Bear, I wish I had the time to cook and eat like you do, I think it's a wonderful way to live, so does DH!
It really doesn't have to be a terribly time consuming thing if you don't want it to be, there are lots of little tricks that you can use to minimise the time spent in the kitchen.

If you get a chance, watch how professional chef's work - they will prepare a load of little bins "mis en place" full of all the raw and/or semi-prepared things that they use on a regular basis - from this they can often produce 20-30 different dishes in a few minutes. They are also very good at keeping multiple things going at once - it's no good standing at the stove doing one thing, you may as well have two or three pots going to make better use of your time.

The same techniques can be applied at home - I use a lot of little zip lock bags and vacuum seal bags to allow things to be done in stages, so I can reach into the fridge and grab bags of chopped, prepared veggies, sauces, etc to assemble a dish quickly. If I'm in the kitchen waiting for the toaster, the kettle to boil, or usually cause I've run the hot water for the washing up too hot and I can't put my hands into it - then I'll spend the time chopping or peeling something ready for the next meal, then bag it and put it away until I need it. As an example - many of sauces that I make start with frying onion, celery and carrot so it's always worth making sure that I've got little bags of pre-chopped ready to go into the pan.

The biggest time saver is a good knife and knife skills - practice chopping and cutting things properly concentrate on speed and accuracy and everything else gets faster.

One of my favourite cook books is Nigel Slater's "Appetite" - it's full of very simple, quick basic recipes that encourage variation - for example, one of the recipes is for a pan-fried veal escallope, it then has about 20 variations to serve it with oranges, parsley, garlic, oranges, nuts, basil, etc...it's great because once you have the basic techniques down you are encouraged to broaden your repertoire.

Most packets and jars are massive rip-off for what you are actually getting - especially when they are for classic italian dishes. There is a saying that "French food demonstrates the genius of the chef, Italian food demonstrates the genius of God!" - good italian food is about the simplest form of cooking on the planet, the key thing is getting the ingredient from field to plate with minimal interference. I have a friend that used to buy jars of carbonara sauce to cook a couple of times a week, and was shocked to discover that if you make the sauce fresh then all it contains is eggs, cream, parmesan and optionally ham...and you don't even need to cook it as it is cooked by the heat of the hot pasta. Effectively she was paying $8 per liter for a cream and egg solution in a jar! The directions on the pre-made sauce actually took longer than making it from scratch.

This may be wandering outside the scope of this topic....would it be helpful if I can provide simple recipes to replace the cans, jars and bottled sauces that you commonly use?