I always want Mondays to be a lighter lift than they end up being.

I am not going to calculate how many working Mondays I’ve had in my life, but even before I was working, I had a Garfield-esque disdain for the day. Not pathological, exactly, but persistent enough that it feels like one of those things I simply know about myself. I struggle with transitions, and Monday is the day that wrenches me most abruptly from one mode into another: weekend to workweek, spaciousness to schedules, vague possibility to the tyranny of the calendar.

Which means Monday dinner needs to account for the fact that Monday Ashlie is not always the person Friday Ashlie imagined she would be.

A while back, for instance, Friday Ashlie decided Monday Ashlie would make banana leaf-wrapped fish.

This sounded reasonable enough in theory. Elegant, even. Except I had never made banana leaf-wrapped fish before. The fish had bones. Nothing seemed to fit properly in the steamer. At one point, I realized I had forgotten to put water in said steamer — which is, you know, a steamer’s whole deal.

On a Saturday afternoon, or even a more spacious weeknight, this would have been a fun learning experience. I would have put on music and embraced the mild chaos of learning a new technique.

On that Monday, I just wanted dinner to happen.

This is why I have come to appreciate what I think of as back-pocket formulas: reliable little systems you can make while your brain goes mostly offline.

In summer, mine is a pan of roasted red onion, red pepper, squash and eggplant, marinated while warm in olive oil, herbs and a splash of red wine vinegar. Once it is in the fridge, the question of dinner gets easier. Put it on toast. Toss it with pasta. Spoon it alongside something grilled.

And once my fall appetite returns — the appetite for the beige and the brown — I make mushrooms.

Specifically, I make what I have come to call my “stewy mushrooms.”

These developed slowly through repetition. There was no single revelation, just a lot of weeknight pans of mushrooms that gradually got better as I figured out what I liked.

The first breakthrough was pressing them.

After onions soften in a mixture of butter and olive oil — my one small moment of preciousness here — I add roughly torn mushrooms, season them lightly with salt and pepper, then put a bacon press on top.

Press, press, press those babies.

Mushrooms contain a remarkable amount of water, and I want some of it gone before I start building the stew around them. They do not need to become crisp. I just want them a little drier, a little sturdier, with some browning around the edges. If you do not own a bacon press, use a smaller heavy skillet, a foil-wrapped kitchen brick or simply a spatula and some patience. Watch the mushrooms more than the clock; a mix containing oyster mushrooms behaves differently than a pan full of white buttons.

And on that note: buy whatever mushrooms look good and are on sale.

My supermarket fairly regularly discounts a “gourmet blend” of cremini, shiitake and oyster mushrooms, and I love it. But white button mushrooms work completely fine. This is Monday dinner. We are not going foraging at dawn.

Once the mushrooms have given up some moisture, I add the second thing that turned this from “some mushrooms I make” into one of my favorite formulas: a deeply savory seasoning blend of smoked paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, red pepper flakes, bouillon and brown gravy powder.

The latter two are your umami foot soldiers.

People can get strangely dismissive about bouillon and gravy mix, as if savory flavor becomes less legitimate when it arrives in powder form. I reject this premise. Their entire purpose is to make things taste deeper, richer and more satisfying, and on a Monday night I am happy to let them do their jobs.

From there, the mushrooms stew in two stages: first with a little stock, until the pan looks concentrated and almost sticky, then with the rest of the stock and fresh thyme until everything settles into that texture I actually want — not sautéed, not soupy, but stewy.

The longer they go, the more concentrated they become. The onion — and yes, I use a whole medium white onion, because we are committing to the bit — melts into the background, helped along by both onion and garlic powder. The gravy mix and bouillon make everything aggressively savory. Red pepper flakes and black pepper bring heat, while fresh thyme and lemon zest keep all that brown-on-brown flavor from becoming monotonous.

If I have cream, I sometimes swirl a little in at the end. Coconut cream works beautifully, too. Then I finish with the zest of half a lemon and as much black pepper as my heart tells me is correct.

But they are also excellent spooned onto little buns, topped with cheese and baked into mushroom sliders. They can go on flatbread with goat cheese, over toast, or beside good bread for dipping. Toss them with egg noodles and add a swirl of sour cream or labneh and you have something that starts edging toward weeknight stroganoff.

That is what I want from a back-pocket formula: something that removes decisions without removing choice.

I can make the mushrooms on autopilot, then look at what remains of my energy.

Do I flip on the rice cooker? Toast bread? Boil pasta? Steam some vegetables in the microwave? Toss a salad on the side if I am feeling especially responsible? Boom. Full, adult-approved dinner.

I make these mostly by feel now, so the measurements in the recipe below are my best approximation of an average batch. After you make them a few times, I suspect you will start doing the same. And that is the real gift of a recipe like this. Not that it is impressive, or novel, or particularly photogenic.

It is that someday, on a Monday when the day has taken more out of you than expected, you will already know what to do.

This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, recipes, technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.