Better eating on busy days

I recently did the Tiny Choices reader survey, and they posted mine last Friday. If you’re not a regular reader of Tiny Choices, or haven’t heard of them before, I highly recommend subscribing to their posts either by RSS or email. They’re one of the first eco-blogs I started reading and are always full of useful information with an upbeat attitude.

And the readers there are lovely too. As an example, I mentioned in the survey that I still succumb to the lure of junk food, even though I don’t like eating it anymore and am well aware of how bad it is for the environment. The Tiny Choices crew gave me lots of good ideas in the comments on the post, for which I’m very grateful!

And it inspired me to come up with a list of “lazy food” I can stick up on my pantry door. The idea is that when I’m brain-dead after a long day at work, and am tempted to choose takeaway, I won’t have to go to the effort of thinking of something low-effort to do with what I’ve got in the pantry. The ideas will already be there, and all I have to do is go through the motions to get dinner sorted.

The suggestions from Tiny Choices so far have been:

• Breakfast for dinner: fried egg on toast; porridge; cereal with fruit. These sound pretty good to me, actually!
• Stashing meals in the freezer for eating later. Although I tend to use up my frozen leftovers for lunches, since I’ve never gotten the hang of making sandwiches for myself.
• Tinned soup, with grilled cheese on toast.
• Pasta with pantry staples like olives and sundried tomatoes.
• The Tiny Choices Meal List and Rice Cooker meals – a similar list to mine for quick-ish, healthy meals that give good leftovers. Although on the days I’m looking at takeaway, even spending half an hour on dinner feels like too much.
• Vegetarian chili, which seems to be frying an onion in a pot and dumping in other easy ingredients, then leaving it to cook for ages without needing supervision. Sounds yum.

I’d love to hear your ideas for meals that can be made with common pantry items, and don’t need me to pay much attention while making them. They don’t have to actually be healthy, since part of the takeaway lure is the fat and salt. I’m guessing it’ll be easier to give that up if I feel like I’m getting some kind of comfort food instead.