In the comments of yesterday’s post, Engie asked: “So what do you do when the meal plan doesn’t go? Do you have go to easy meals? Does everyone just eat scrambled eggs? We meal plan and then follow it to the letter because we don’t have a deep enough pantry for substitutions. I want to know how other people handle this!”
I can’t speak to how you do it in your family – although I would love to hear about it, right alongside Engie – but here’s how we are able to come up with last-minute, off-meal-plan meals.
Step 1: Overbuy.
Sigh. Was I like this before the pandemic? Probably, to some extent, but I don’t remember. During the 2020 pandemic, and since (although to a lesser extent), I have always been Very Aware of our food and household goods inventory. If something is getting low, or, in some cases, if I open a new jar/package/bottle of something, I will add it to the grocery list. I even have a special category on the AnyList I share with my husband for “not urgent but need eventually.” (He only does the shopping very rarely, but he dislikes having mayonnaise under “Condiments & Dressings” when we just opened a brand new bottle of mayonnaise.)
I will also buy staples in multiples when they are on sale. Things like black beans, tomato puree, shredded cheese, Fage yogurt, chicken, ground beef, flour. Things that used to be pretty reasonably priced – I am looking at you, cereal and tortilla chips – I now only buy when on sale, and I usually buy at least two of the items my family loves.
This means that I usually have a huge stockpile of ingredients to choose from when I deviate from the meal plan.
Because I always have plenty of flour, say, and plenty of tomato sauce, and because Carla is obsessed with pepperoni and cheese, I can usually throw together a pizza. We almost always have eggs, and some combination of veggies, so omelets or scrambled eggs are usually a possibility. Every time I do my weekly grocery trip, I buy some sort of lettuce. So a salad is always possible. I stock up on black beans and tortillas when they’re on sale, so I can always make a burrito. There’s usually plenty of chicken, salmon, and ground beef – and probably a few pork chops – lying around our freezer.
Step 2: Plan for spontaneous nights.
My husband and I have been together for nearly a quarter century; we both know that some nights I am not going to feel like making dinner, or that the planned meal will be unappetizing, or something will come up that makes cooking unappealing/time consuming. So we usually buy things to have on hand in those cases. Microwave meals, frozen pizzas, the occasional box of macaroni and cheese. Mainly frozen things we can heat up in a hurry.
Step 3: Build a repertoire of go-to easy meals.
Roasted salmon and a baked potato takes fifteen minutes (not including defrosting time for the salmon). Ground beef tacos is another fifteen/twenty minute meal. Scrambled eggs takes five minutes. Burritos take about twenty or thirty minutes, unless I have black beans already in the fridge, in which case that’s another fifteen minute meal.
Snack dinners are a family favorite: whatever cheese we have in the house, crackers, a handful of almonds or cashews, pickles, pepperoni. Slice up some bell peppers, cucumbers, carrots, which I usually have on hand. Apples, grapes, blueberries, plums. Put a bunch of random stuff on a plate, with some ranch dressing and/or peanut butter for dipping, and you’re good to go.
Then there’s always the breakfast route. Toast with butter. Yogurt with granola, or fruit and chocolate chips. A smoothie. Cereal.
Any or all of these things might make it onto our dinner table in a given week. And of course there’s always takeout.
I am the very same. For me, I think I always overbought to some extent, bu the panny cemented and exaggerated this impulse for sure. We can always have grilled cheese, breakfast for dinner (including pancakes!), spaghetti, frozen pizza, tacos/quesadillas, baked or grilled chicken, etc etc etc
Having the repertoire of easy to do meals gets me through most weeks. With my current kids, easy nights are French toast, tacos, some variation of “melt cheese on a carbohydrate”. My older kids, it was some sort of pasta with parmesan cheese and broccoli on the side. ( different shape of pasta makes it a different meal, right?).
The pantry helps, provided I don’t go crazy buying too much of something we won’t use. Pasta, sauces, tortilla chips , are all shelf stable. The extra fridge in the garage lets me store eggs and milk.
We have great intentions about meals but then a spontaneous idea hits one of us and we make something in the moment that’s entirely different than the plan. It seems healthy to me to be flexible about what’s for dinner, but also frustrates me a woman who likes to be organized.
I’m in awe, Suzanne… so many of your make-do meals in Step 1 are what I count as *making* dinner!
When I don’t feel like making dinner, it’s either grilled cheese and fruit/frozen pizza and salad/takeout.
Also: “Ham sandwich” is now part of our vocabulary and we love it :)!
(I also overbuy as I like to freestyle it for dinner.)
Huh. We just all live different lives, don’t we? We literally buy down to the last orange we will need during a week – no overbuying over here. If we “scrounge” one night, that means that we will use an ingredient for one of our planned meals, so we might as well just make what was planned.
I think so much of this is because we can’t really do takeout and most convenience foods. Maybe my life would be more whimsical if I could!
