homeeconomics101 | Tiredness food :)

We've always got tins of beans and chilli in stock. If we want a bit more than just a tin of something we mix the chilli and some cooked pasta, grate cheese on top and put it in the oven for a simple pasta bake. We always make sure we have pasta and couscous in stock too, because you don't have to add much to have a tasty and filling meal!

Pasta. With a little bit of olive oil and Parmesan (or any other grated cheese of your choice) you can whip up a dish that will fill you up in under 10 minutes.

*nods*

I also keep chicken broth on hand, and onions and potatoes, so with whatever is lingering in the vegetable drawer of the fridge, can make up some soup. Potato soup, if nothing else.

Also: yeast, flour, eggs, cheese - so I can make bread (I use a breadmaker), or pancakes or an omlette for supper.

Canned or aseptic-pack soups: big-chunk chicken noodle; butternut squash; split pea w/ ham; clam chowder.
Biscuit ingredients: I make up my own "mix" & keep it in the cupboard in family-serving-sized ziplock baggies (flour, salt, baking powder, sugar), and add oil & milk just before baking.

I don't know what I'd do if there wasn't a convenience store three doors away, which stocks milk and cream for my coffee!

I cannot live without carbs, so we always have a lot of Matza, Wasa bread and 4-packs of empty pita buns, because they all keep forever. That, a pre-cut pre-washed lettuce mix and a 0,5kg block of cheese - that's my emergency supply for when I can't be bothered to do much more than add a slice to a slice and use a toaster.

My mother stockpiles frozen veggies, especially those soup mixes (we're big on soups here, but those canned ones taste foul). On lazy days you just pick a frozen pack, add water and perhaps one of those Knorr chicken-broth thingies (or a real chicken breast, if you want the healthier option) and some dice-cut potatoes, boil for 20 minutes (or as long as it takes for the chicken breast to be good), and you've got a hearty meal ready with little effort. I'm lucky in that there are dozens of various frozen veggie mixes available everywhere here.

Oh, vegetables mixes, I need to remember those! We only have a small freezer (currently holding a pack of beans and one of spinach), but that is a great idea.

Pasta, sauce, chickpeas, and sweet potatoes.

One of the things we eat pretty much every week (sometimes multiple times in a week) is pasta with chickpeas--cook pasta, heat up sauce with drained and washed chickpeas thrown in (and any cut up vegetables you might have on hand), combine, eat. It's incredibly easy, cheap, and delicious (as far as the roommate and I figure).

Sweet potatoes, we also eat every week at least once, because a good-sized one baked can make a meal in itself if necessary. They're really good for you, too, and I think they taste just wonderful.

Oh, and an onion's also good to try and keep in the house, because you can put it in basically everything, and if you don't unpeel them the whole way, they last for a long while. Chop it up and put it in your spaghetti sauce! Chop it up and put it in an omelet! Chop it up and make this awesome soup with your sweet potatoes! It took me a long time to learn to like onions, but man, they can be handy.

edit: And boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix! All their box mixes are good--would definitely also recommend their biscuits and muffin mixes--but Jiffy cornbread is a good staple to keep around. You can put it on top of casseroles, make it into pancakes--or, you know, make it into regular cornbread, too. It's pretty delicious, and I do try to keep a box on hand.

Edited 2010-02-05 22:40 (UTC)

Whenever my roommate comes home and finds me dumping salsa or frozen spinach or somesuch into a pan full of scrambled eggs, she says, "One of those days, huh?"

Another one is mac and cheese from scratch, which, if you don't bother baking it, takes minimal time and brain: butter, flour, milk, cheese, pasta, nom.

I always have frozen vegetables stockpiled to go with. I do a farm share in summer and freeze a lot, but the grocery store's options are getting more and more interesting.

Oh, and tomato soup.

Frozen veggies, especially broccoli and spinach, which can add bulk and flavor and vitamins to some pasta or rice to make something simple into something usable.

Pasta, the dried sort, or fresh which I then toss in the freezer. A few different sorts, I like the whole wheat varieties best, though it's hard to get the prepared fresh filled sorts of pastas with whole wheat dough. I make concessions. :D Jarred sauce too. Ain't too proud for Ragu.

