S/O life hacks thread- meals and food focus

[Anonymous]

In the life hack thread, there were some great mentions of food/meal planning hacks people but without much detail. Can people share hacks they do for food?

I especially would love your simple (and young kid friendly) dinner ideas and meal rotation.

[Anonymous]

Sheet pan dinners: protein, vegetables in the oven and add a starch like rice or pasta on the side.

I try to make a big dinner Sunday when we have the time then we have leftovers Monday and maybe even Tuesday.

If you have an iPhone I use the Reminders app to grocery shop, I share the list with my husband and have it broken down by store category in the order you shop the store. So, produce is first with everything indented under that. DH and I update as needed to whoever goes to the store knows what we need.

[Anonymous]

Meal planning

A few quick, easy recipes I can make without even consulting a book: pasta carbonara and pasta amatriciana, quiche, broiled fish, beans and rice, etc.

Learn to love your slow cooker/instant pot.

Always keeping the pantry stocked with our personal staples.

Sometimes the side is just raw cut-up veggies. We also often roast veggies.

If I make a sauce or something that takes longer, I make a double batch and freeze some: bolognese sauce, the sauce for chana punjabi, pesto, chicken stock, etc.

[Anonymous]

Every Sunday:

Chop veggies/romaine lettuce/clean fruit/cook chicken breasts/ make some sort of grown up lunch meal in bulk/hard boil eggs. It takes me about an hour to get through all of that and makes the rest of my week go along so much more smoothly. (I've also lost 25 pounds since August doing this since ... no longer have "nothing to eat")

We typically eat the same stuff during the week, which makes planning and prepping easy.
M: Leftovers (we usually cook a nice Sunday dinner)
T: Some form of taco/taco salad/enchilada - some sort of Mexican.
W: Breakfast for dinner (always eggs/bacon/fruit - usually sweet potatoes for parents and pancakes or french toast for kids)
T: Roasted chicken with rotating veggie/starch
F: Take out!

[Anonymous]

We make a huge amount of meat and then freeze 1lb. Then we can just pull out the frozen cooked meat and dinner is ready quickly. This works well with- shredded chicken for quesadillas, taco meat for stuffed peppers or tacos, sausages, meatballs for spaghetti.

Some meals in heavy rotation-
-quesadillas: shredded chicken, black beans and cheese. With a side of cut up peppers.
-rotisserie chicken with a side of vegetables (this is my lazy meal)
-stuffed peppers with taco meat, pasta sauce, lentils mixed together
-white bean gnocchi
-pesto chicken cooked. Then you add diced tomatoes, olives and mozzarella.
-Homemade pizza (dh doubles the recipe so there's dough in the freezer every other time)

[Anonymous]

The easiest is pescatarian charcuterie - sardines, cheese, olives, lots of veggies, crackers, hard-boiled eggs. The kids love it, and it is so, so easy. If you eat meat, it would be easy to sub in salami or that sort of thing.

We also do breakfast tacos about once a week, as scrambled eggs take about 10 minutes start to finish, and I can prepare a cabbage slaw that my kids love while they cook (https://smittenkitchen.com/2010/04/cabbage-and-lime-salad-with-roasted-peanuts/ but to keep it simple I just use one normal green cabbage and EVOO).

Crock pot soups are also a hit, especially if you can WFH and make a loaf of this bread: https://pinchofyum.com/no-knead-bread

[Anonymous]

Here are my easy, kid friendly dinners. We ate this pretty much every day while my kids were little:

- a big plate of cheese, crackers, fresh cut fruit, fresh veggies, and olives (we still have this 3-4 days/week in the summer)
- mini pizzas on English muffins
- bagels with cream cheese, smoked salmon, tomato and onion
- oatmeal with fruit and nuts
- baked potato with a can of Amy’s chili and shredded cheddar. Broccoli on the side.

[Anonymous]

I do a semi meal planning

Monday - Rice, lentils/ beans, veggie
Tuesday - Wrap or Sandwich of some type
Wednesday - Something Indian
Thursday - Vegetable and grain bowl
Friday - Pizza/ pasta

I keep lunches simple- leftovers, soup, etc. Sometime during the week, I decide what exactly I am going to make and do grocery shopping. This gives me a good guideline and flexibility.

[Anonymous]

I hate routines, and this is the routiniest of all times. I prefer to glom onto some new thing for week. Couple weeks ago it was paninis. This summer was avocado toast and gazpacho. Also soups based on whatever you have in the pantry. Now I’m into pita meals. We’ve been buying good sourdough bread and eating lots of toast. I’m a vegetarian but started buying meat for my husband and older child who likes it. I could eat baked ziti with veggies once a week but my family isn’t as into it as I am. Buy supermarket bagels and philly cream cheese. Washed baby spinach is always around for salad.

[Anonymous]

At my husband's urging, I put together a 5 week rotation of meals so I don't have to think about it any more. Each week has 6 meals and the extra day is always something new, or takeout or breakfast for dinner or something.