I love those throw together meals; I’m not much of a cook and for one person, making an actual dinner isn’t very motivating. Eggs are a great standby. I always have soup around, tuna (for tuna melts) and if I’m feeling particularly decadent, a plate of nachos. 🙂
Our set up is much different but I can only make meals on weekends or days when I WFH since we get home around 5 and the adults prefer to eat around 6. We have frozen ground beef for tacos but I need to ideally put it in the fridge to thaw out the night before (I hate defrosting it in the microwave!). I think you and your husband eat quite lately, probably because of his schedule! My challenge is the need to have dinner on the table in 30 min. Which is so hard!!
I love the “snack dinner” and the “breakfast for dinner” ideas! I love omelettes. I think that’ll be our dinner tonight!
I love snack dinners! I also love brinner (breakfast for dinner). Sometimes I eat cereal for dessert.
Ella will say, Breakfast foods were created by capitalism, Mom. Go ahead and have a ham sandwich for breakfast! Sounds good to me!
I find these kinds of posts fascinating! Oh god, the pandemic did a number on us all. I feel like in February 2020 I was finally at a place where I would have just one backup of any given item, and then once the pandemic hit all hell broke loose. It was like, what am I NOT going to be able to find today. (I still think of you when I see frozen waffles. Also sriracha!)
That said, I never deviate from our meal plan. But then, I cycle a lot of the same meals week in week out (there’s always a Big Salad, a Greek salad, a stir fry, a pasta night or pasta salad in summer, etc.) Mark was reading up on zodiac signs, which I feel like I am Kind of an Expert on, and he got to mine. “Resistant to change” – he laughed and laughed. Only recently did the guys cease to be surprised when I served a stir fry on Thursday rather than Tuesday, for example. I AM RIGID.
If I go out for an evening and Rob and Jake are home alone, Jake ALWAYS makes dinner and it’s always breakfast for dinner!
I think the punchline for days when things don’t go to plan is “do what ya gotta do”. I know that in Engie’s house that’s a lot harder because her husband has dietary restrictions and they can’t just order a pizza.
We have a hefty set of pantry/freezer staples and quick meal ideas so that we can “ham sandwich” when we need to. Grilled cheese and soup, mac n’cheese & nuggets, chicken and rice, Costco orange chicken…you get the idea. Now that the kids are older…sheesh THEY ARE ADULTS!!!! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN????…we do an occasional “fend for yourself” night. When that happens I’m probably eating a TJ’s frozen meal, Hubs is having canned soup, #1 is boiling up Ramen, and #2 is dishing out a Costco frozen mini pizza. We weren’t doing that when the boys were in grade school, but it’s fine now.
There is no planning of meals in this house – ever. But “someone” (we all know who) does overbuy. Like in a major way. I keep finding stuff stowed away in random places because there is no room left in the pantry. Sigh. I mean I get it; buy multiples because it’s on sale; but when you already have twenty cans of whatever? You don’t need to buy five more just because it’s on sale. I mean, eventually, after you’ve used up 15 of those 20 cans, it will go on sale again.
In some seasons, we hit the takeout a lot more than we should (in our defense, it’s most often Chick-fil-a, frequently salads).
Other scramble/scrounge meals feature: kitchen sink salads; cheese toast and fruit; sandwiches; omelets (for me); and in truly desperate times it’s popcorn, LOL!
I’m a huge fan of snack/”preschooler” lunches: fruit and cheese and nuts and chicken nuggets, whatever little bits I can piece together to be yummy in the moment 🙂
Yes, I think the solution is to always have certain things stocked in your freezer/pantry. We do takeout once a week, it’s always planned on Fridays, and we don’t usually deviate. My husband will always eat pasta, I can always have a salad, and then my daughter will eat some sort of tofu dish. As long as we have the basics on hand, we can get by.
I rarely veer because I am not good at thinking on my feet, so even if a meal seems hard, coming up with a new idea can seem harder. But when I do it’s often frozen food (either leftovers or a frozen prepared meal) or telling everyone to fend for themselves.
We keep an inventory of breaded chicken strips in the freezer, and if we ever get in a pinch – that’s our go to. But we rarely get in a pinch. I almost always make something – but not always something fancy. Because I work from home, I can throw in cheesey chicken in no time. It takes an hour and a half to cook, but so long as I think about it in late afternoon – we are good to go. I also buy big tubs of Italian Beef. Those take a day or two to thaw, but if I look ahead at the week and think, I’ll have no time and I have nothing on hand – bam – Italian beef it is. Of course, I cannot do breaded chicken breasts, but I also buy rotisserie chickens (yes plural, why do you ask) at Costco every other week and I am a champ at getting meat off of it. We are rarely without leftovers in the fridge.
My husband and I have 7 children and buy a whole cow and have our pigs butchered 1x/year from butcher. We choose cuts, fat content, how thick we want the cuts and how many pounds, steaks we want per package. You can also find a farmer if you want grass fed cow/pigs and it is saves you so much money. It Saves us so much money during the year. We always have meat in freezer so we just need to buy veggies/fruit, other essentials to go with meals. I am the awful at meal planning so we just plan day by day.
My problem is that I OFTEN want to deviate from my meal plan, but I never want the stuff I bought FOR THOSE TIMES when I want to deviate, so that’s when I end up ordering takeout and spending like $30 on a meal I only half-liked. When will I learn from my mistakes???