Chef Boyardee Recipe: When I’m Cooking for One
If I’m cooking for myself, I’m not pulling out cutting boards. I’m not sautéing. And I’m definitely not slow-roasting anything that needs flipping halfway through.
When it’s just me, I go straight for the can—specifically my guilty comfort: a Chef Boyardee recipe I’ve been making my own since childhood. It’s not really a recipe in the truest sense, but it’s been with me since I was a kid, which makes it precious all the same.
My Guilty Comfort
Specifically? Chef Boyardee beef ravioli. The canned one. The same one I loved when I was seven.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not even technically good. But it’s perfect. And it’s fast.
When you stumble in after a workout with your buds—still in gym shorts, running on nothing but time and fatigue—it hits like memory, salt, and that weirdly comforting tomato mush. Maybe that’s why I still reach for it.
My sister and I would eat those raviolis straight from the bowl while we watched The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, slouched on the couch, both of us slurping and laughing.
Back then, it wasn’t fancy. But it was ours.
The Little Tweaks
These days I tweak it. A shake of dried basil. Maybe some goat cheese if it’s sitting in the fridge.
Once in a while I’ll swirl in cream cheese and pretend it’s a vodka sauce without vodka.
I usually eat it out of the pot and skip the bowl. Sometimes without a real spoon. And for the record? I prefer the mini raviolis—they trick my brain into thinking there are more of them. My sister likes the regular sized ones and the cuts them in half to trick her brain there are more of them.
Where I Draw the Line
It’s not impressive and it’s not supposed to be. To me this is proof that food doesn’t need to be Instagram-worthy to be worth the moment.
And it’s not like ravioli was always just comfort. On the farm, I’d buy the pop-top cans so I wouldn’t need a can opener. I’d mow fields for hours on the John Deere, and crack one open cold — straight from the can. That wasn’t nostalgia. That was necessity.
And that’s why I laugh when people say food has to be fancy to matter.
It doesn’t. Sometimes it’s just a can, a spoon, and the right moment.
