I do a pretty consistent job of creating a menu plan each week, but while keeping up with a pretty busy schedule, I don’t always execute the plan perfectly. Eating out or ordering pizza when the meal plan fails is not in our budget. Instead, I always try to have ingredients on hand for quick meals that will give us nourishment, even if the day has gotten away from me and the frozen chicken is still frozen. (Fact – A frozen chicken will remain frozen if left in a frozen environment.)
Click on this link to see a full, detailed list of the freezer, fridge and pantry items I try to always keep on hand, but I find that if I at least have the following ingredients, I can throw together a nice variety of meals with very little planning involved:
- Wheat or other grains (to grind into flour)
- Milk
- Eggs
- Whole Wheat Pasta
- Butter
- Tomato Sauce
- Cheese
- Frozen veggies
- Fruit (fresh and frozen)
- Canned Salmon
- Canned Tuna
- Hamburger Meat
Here’s a list of simple, nourishing meals I can make with these ingredients:
- Pancakes and scrambled eggs – using this pancake recipe, but skipping the soaking part
- Italian Pasta Bake – without meat if I don’t have time to thaw and cook hamburger
- Salmon Patties with frozen veggies
- Creamy Mac and Cheese with frozen veggies
- Tuna Casserole – using the creamy mac and cheese recipe with a can or two of tuna
- Fried eggs with fruit smoothies
- Quesadillas – if I have tortillas on hand
- Hamburger patties with vegetables
None of these meal ideas take much time or energy to make, nor do they create much of a mess in the kitchen. I love having these ideas as “back up” meals for those times when I fail to stick with the menu plan. (And now, I’m going to go get a chicken out of the freezer for tomorrow.)
What are your favorite meals to fall back on when your dinner plan falls through? What ingredients do you like to have on hand for meals like this?
Update: If you have the ingredients for it, these Black Bean Chicken Nachos are great when made last minute. :)
Breakfast foods are good for us those nights when I realize it’s 5pm and Larry’s going to be home within the hour and I forgot about dinner. Eggs with fruit and toast or muffins. Or waffles/pancakes – esp now that I have healthier recipes.
Or sometimes it’s throwing together what I like to call a random dinner: frozen vegies, lunch meat or left over meats, muffin or quinoa or brown rice and some fruit or applesauce. (Basically whatever looks like a decent dinner)
Man that Mac and Cheese looks divine!
Growing up, my mom was known for her “miracle meals”. That was her cute little name for “Oh shoot, I forgot to thaw the meat and now I have no idea what to make!” Somehow she always made it work!
I’m with Brooke–I often go for the breakfast foods when the day has gotten away from me and I didn’t really have a plan anyway.
Now that it’s Fall, one of my go-to recipes is Tomato Dill Soup.(from Allrecipes.com) I always have the ingredients on hand and my family loves it! I like to add heavy cream at the very end to make it extra rich and creamy.
Most of the time I have meatballs cooked in the freezer and can do spaghetti and meatballs with a salad. Tacos are a go to here as well….
Much of my list is like yours. We also like spaghetti, which of course is basically like your Italian Pasta Bake, minus the bake. Some nights a good grilled cheese with sliced carrots/celery and/or fruit works!
breakfast for dinner is my go to plan always!
I agree, it can be very tempting to want to run through the drive-thru when you realize that you don’t have a dinner plan. It can wreck a budget though. I like to have home-canned chilli on hand for those nights. Other options include: breakfast, quick chicken quesadillas made using canned chicken. (I love having home-canned chicken tenders available!)
I try to always have fast-rising yeast on hand for the days when our planned meal just doesn’t work out. Here is a link to my favorite dough recipe: http://amysfinerthings.com/ham-and-cheese-pockets-recipe
With the fast-rising yeast I don’t have to wait the hour for the dough to rise and we fill the dough with leftovers or pizza fixings…or just about anything we can find!
