Did you follow that post title? 🙂
While I would love to have a perfectly planned out meal plan week after week, that’s just not a reality around the DeSpain household these days. I’m a planner by nature though, so I usually decide in the morning what we’re going to do for dinner that night just incase I need to thaw any meat or do any other early prep (like quickly whip together dough to rise).
It’s inevitable though that a couple of nights a week I’ll glance at the clock at 5 p.m. (or 6:15 p.m. like I did Wednesday night!) and realize that I have no clue what to feed my family of four.
We have a few go-tos when we’re totally wingin’ it, and here’s what those nights look like when I need to get something on the table in 10-15 minutes or less.
- A variation of pasta (sometimes mixed with pasta sauce, sometimes with olive oil and spices, or sometimes I’ll even whip together homemade mac and cheese since it’s so easy and so delicious)
2. Frozen pizza with a bag of steamed vegetables or a bagged salad
3. Grilled sandwich (we basically grab whatever we can out of our deli and veggie drawers and throw whatever we want on our sandwiches before grilling it on our favorite Cuisinart Griddler) <—- Everybody needs this in their kitchen!
4. A variation of eggs (Thank goodness both of my girls enjoy scrambled eggs with cheese. They get this frequently for dinner when Daddy is gone.)
5. Leftovers… we love leftovers.
When I go to the store, I intentionally always pick up these items for nights when we’re wingin’ dinner.
- Whole grain pasta
- Pasta sauce
- Eggs
- Shredded cheese
- Lunch meat
- Sliced cheese
- Frozen pizza
- Bagged vegetables
- Bagged salad
- Loaf of bread
- Red onion
- Tomato
I had somewhat selfish intentions with writing this post because I would LOVE more ideas of what to do when we have nights with no dinner plans. 🙂 So, what’s on your table when you didn’t give dinner a second thought until your stomach started growling?
