One of the saddest and yet most commonplace complaints I hear about cooking from my students is the objection “oh, that just takes too long” usually followed by “I’m not going to all that trouble just for two people,” or worse, “just for myself.”

And why, pray tell, not?

Yes, we’re all busy, and I confess that there are nights when I’m so tired after a long day on my feet that the last thing I want to do is spend a lot of time in the kitchen, nights when a spoiled, mean-spirited whiner inside me drowns out both my will and my appetite with those very same complaints.

Usually, I can shut the little sucker up with a big glass of cabernet.

But sometimes, I confess that not even that works. Part of the trouble is we’re all a bit spoiled by our fast-food culture’s instant gratification, but part of the problem is uglier than drive-by burgers and fries: part of it is that we’ve chosen to make our meals less important than the other parts of our lives.

Hand in hand with that is the fatal notion that cooking must necessarily be labor-intensive and time-consuming if the end result is to be good. Yes, there’s a lot of haute cuisine of the kind that, as a late friend of mine used to put it, “requires six sous chefs and a lay reader,” but not even all haute cuisine is necessarily complicated or all that time consuming, and at any rate, that's not the kind of cooking that any of us need to do day-in-and-day-out.

Good day-to-day cooking need not take a lot of time, or always be tediously labor-intensive. Many wonderful and memorable meals take very little time and even less effort without resorting to a lot of packaged convenience foods—especially now that most of us have a lot of labor-saving tools and equipment that cut prep and cleanup time to a minimum.

That’s not to say that all convenience food is bad or that we should never take advantage of a short cut that works. Martha Stewart Living magazine, which rarely allows packaged ingredients in its recipes, recently presented one for stuffed cabbage leaves baked in a tomato sauce that was made from scratch with whole canned tomatoes.

Now, I can guarantee that in a dish like that, few (if any) people would be able to taste the difference between a good-quality jarred marinara sauce and the one included in that recipe. Somewhere in between a “no commercial tomato sauce should ever pass your lips” purism and the kind of slap-dash “some assembly required” approach of Sandra Lee is a comfortable middle ground where most of us can live very well.

But the bottom line is, when time and effort become the overruling factor in deciding what to make for dinner, it reduces our pleasure at the table to little more than stopping at a gas station to fill up the car, and we lose sight of the truth that a joy worth having is one that’s worth working—and waiting—for.

The one thing we all absolutely have to do is eat. We don’t really have to watch television, go to the movies, read a book, spend hours playing Facebook games, or meet some self-imposed deadline on the job. That isn’t to suggest that we don’t need some recreation or that the rest of our lives is unimportant, but shouldn’t the one thing we absolutely have to do be more important than we allow it to be most of the time?