Rice, I especially like Jasmine rice, it's got great flavor and is easier to cook and a little more nutritious than plain white rice and requires no tending, you stir it once midway through and that's it.

Onions and garlic are mandatory. Always in the house. They make everything better.

Sandwich fixings. At least one night a week dinner is a sandwich (or quesadilla with the same ingredients just on a tortilla and thrown in a dry skillet until the cheese melts) maybe something thrown into my George Foreman grill (substituting for a real panini press) and some fruit and maybe some popcorn.

Prepared soups and broths (and frozen or shelf-stable meals or meal kits or pre-made sauces esp. the Asian ethnic sauces) are fast and easy and a lot are tasty, but they are usually loaded with sodium. Pretty much anything prepared is going to have a whackload of sodium, much more than what any home cook would ever need to use to make the same dish and make it taste good from scratch, so I pretty much just steer clear, but YMMV.

Pasta, and jars of pasta sauce. Canned tuna. Peanut butter and jelly. But mostly what I try to do is freeze leftovers. Any time I make soup (or stew/chili/etc - anything that's easy to do in large quantities), I freeze individual servings to be eaten later.

Incidentally, if you're freezing in plastic bags and if your freezer is large enough to accomodate this, I find that it helps to lay the bags down on something flat (like a cookie sheet) until they freeze. They take up less space that way.

Pasta and sauce, hard cheese for grating.

Frozen tamales that can be steamed.

Bags of frozen veggies, instant veggie broth, and either quinoa or couscous or rice.

Sometimes when I make soup or stew I'm clever enough to set aside a single serving to freeze for later, so there's a stack of labeled frozen soups in the freezer.

Apples, cheddar or jack cheese, and multigrain crackers.

And then there's always the option of a big bowl of granola, lowfat milk (lactaid milk keeps longer in the fridge than regular milk, yay), and frozen blueberries.

Lately I've been experimenting with smoothies, since Mom gave me an immersion blender. :-)

dried wholemeal pasta
tinned tuna (tuna + butter beans + chopped onion = substantial salad)
tinned sardines in olive oil (can be mashed and dumped on pasta, SHUT UP YOU SARDINE-HATING PEOPLE IT'S NICE)
tinned beans (e.g. butter beans, chickpeas)
a jar of pesto or other pasta sauce
eggs (then I can make omelettes, scrambled eggs, etc.)
onions, garlic, assorted spices
frozen edamame (I can eat a large bowl of edamame with sea salt as a meal without anything else at all)
basmati rice

Edited 2010-02-06 07:29 (UTC)

HAIL FELLOW SARDINE LOVER.

Let us go forth and convert the Haters, so that they may experience the joy of the Sardine.

Tinned sardines in olive oil, add optional black pepper and lemon juice to taste, mash with a fork, turns into awful-looking grey sludge, tastes wonderful dumped on wholemeal pasta.

It's my comfort food for when I have no energy to cook and need a hit of grease and carbohydrates in a reasonably nutritious form.

If I'm more energized ... I need to find a good recipe for salsa verde and try it with grilled sardines. {/thinking out loud}

In cabinets: pasta, basmati or thai rice, potatoes, onions and other spices, a bag of breadcrumbs, flour, lentils (already cooked and not), dehydrated bakmi goreng, canned sardines, canned tuna, sour cream, tomato sauce, pesto sauce, maple syrup, cereals, milk, Swedish toasts.

In the freezer: chicken legs, fish fillets, fish nuggets, mashed beef (for bolognese sauce), vegetable purées, fried potatoes, some kind of pommes Dauphine called pommes noisettes, Chinese and Japanese dumplings, edamame, raspberries, chocolate cake, soup, bacon cubes.

In my fridge, I try to always have eggs, grated cheese, cream cheese, ham, smoked salmon, carrots and any other vegetable I can keep for a while. I'm an extremely picky eater and it helps a lot if I have vegetables at all time.

