For Jess...

The five-ingredient rule is something that my mother-in-law shared with me shortly after I got married. She said that one of the things she did when her five children were small was to come up with about 20 recipes that she could make with only five ingredients.

The benefit of the 5-ingredient rule is that you can make these recipes in short order. With seven people in the house, and five of them children, emergencies and crazy days happen fairly often. By keeping the pantry stocked with the ingredients for these 20 recipes, she could make them without much fuss on hectic days