Is There an Interesting Lunch Hiding in Your Own Pantry?
By: Jean Anne Feldeisen
Tags: Food, Menu Design, Lunch, Cooking

Is There an Interesting Lunch Hiding in Your Own Pantry?

Using the meal planner tool to plan lunch

Photo by Luisa Brimble on Unsplash

A well-planned meal is a treat. It can make you feel special and loved, even if you’re eating alone.

Many of us are home for lunch more of the time these days. Do you want to be able to fix yourself something decent to eat instead of grabbing a peanut butter and fluff sandwich or a handful of cereal? A donut and coke? Sure you do. It’s even more important now to feed yourself well to boost your immune system.

A few months ago I developed a meal-planning form which involves a series of questions to answer and a weekly calendar for use in planning a week’s meals. I’ve been testing it for several months now. You can see my previous stories about it here.

And here is the story about dinners

This post is about planning lunches, using the meal-planner form.

The process begins by answering five questions about your current situation.

What do you have in the refrigerator or pantry or garden that needs to be used? What do you have in the freezer that needs to be used sometime soon? What are your time constraints during the upcoming week and when will you be eating somewhere besides your house (that you don’t need to include in your planning)? What dietary restrictions or goals or special diets do you need to follow? Will there be a guest with a special diet? What do you feel like eating or cooking? What foods or recipes have you or people in your family been talking about or craving or dying to try?

After answering the questions I begin by planning dinners. That is how I do it. Once I have picked seven dinners, based a lot on my answers to the questions, I look to see which meals lend themselves to leftovers for the next day’s lunch. I drew arrows to show my plan for those meals. For the other meals, I will use a combination of what you might call pantry meals, and already prepared things in the freezer. So I’ll talk about all three of those things; dinner leftovers, freezer meals, and pantry meals.

Leftovers from Dinner

How much you do of this will depend on whether or not you prepare for leftovers, making enough for two dinners and a lunch or one dinner and a lunch. I wouldn’t do too much of this eating the same thing because it gets boring and uninspiring, though it is usually edible.

I happen to like leftovers and think they are often better than the original dish. The flavors have a chance to blend and mellow and maybe change a little. But one or two leftovers of a dish is ENOUGH. If there is more than that available at the end of a meal, I will freeze it if possible.

Freezer Meals in Individual or Family Portions

The other thing I do that is almost exclusively for the sake of lunch is to make a soup almost every weekend. I use soups a lot more in fall, winter and early spring. Once the garden gets going a lot of inspired salads take their place, though not exclusively. I use soup for a meal, and a lunch and freeze one or two quarts for other lunches. At this point, I have 4 quarts of pork and bean soup, three quarts of tomato soup and two of vegetable beef soup in the freezer. And I’m making oriental chicken broth today to turn into quick egg drop or dumpling or just vegetable soups. I can pick any one of them, add some bread or crackers and cheese, or yogurt and have a tasty and hot meal.

I also freeze single serving portions of leftovers from meals. Sometimes my husband and I have different things for lunch or sometimes one of us eats elsewhere. That happened a few days ago. My husband had to take an all-day trip and I pulled out the one serving of a smashing eggplant parmesan I made a month ago that he doesn’t care for. I had it for lunch with the greatest pleasure.

Besides soups there are frozen meals of chicken and gravy, kidney bean stew, lentils, or ratatouille that could turn into lunch any time we want. So, that is always a possibility if you think of it a bit before you want to eat to allow time to defrost and heat it. I keep those meals at the top of the freezer so they don’t get lost and forgotten.

Pantry Meals

These are things that I like to make up from things already sitting in the refrigerator and pantry. We had one today. I had nothing in mind for lunch, we were hungry so I said (one of our standby pantry lunches) How about sardines and crackers and cheese? He said yes, I got out the cheese, he opened the sardines. I took out some rice crackers, a board of two kinds of cheese, a dish of seasoned olives and two clementines. Then we ate. Just like that. I like those kinds of meals. You can have as much or as little as you want and the variety of choices creates a little interest and creativity. Add some pickles, a fancy mustard, sliced red onions, whatever you can find on hand, and the interest grows. You could use canned tuna instead of sardines too.

Another combination I like is to start with a bowl of beans, or beans and rice, warmed if you want. Then add some sliced onion sauteed in olive oil with garlic salt, maybe a pinch each of cumin and coriander. You could have it cool with some chopped tomato, chopped lettuce, or hot with cooked greens, yogurt or sour cream. Add a few radishes. Maybe a splash of hot sauce.

You’ve all made meals like this, I’m sure, and as you play with them you create combinations that seem particularly inspired to you, and you can always come up with a meal this way.

How about cooking a little bit of spaghetti. Then warm some chopped garlic in olive oil, add some leftover vegetables from a meal, or chopped scallions, or saute some sliced mushrooms. Add a lot of grated cheese – see, this is starting to make me hungry.

And there are endless variations on salads, of course. He picture below the headline shows an abundance of ideas. Feel free to experiment. Gen planning a pantry meal it helps to have the bare bones of an idea written down, then you are free to improvise on it.

The key is to relax, look around you, see what is available and make use of it somehow. See if it makes a tasty combination. Maybe write down some of these combinations and keep stuff in the closet for just such times of need.

So, between leftovers from the week’s meals, planned leftovers in the freezer, and creative pantry combinations, lunches need never be a problem.

My meal planning sheet this week

Photo courtesy of the author

You can see in the planning sheet I have started with seven dinners. I’ve created 2 meat, 2 chicken, 2 seafood and 1 vegetarian meal for dinners this week.

The details

Many have elements that are used again. Sunday leftovers go to Monday lunch (with 4 cooked pot stickers hidden away for the soup on Friday).

The roast chicken provides lunch for 2 days (chicken salad is a treat for us). I eat the leftover greens with lunch on Thursday.

Dons birthday dinner steak was a disappointment. A tough old cow, but it was cooked perfectly on the grill and there are leftover potato and vegetables. We were going to use leftover steak for breakfast with an egg but ditched it instead- put out for the birds.

There is one serving of clam spaghetti left for Don, so on Thursday I make a concoction of fried onion, cooked beans, seasoning and a dab of yogurt which I prefer.

For lunch on Friday we are caught up short- hungry with no plan. Sardines and cheese and crackers made a quick pantry lunch.

Tomorrow lunch will be another bean and rice combination. Maybe a cup of soup.

I am also cooking oriental chicken broth which I’ll freeze to add to my stock of freezer soups from which we can choose for future lunches. They require only very brief heating/cooking of thinly sliced fresh vegetables and can be put together quickly. So there you go. A whole week of lunches planned.

Pot stickers cooking. Photo courtesy of the author