Some of my favorite 'lazy' dishes:
- rice salad with tomato and tuna
- potato salad with tuna and onions or shallots
- ham and already-cooked lentils
- red cabbage salad, edamame and chicken leg
- dumplings with sweet potato purée and edamame
- fish with simple butter sauce and eggplant/potato purée
- duck breast with pommes noisettes
- cheese omelet with red cabbage salad
- smoked salmon and pasta with pesto sauce
- raspberries with a little sugar, a slice of chocolate cake and mascarpone

Not all of these can be instantly ready but they all require very little cooking.

When I do some heavier cooking, I often make big quantities I can eat whenever I want later in the week or that I can freeze.

Edited (nitpicking) 2010-02-06 11:57 (UTC)

Gosh, you have the most organized stock ever :) Seriously, this sounds like you can go for quite a while without having to go outside, if needed.

Love your ideas and I suppose most of those can be thrown together creatively without worrying too much about following a recipe .

I can and have actually but I learned the hard way: I can eat cereals and pasta for days if I don't have anything else to eat and am too lazy to go outside. :/

Exactly. All you need to know is how to boil water, use a microwave or an oven and make some salad dressing (if you don't wanna buy all made one). And there are tons of little things you can add to make dishes a little tastier that don't require any cooking: mozzarella or Greek cheese, walnuts, pine nuts (you can also roast these), garlic and parsley butter (this you can make yourself and freeze it and it'll last you ages or you can buy), maize kernels, prickly pears or grapes, apple slices of even slices of orange too.

Oh I forgot to mention something: honey. This is great to cook apples and bananas with but also with meat (in tajines for example) and it helps a lot with sore throats ;)

Thanks for posting this :) I always struggle with what I can stock. Living alone has its disadvantages when it comes to storing food ...

Anyway, what I usually have in my fridge is diced bacon and some sort of vegetables, usually peppers. I can't cook to save my life, so after a stressful uni-day, I roast these a little, add water, boil, add favourite Knorr soup (cheap and easy to stock), voilà. Needs only one pot, which is a definite advantage (no dishwasher).

*off to copy down some of the suggestions*

I keep at least one pie crust in the fridge at any given time, and keep mushrooms, cooked crumbled bacon and frozen spinach in the freezer. Add some cheese, some milk and a couple eggs and you've got quiche.

Mom also freezes lasagna, chicken broth, bread... lots of stuff.

My go-to "too tired to cook" meal lately has been rice curry with tinned chicken.

I keep a loaf of sliced bread in the freezer. When I want to eat it, I pry off a couple of slices and stick them in the toaster. They come out lightly toasted, aromatic, and quite dry; then I'm happy to eat them.

My Extreme Laziness vegetable is green peppers: wash and cut into sticks. In the freezer I keep frozen spinach and frozen butternut squash puree. The spinach gets made into creamed or curried spinach; the squash I can heat with butter and brown sugar or with butter, milk/orange juice, and curry powder, depending what I feel like.

When I'm baking something that fits custard's 'ten minutes at 400 degrees, then 30 to 50 minutes at 300 to 350 degrees' profile, I often mix a 10-oz box of the butternut puree with 2 eggs, a pint of milk, and a quarter-cup sugar, and stick that in the oven with whatever else I'm baking. It comes out as a sweetish vegetable or a plant-flavored dessert, plus it has protein from the eggs and milk.

This fall I started cooking spaghetti squash. It's an adventure to carve one up (use a SHARP knife), but then you just put the empty quarters on a baking sheet, butter all the edible surfaces, and bake until the flesh forks up without too much trouble. A good big one gives me 6 or 7 cups of cooked flesh. I freeze the result in one-cup containers and don't have to worry about orange vegetables for a month. To eat, I either heat with butter and brown sugar or dump into hot chicken broth.

Speaking of which, a can of chicken-broth concentrate is a wonderful thing to keep in the fridge.

Sometimes on snowy days I'll boil pasta and dress it with stuff that keeps well: pecans (freezer), sundried tomatoes, sliced onions, spices, oil or salad dressing.

Eggs keep well, often several weeks past their 'best if used by' date. Just break one at a time into a small bowl so if any one smells or looks wrong, you can throw that one out and use a clean bowl to test the rest.

