Cooking With Aching Muscles

I’ve been working hard to give one of the bedrooms in our house a makeover. The house is nearly a hundred and fifty years old, and nothing is truly level or plumb or straight. You can’t just nail in a panel or board, everything has to be custom fitted. Makes a lot more work. It also guarantees muscles that ache at the end of the day. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that it’s an old house, even though it means work. I find it fascinating to see what materials were used. They made-do with whatever they had. Makes me wonder what they had to eat at the end of the day. Without a nearby grocery, I assume they made do with whatever they had on hand, but even then, no microwave or quick solution to the question of what to eat? Open a can of beans? Only if they had canned food. Thaw something from the freezer? Only in the winter, I suppose, and only after a good fire was blazing. I’ll bet pancakes and a few slices of bacon came into play on occasion.  An omelet might do well. In my case, I’ve been fortunate to have a meal cooked by Lesley, but I still think about those on their own at the end of a long, hard day, even my series protagonist, Bobby Navarro. He likes to cook, but a long day on a motorcycle can produce it’s own set of tired, aching muscles. I think soup, fortified with beef jerky would be a good bet for Bobby. Now, what about others? What works for a writer who has written past a reasonable hour and forgot to take anything out of the freezer?