I love your mac and cheese recipe. I include it in our menu a least every two weeks since my family LOVES it.
Even during the colder months, my husband and I enjoy keeping our freezer stocked with different meats to cook on our gas grill. We can also grill whatever vegetables we have available (onions, mushrooms, peppers, potatoes)which makes for very little clean up after a delicious meal.
Sometimes my planning for dinner skills aren’t the best. We like breakfast foods or tomato based dinners–chili, goulash, spaghetti, spanish rice. Hamburger (even frozen) cooks pretty fast in a fry pan on high. (I am the voice of experience here) :)
I love your ideas for go-to meals and items on hand I buy regularly. Having a list is so helpful!
I try to always keep something in the freezer that I can just pull out and reheat or cook from frozen. If I end up without then it would be breakfast foods. I have the time to make omelettes at supper time and rarely in the morning so we consider them a treat.
Waffles are always on the fall back list lol. We don’t use syrup but instead other toppings like fruit or peanut butter.
I was wondering how you actually stay on track with your weekly meal plans. That is a lot more cooking per day than I could do right now. I try to have at least 1-2 nights per week where I make the food from scratch, but it does require planning ahead. When those fall through, or on other nights, we eat fresh fruit and home made bread, scrambled eggs, and usually have some good left overs or frozen soup that I thaw in hot water.
Would these be some of your cheapest meals to make? What meals would you serve more regularly if you HAD to cut your budget? The price of everything seems to be skyrocketing and it is making things tighter in our home as I am sure is the case with many! We are currently re-evaluating our monthly expenses:)
Yes, I’d say these would be some of my cheapest meals to make. Here are a couple posts I wrote a few months ago which will answer some of your questions about how I would cut back: https://heavenlyhomemakers.com/ways-to-stretch-the-real-foods-grocery-budget and https://heavenlyhomemakers.com/very-limited-income-for-real-food-purchases
I noticed that you had commented about not having enough time to thaw hamburger for a dinner in your menu. Here is a tip that makes thawing it out very fast. I portion it out into about 1 lb blocks and put it into quart size freezer bags. Remove as much air as you can. I then proceed to squish it out flat and fill the bag from corner to corner. Once this is frozen you and stand it up and it can take up much less space than a block and it thaws out very fast because it is thin. Have a Blessed Day!!
I do only 8 ouces in a package because we are empty nesters and I wilsh I had packaged it that way ever since I was married. It thaws in no time at all and I have freedom about how much I thaw if we have company or kids home.
I was going to say this when I was done reading all the comments. Just run the still-closed bag under warm water for about a minute. I love doing it this way.
I like to keep cooked meat frozen as my back up plan. Toss in frozen cooked black beans, frozen cooked meat [2 cups], frozen tomato puree, add spices and 15 minutes later a heart-healthy low-sodium dinner.
I am glad to hear I am not the only one who does not stick to a meal plan all the time. I finally did a meal plan last week, printed it and put it on the fridge, only to find out the meat we had ordered to be picked up on Monday would not be ready until Thursday so there went my meal plan. Our go to meal is lentils. They can be cooked up in an hour or less, spiced lots of different ways and are so good.
Thanks soooo much for your healthy recipes and ideas, you are an inspiration and your blog its a blessings to me! Now, I usually have cooked rice handy, and I use it and mix with whatever other ingredients I have. One day it could be mixing the rice with scrumbled eggs, healthy little pieces of hotdog and french fries…all mixed with butter salt and pepper, its yummy! Always a hit! Also, I can mix frozen vegetables with rice and butter, sometimes I use instead the healthy alternative for soy sauce. If I have beans, lentils leftovers, I will mix it with scrambled eggs,rice, butter or oil.
