of course not. But it's going to taste a lot better than the Cheerios.

This is a new newsletter about cooking real food at home for people who want to do that but think they’re too busy to, written by me, Yossi Langer, a busy person with kids in Los Angeles.

I started it because I missed writing and I've got a little extra time on my hands at the moment, but also because I feel like I've finally settled into routines as a pretty good home cook and I'm eager to share some of what I've learned.

I'm sending this first newsletter to just a few people I actually know. (You can unsubscribe and I won't be mad, I promise! But I'd also be grateful if you'd send it to a few people you think might like it.) My plan is to send a short email every week with a single useful tip. Just a newsletter. I hope you like it.

Rich, tender zucchini bread from this Love & Lemons recipe; my weekly Friday challah—I've used this Claire Saffitz technique for the last few weeks and it's been consistently perfect; sesame sourdough sandwich bread (below) with a new starter I just got stabilized; little grilled Japanese sweet potatoes brushed with melted butter and miso; a huli huli chicken on the kettle with rice and coleslaw, a big batch of cold brew; a big batch of iced tea (god it's been so hot in LA); a tub of tuna salad that I think I'll write about in a future week; some confit cherry tomatoes and garlic I’ve been smearing on the sourdough.

Oh, and some terrible pupusas—first time trying to make them at home and wow they could not have been worse. Bready and bland. We still ate them.

(A kitchen song is a song I like to listen to in my kitchen.)

This week it’s Tyler Ballgame’s “For The First Time, Again”.

That’s it for this week. Tell me if you liked it!