The upside is that I can literally write my grocery list without even looking at the recipes.

The downside is that I crave variety, and I hate cooking the same stuff over and over.

But I have 2 young kids, one with allergies, and my husband is vegan so it's not super easy to feed everyone.

[Anonymous]

I have a meal plan similar to above posters.
We have spaghetti and meatballs every week. The exact night varies depending on the activity schedule for that school year. I make meatballs in huge batches once a month or so and freeze them. I can the sauce in the summer with my uncle, but I would just buy it if I didn’t have that tradition. All I have to do is pour the sauce in a pan with the meatballs, cook the spaghetti, and serve. It’s almost no mess (aside from kids clothes), and everyone’s likes it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Meal planning

A few quick, easy recipes I can make without even consulting a book: pasta carbonara and pasta amatriciana, quiche, broiled fish, beans and rice, etc.

Learn to love your slow cooker/instant pot.

Always keeping the pantry stocked with our personal staples.

[/b]Sometimes the side is just raw cut-up veggies. [b] We also often roast veggies.

If I make a sauce or something that takes longer, I make a double batch and freeze some: bolognese sauce, the sauce for chana punjabi, pesto, chicken stock, etc.

A friend of mine told me once that she serves cherry tomatoes and baby carrots as a side every night. I thought that was brilliant.

[Anonymous]

Keep these coming! lots of great ideas. For us:

Pasta - the kids are still eating it plain, mostly, but can sometimes be enticed to stuff veggies into their rigatoni "for fun" which they then eat. They also love the Rana brand butternut squash ravioli, which is reasonably healthy.

As someone else had, fresh veggies + tofu + cheese + baguette slices can easily be a meal.

Scrambled eggs, with cheese and spinach

homemade pizza - we buy a boboli pie and add sauce, shredded cheese, and spinach

sometimes we just to PBJ sandwiches, but I try to save those for lunch.

slow cooked chicken thighs. The kids are hit or miss with this, and DH and I find it boring, but it's incredibly easy.

roasted fish with veggies. Put salmon or white fish filet on a baking sheet, pour out some frozen veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, etc) and/or asparagus. Douse everything in olive oil and sprinkle spices. Cook. Incredibly easy and healthy! Side of rice or a nice bread.

[Anonymous]

I meal plan - if I don't, we would get takeout every single night! Or pasta with sauce.

So on Sunday I plan the meals, and write them down and post them on the fridge, right down to which veges and starch (or 2 veges) we will have with each meal, and which page the recipe can be found on (I cannot cook without a recipe).

Then I check what I need, make the shopping list and go do it. Every Sunday. Of course, you could split these into 2 different days, but you get the point.

Also, I hate wasting food so I have a few recipes (and I need to research some more) that need the same ingredient that I don't otherwise use much. Example: there are 2 recipes that need fresh celery. So when I plan to have one of those, I always make the other one in the same week. That way I use up all the celery because otherwise it languishes and rots and gets thrown away.

My mother did this when growing up - if we had a baked ham, we knew we'd have ham sandwiches a few days later and then a particular chicken dish would happen later in the week (which was my favorite meal, ever) because it needed some ham and she used the absolute leftovers for that

[Anonymous]

We like Mexican food so pretty much every week we make:
- rice
- black beans
- peppers and onions
- chicken
- ground beef
- steak (this is only sometimes, we don't do this every week, sometimes we'll do barbacoa, sometimes it's cilantro lime flank steak)
- guacamole
- shredded cheese (I can't stand the pre-shredded kind)

With that plus salsa, sour cream, tortillas, and chips you can make:
- burritos
- burrito bowls
- fajitas
- tacos
- quesadillas
- nachos
- salad

That gets us through multiple meals each week and you don't feel like you're eating the same thing over and over again because there are so many options.

We also do one pasta dish a week, so that requires a sauce and a protein and we always have leftovers of that for lunch another day.

One day is a salad of some sort - sometimes we use the pasta protein, sometimes a Mexican protein, sometimes a different protein. Another meal that's easy to customize and change up so it doesn't get old. We use the Chop't method - cut everything up first but then cut it all up at the same time together and toss it in the dressing. It means you don't tend to end up with some random pieces not eaten at the end because everything is all mixed up perfectly.

Another day is Asian wok something - either fried rice or stir fry. Again, switch up the proteins, switch up the veggies, and switch up the sauce (use a sweeter stir fry sauce, a saltier soy sauce, a spicier Szechuan sauce, etc.).

We also often do pizza once a week. Either get the dough pre-made (not pre-cooked but you can buy a ball of dough from most grocery stores) or if you're working from home, whip it up a few hours before dinner. Keep pizza sauce on hand (easy to make in bulk for the month, and make a few different sauces - red sauce, BBQ sauce, white sauce, pesto sauce), then add mozzarella plus various proteins. Also easy to not get tired of when you mix it up - a BBQ chicken pizza doesn't taste like a sausage and onion pizza, which doesn't take like a Mexican black bean pizza, etc.

One day is takeout for dinner, always!