Dinner hacks for real people
We all know the drill: you know you should plan weekly meals, and, you really will, someday. Honest.
However, today is here, you just got home from work, the pantry and refrigerator are mocking you with their unknown and uninspiring contents, and, your kids insist on eating dinner every night. Bonus points if they ask, “What kind of pizza are we having tonight?”
However, I have noticed that the standard quick dinners may be neither “quick” nor “easy”. Even if a recipe is promised to be really easy, I usually won’t try it if the ingredients are unfamiliar to me, and, I’m probably not going to go back out for a rotisserie chicken like all the women’s magazines tell me to do, and, I probably haven’t started anything in the crockpot.
What I can do fairly successfully, though, is keep certain ingredients to make things I don’t really have to use a lot of brain power to complete.
Some of my standard ingredients:
1. Frozen, boneless chicken breasts
2. Ground beef – sometimes, I am even organized enough to buy a bunch, cook it with garlic, and, such, and, freeze portions for recipes
3. Frozen vegetables: peas, corn, broccoli, carrots
4. Milk, eggs, cheese
5. Tuna
6. Frozen meatballs
8. Bagged salad
So, what’s for dinner? While these are certainly not gourmet, or, everyday selections by any means, these are some of my standard, no-brainer emergency meals that I make with my stocked ingredients:
1. Tuna melts – (tuna, mayo, pickle relish, cheese, English muffins)
2. Bisquick Impossible Chicken or Cheeseburger Pie – though it’s a little 70’s-ish, we usually have enough stuff around to make one of these.
3. Spaghetti – sauce from a jar, meatballs, or, prepared ground beef
4. Barbecue chicken – boneless chicken breasts roasted with barbecue sauce, onions, cheese
5. Grilled cheese sandwiches – a classic, add ham or roast beef, or, try different kinds of cheese such as Swiss or Havarti
Inspiration for real people:
Cooking By Numbers – check off what you have, they’ll tell you what to make
Foodie View – recipe search engine, can search by ingredientsMealtime.org – some hints and quick meals
Foodgeeks – general kitchen tips
What are your standard, “go-to” emergency meals on a busy night?
My newest idea is to cook on the weekend and then eat it all week. Several weeks ago, I cook pork tenderloin, baked a chicken and made spaghetti sauce. Then we just warmed up when we got home during the week. It was pretty stress-free, although my son doesn’t like most food, so he was a challenge. He can make his own peanut butter sandwich, though, so he isusually good to go. It gets complicated when the weekend activities threaten to take up the time I set aside to cook.
Dinner is a never-ending challenge.
Our go-to meals are spaghetti and sloppy joes as we always have ground beef on hand.
Dinner time has always been a challenge for us because of the time we get home so in early February, I started sitting down on Sunday mornings and going through one cookbook and picking out our menu for the week Sun-Thur as we eat leaftovers etc on the weekends and then I make a huge trip to the grocery store and it has cut down my stress like I would never have believed. So far my favorite cookbooks by far are the Taste of Home/Quick Cooking ones…
We are trying new stuff and have actually found a handful of new recipes that we really like and for our resident picky eater, if she doesn’t like what we are having she is more than welcome to make herself a sandwich or have cereal because I only cook one meal a night.