Mac and cheese is such a great base for meals! We do the same, and sometimes with burger. We often add peas to the tuna version, and onion to the burger version.
This is a really great suggestion! Once you have the mac & cheese, you can create a bunch of different dishes!
Also, my wife can't have dairy, and we found a fantastic vegan mac & cheese by a company called Daiya. In our opinion, they've got the best-tasting dairy substitutes. They have a vegan cheddar cheese sauce and an alfredo sauce that's really good, and also make standard mac & cheese boxes for quick-and-easy.
Americans tend to think if mac & cheese as unhealthy comfort food, but it's a great basis for a variety of dishes.
there's a curry I make that's got a texture close to ground beef chili with 100% less beef. I can post the recipe if anyone is interested but there are like a zillion ingredients so I'd rather there be actual interest before I do.
I'm taking about instant noodles. There are Korean ones I found recently that are extremely spicy. They are called nongshim or something like that. Soya chunks I just buy from the store and chuck them in the water as it is boiling.
The one recipe I make, more than any other, is bread. It's fast, simple, and aside from being a nearly every-morning staple, it forms the basis for many if our lunches. I make this once a week, throughout the year, and I doubt we make any other single, non-trivial recipe more frequently.
It's one of the easiest bread recipes I've seen, and frankly just as good as and fussy recipe thay requires more steps. This one is just "put everything in a bowl and mix it."
Now, some breads do need more work that you really can't simplify and still get the same result, like baguette. But I think people see bread recipes and think they're a lot of work, get turned off, and never make their own bread. It's a shame, because it doesn't have to be hard, and it's way cheaper - and IMO tastier - when it's home made.
Getting good at making a simple pasta or rice can be super useful. I like making a Mexican bowl with beans, capsicum, beef mince, garlic and whatever else and then either having it with rice or corn chips etc