I like to keep frozen, homemade casseroles like spagetti pie, lasagna or pizza pasta in the freezer. It takes no extra time to double or triple these recipes and freeze. Then when I am short on time I can pull one out of the freezer and bake it for two hours! To save time I also freeze the “casseroles” in disposable 13 by 9 containers. Its worth a dollar on nights when I am rushed anyway :)
With my kids and their challenges, I try to have back up meals ready in the freezer that can just go into the oven. Any time I have one of those meals like tuna casserole, lasagna, enchiladas, etc on the meal plan I make 2 or 3 and freeze the extras. I also make big batches of meat balls and jumbo pasta shells stuffed with cheese that get frozen in batches for super quick meals. Even the simplest meal that requires me to assemble or cook anything won’t happen on those nights for me.
(Fact – A frozen chicken will remain frozen if left in a frozen environment.)
Bah ha ha ha ha! I think I laughed for three minutes. I must be tired, but that just really tickled me. :)
We do breakfast for dinner a lot or grilled cheese or PB&J and fruit.
Ha! Glad I cracked you up. :)
Your creamy mac and cheese looks amazing! Whats your tuna casserole recipe? i couldnt find it
I don’t really have a recipe for the tuna casserole. I just use my Creamy Mac and Cheese recipe (linked above) and add a couple of cans of tuna.
Little trick I picked up on another site; walk into the kitchen turn the oven on to 400 and put a pot of water on to boil! Chances are you have something that will need steamed, boiled or ‘jet’ defrosted and it gives you action time to think of anything at all to put in that pot. Pasta, rice, vegetables all of these can be popped into hot water so theres half the battle. And to anybody watching, you look in control! good for you, good for kids, good for hubby!If in turns out that you end up using just the oven, the water will make great dishwater!
we actually don’t do a menu plan at this point… I have a general idea of what food stuff we have in the house for the next 2 weeks, and a couple of ideas for meals throughout the week(s), but I typically just throw things together. (I call them my Dinner Experiments). That means… ANYTHING, haha. Pasta, beans, rice, ground beef, veggies… Since our 15 month old has many allergies, often I try to make something he can have with us, or I will pull out his portion from the pan before adding “our” ingredients (IE, milk based sauce, egg, etc). I also like to make bread (rolls, crescents, breadsticks) ahead of time and freeze them unbaked, so I can pull out as many as I need and pop them in the oven for 10 or so minutes! yum, fresh bread makes my experiments complete quite often!
Often our to go meal is like others eggs, but a favorite fast to go meal at my house is my salmon patties. I rarely put them on the menu, but I always buy cans of salmon in bulk. I usually have bread crumbs frozen and onions and bell peppers cut and frozen for omelets or salmon patties. I just mix it up throw it in the oven and add some fruit and veggies to the table.
To stretch chicken for my family of 6, I always get whole chickens, cook them in the crock pot, debone, divide and “food save”. Then these go in the freezer. Can thaw and have them ready for a meal by putting the food saver bag of cooked chicken in boiling water for about 15 minutes or so. I also keep whole wheat pasta and sauce on hand. As well as some canned beans and such. A great go-to dinner for us is shredded chicken mixed with black beans, pinto beans, corn, diced tomatoes and green chiles, etc. add some cheese and sour cream and put in a tortilla or over rice or whatever. Also keep brown rice on hand always and we have a rice cooker.
I loved the comment about how your boys are ready to eat your leg…I have three boys and they are almost always ferociously hungry!
I love these ideas!
Ooh, here’s a tip for not having thawed meat when you don’t have time to follow your planned menu and need to make something quick. I usually buy ground beef in quantities of at least 5 pounds at a time. I chop an onion or two and throw in some freshly pressed garlic if I feel like it and cook all 5 pounds at once with the onion and sometimes the garlic. This is then very versatile and ready to use. I freeze it in meal sized portions (about a pound each, give or take) and just pull one out anytime I need it. Then you can just throw it in your casserole (or whatever you’re making) without the worry of thawing it first. It’s already cooked, so it just needs to thaw/heat while your dish cooks. Very simple and easy. :O)