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.