This one goes out to everyone who has ever opened their refrigerator and hoped that the perfect meal would magically spawn in front of them.

A lot of components go into being a decent cook, and one of them is resourcefulness. You can know all the clever techniques and memorize every type of delicious recipe, but if you can’t think up an edible lunch idea based on the five random ingredients you have left before payday, you are not trying to stretch your skills in the way that they need to be stretched. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

Everybody has to eat, but it takes someone with a passion to make sure that almost every meal is something that expands both their diet and their tastes. There is nothing wrong with falling back on the same rotation of tried-and-true meals when you are busy but still need to cook, but at the same time, sometimes it is good to broaden our horizons a little. You never know; you might just discover the next thing that you want to make several times a week.

If there is one thing that cooking memes are good at, aside from entertaining us and making us hungry, it is showing us that there is more to our plates than the same few recipes cooked on rotation. It also reminds us that the stuff we already love is great, too (as well as occasionally getting ruined by people who want gross food internet points). There is a lot to be gained from eating with our eyes.