Breakfast was taking 90 minutes.

Four people in a kitchen. Nobody sure what’s in the fridge. Nobody sure what anyone else can eat. Every morning starting with the same five open questions: What do we have? What can you eat? What can I eat? Did we run out of that thing? Who’s making what?

By the time all four of us had food in front of us, the morning was gone. And that was a good morning. A bad morning was when I was flaring. Celiac plus Crohn’s means some mornings I’m operating at maybe 40%. On those mornings, standing in front of an open refrigerator trying to solve a four-variable dietary puzzle is not a small problem. It’s the whole problem.

Here’s the thing about our kitchen. My wife has her own restrictions. One of my kids won’t eat grains. No rice, no noodles, no bread. The other won’t eat meat. I can’t eat gluten, and on a bad gut day the list of things I can tolerate shrinks to almost nothing.

The overlap between all four of us is vanishingly small. If I made something everyone could eat, it was usually so bland nobody wanted it. If I made something good for two of us, I was still cooking two more separate things. Every meal was a negotiation.

So I built defaults.

I mapped the cuisines we all actually accept. Italian works because you can do gluten-free pasta for me, regular for the kids, and the sauces are flexible. Mexican works because the base is rice and beans and protein, and you can assemble different plates from the same components. American BBQ works. French works if you’re thinking technique, not recipe.

Four cuisines. That’s the crate. Not everything we could eat. Everything that gives me enough room to differentiate.

Then I started batch cooking. Sunday afternoon: a base protein, a starch in two forms (gluten-free and regular), a sauce, roasted vegetables. Five components. From those five components I can assemble four different plates in about ten minutes on a weekday morning. Or evening. Or whenever the next meal hits.

The structure has three layers. There’s the group body, which is the batch base everyone draws from. There’s the cuisine framework, which tells me how to season and combine. And there’s the individual accommodation, which is the per-person assembly. Same base, four plates, four people eating something they actually want.

When the system works, breakfast takes 20 minutes. Most of that is reheating. Nobody makes decisions. The defaults cover the low-energy mornings, and on the mornings when I have capacity, I can riff. Cook something new. Try a technique. The system holds the floor so I can play when I want to and rest when I need to.

I didn’t think of this as design work at the time. I thought of it as survival. I had an autoimmune disease and two kids with dietary restrictions and a wife with her own, and I needed mornings to stop being a crisis. So I read the constraints, found the structure that met all of them, and removed the daily decisions.

It was only later, years later, that I recognized the pattern. The same operation I was doing at work (reading a system’s constraints, building structure that accommodates them, removing the recurring friction) was the same thing I’d been doing in my kitchen every Sunday. Same method. Different material.

The kitchen is where I learned it. Before I had language for any of it. Before I knew what accommodation design was or that it had a name. I just knew that four people needed to eat, and the morning couldn’t keep taking 90 minutes.