Also, to provide vitamins when I really have no ability to shop or cook, I keep two emergency supplies. One is canned mandarin oranges: some brands have 50% to 70% of the RDA for vitamin C per can. The other is frozen bags of mixed berries. Both of these taste good and help my body feel like it's getting vitamins. I wouldn't want to rely on them for more than a day or two, but these are what I eat when I haven't had any vegetables or fruit all day and have no more energy.

The key to pantry cooking is simplicity. Glamorous cooking gurus will tell you to insist on fresh lemons and fresh herbs, and share all these wonderful recipes that call for twenty ingredients, most of which you don't normally use. I prefer to base my meals on 'pasta, and things that make it taste different'; 'custard/quiche, and things that make it taste different'; 'vegetables, and the spice rack'; and so forth.

:D

I have a 10 kilogram bag of rice and lots of different spices in my kitchen for that reason ;)

I tend to have a stockpile of tinned chopped tomatoes, one of those 3KG bags of pasta, rice and random tinned beans, onions and peppers in the fridge.

This leads to a lot of bolognese type sauces but is dead quick, especially if you have an inexplicably large collection of herbs and spices (both green ones and assorted things the man in the import food shop tells me to try).

The other thing I try to have is a fair quantity of noodles, coconut milk and a bag of chopped stir fry veg in the freezer. If you're not using meat, that takes ten minutes and give leftovers.

I try to freeze soups as well, especially in winter. I used to include frozen peas in the list, but they make the boy cry. And sometimes I theive from the maternal freezer-food stockpile, because I will never ever make stew but I love eating it.

Spaghetti/Pasta sauce
I always have shredded parm cheese (the good kind not the stuff in the green container)
Frozen veggies
eggs
corn tortillas
Tasty Bites pre-made curries (toss the bag in boiling water and eat)
Crackers and goat cheese (perhaps not a well-rounded meal but nomnomnom)
Flour (for making bread)
Romaine lettuce hearts keep well in the fridge (but not once they've been chopped up) so that with croutons, parm cheese and some Caesar salad dressing makes a quick and easy meal.
I make soup a lot and when I do, since I live alone yet make a big pot, I freeze about half a batch in individual containers for later enjoyment.

When I'm too lazy to make anything else, I fall back on quesadillas. Tortillas = carbs, cheese and maybe beans = protein, and spinach or sprouts or avocado or tomatoes = the veg/fruit. Complete meal in five minutes! Can add sour cream and spices and various sauce stuff for extra flavor variations. And if I'm REALLY lazy, they can even be made in the broiler without dirtying a frying pan. Or I guess if you have a toaster oven (I don't) they could be popped straight in there, too.

The depths of my laziness get pretty low, sometimes.

I have classes early and twice a week I don't get home until 9pm, so in the morning I put some boneless beef ribs in the crockpot, pour a bottle of beef marinade on top and let it cook all day. Then when I get home I take the meat out, shred it (it practically shreds itself its so tender), drain the crockpot and put the meat back in with some BBQ sauce for like 15 min and put it on hamburger buns.

Or I put the meat in tortilla shells and make enchiladas.

Or sometimes I just eat the meat right out of the crockpot since its basically a chuck roast.

With cfs, my tiredness food needs to be able to be shoved in the microwave when I am barely able to stand, and needs to be low-GI. So, frozen free-range chicken breast or kangaroo meat, frozen in 1 serve sizes to steam in microwave, frozen vegies, likewise steamed in microwave and cous-cous or microwave rice-in-a-bag. Also important is that this is fairly minimal washing-up to deal with.

We tend to always have cheese, ham and salami in the fridge, so as long as we pick up bread on the way home, we can construct tasty sandwiches on lazy days. For lazy comfort food, I also like mi goreng noodles with an egg cooked in the saucepan with the noodles.

For general pantry stock I like to have cans of chickpeas, red kidney beans, coconut cream, and tuna. I almost always have rice, rice noodles, pasta, and couscous. I have a fridge full of curry pastes and various sauces and a shelf full of dried spices, so I can cook a pretty big variety of dishes when I bring hoome the appropriate meat and veges.

I often do pick up just enough to make one meal on my way home, which is less effort than a full grocery shop, and means everything is fresh.

Tiredness food :)

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