Here's my short guide to /cyber/ meals.
In between punching deck and reselling Russian research chemicals, you're going to need to take some time to eat. Unless you live in a city with plentiful street food, sooner or later you are going to have to step foot into your local corporate supermarket of some sort. Inside is a dizzying array of products, each crafted by their respective corp to attract you and take your brouzouf. Unless you've got some culinary knowledge, you're probably going to end up spending your hard hustled brouzouf on ramen and hotpockets. This guide attempts to bring some structure to keeping your body alive in meatspace using the fewest resources possible (time and brouzouf), while being somewhat tasty. This isn't about min-maxing nutrients, if you're into that, the DIY Soylent community might be your go. Keep in mind this is only as healthy as what you put in it, I'm not a nutritionist and I don't really care to be, consider this guide a framework.
The primary goal here is to keep things cheap and quick, and that will often mean buying inferior, processed food unless you live near a farmer's market, unfortunately. That doesn't mean it has to taste bad or be relegated to single, unconnected meals. With that, I've split ingredients into three categories; Core, Carbs and Flavour. An ingredient in one category should be compatible with anything else in any other category. This is to prevent waste and speed up any decision making.
Without further ado, here are the three categories:
Core: The Core ingredients are the meat and anything that would be considered a main part of the meal that doesn't fit into the other categories. For example, in Singapore Noodles, the Core ingredients would be the meat and vegetables. When shopping for your Core ingredients, check out marked down sections and grab anything cheap. You may find meat and fresh vegetables are quite expensive in your area. If that's the case, check out frozen veggies and whatever meat you can get for cheap in bulk. I've had success with sausages, hot dogs and mince. Protein is good for keeping you satiated, so having a good source is important. Keep in mind that the taste isn't important here, we deal with that later.
Carbs: The human body has two inputs for energy, Carbohydrates and Fat (if you're curious about fat, check out the Ketogenic diet). Carbs are typically cheap, plentiful and very filling. This is probably why they make up the bulk of a typically Western diet. Your carbs should consist of anything neutral and cheap, like pasta, rice, potato, bread and even ramen. Don't be shy with your carbs, they are very filling and cheap.
Flavour: The flavour is anything you want that makes your dishes taste good. If you've kept the taste of your Core and Carbs neutral, this is where your choice shines. My personal choices are tin tomatoes, salsa, Mexican flavour packets and sauces for making chilli. I'd also consider cheese to fall into this category.
Like I said earlier, your choice of ingredients should be compatible with anything else in the other categories. Think of it like a motherboard, with different slots for your components, your $1000 hash cracker GPU works fine with your $20 Taiwanese-special RAM. Not only does this stop you from buying something you'll use once for some special meal, then never use again, but it'll help you create more variety in your meals, preventing you from getting bored. You'll also want to find things that are quick and easy to prepare. I've found that both of these combined are the easiest way to help you avoid wanting to buy expensive takeout every night.
Anyway, chummers, good luck and I hope your upgraded diet helps keep your meat working efficiently.