I grew up with what I now call a “house meal.” It was rice and beans, and it kept our family of four happy and fed and hustled off to bed as many nights as all other meals combined.

I imagine this sounds terribly repetitive today, when, upon short perusal of recipes and a few shrewd clicks, you can have ingredients for Thai green curry on Monday, Korean bulgogi on Tuesday, Parisian glazed salmon with leeks on Wednesday….

It never seemed repetitive to me. I remained, until several years ago, unaware of the presence of any pattern at all, when all along there was one—the house meal—that I had to thank, as a child, for home-cooked dinners instead of microwaveable ones, and now, as a grown-up, for meals with neither microwaving nor perusing websites and clicking.

But perhaps I should explain what a house meal is. It is a meal that one automatically falls back on whenever there is no other plan. This sounds immeasurably broad, but there are a number of prerequisites that narrow the field somewhat: The first is that it be intrinsically easy to trim and change into various meals whose roots in common stock are impossible to discern by anyone but the cook. Rice and beans, as my mother treated them, were sometimes pigeon peas and rice stained yellow with annatto; or Middle Eastern Madjadara, a one-pot meal of lentils, fried onions, and rice; or black beans with chiles; or Indian basmati, dotted with nigella seeds, and spiced green peas. Each tasted different and new but had the same basic mechanics as the others, allowing my mother to switch on her rice-and-beans-toggle and fairly painlessly manufacture a dinner.

"A house meal must be adaptable as a chameleon, made of basic ingredients, fast, culinarily undemanding, and seem neither a sin nor a charity to consume."

Second, a house meal should be made of common ingredients, so that you are likely to have them. Third, it must be fast to make. Fourth, it can’t demand too much skill, in case some part needs to get handed off. My childhood memories are full of images of my younger brother on a stool dumping and stirring the six ingredients of our black beans: onions, garlic, canned chilies, canned beans, fresh thyme, salt. The last, perhaps debatable, criterion, by which I stand firm, is that a house meal should be, according to your own opinions and philosophy, healthy. It should be as healthy—by your priorities—as it can be while still being something you want to eat. That is my fleshy definition then: A house meal must be adaptable as a chameleon, made of basic ingredients, fast, culinarily undemanding, and seem neither a sin nor a charity to consume.

Why one needs such a meal is perhaps evident—because having to become inspired and think and plan and shop each time one wants to eat a home-cooked meal is a tall order.

But maybe it is when one needs it that makes its value even clearer. In my personal experience, the times when I would benefit most from a meal cooked at home are often, paradoxically, those when there are obstacles to making one. The most common example is it being close to dinnertime and my husband and my both being tired and quite hungry. The next is when one of us is too weary, physically or spiritually, to cook, and a meal that can be made automatically by one makes it easier for the other to rest. Another, particularly germane this time of year, is when it seems as though recent meals have been so festive that one’s digestive system cries for a simple combination of chlorophyll, protein, and little else. And what about when a friend feels bad and needs to be cooked for? Then a house meal, whose ingredients can be quickly purchased en route to the visit and assembled on site, can be a finer dinner than the city’s finest restaurant might provide.

Our house meal now is eggs and greens, an odder couple than rice and beans, but auspiciously rhyming.