**This post is part of the Cultivate Your Home membership community. To read the full post, please join our monthly membership for access to this and other content to support you in your motherhood, homeschool, and handmade life**
Balancing mothering + homeschooling + homemaking can be challenging… especially on those days that just feel LONG. The ones where you do NOT feel like cooking, and takeout isn’t an option. What do you cook on those days? And how do you keep it easy AND healthy?
I’m actually not the sort of person who plans meals for the week. I know, I know… meal planning is great! But I just can’t do it consistently. I do the bulk of my grocery shopping once a month, and I buy foods in bulk, so I cook often out of the pantry, freezers, and from the garden during the summer. I always have a good selection of foods on hand to choose from for meals, which is why not meal planning doesn’t stress me out. I just work with what I have, and I stick to a meal formula that I’ll explain here in a minute.
If you haven’t downloaded my Guide to a Prepared Pantry, which has inventory lists for your pantry, you can grab it for free:
My Dinner Formula
To make it easy for myself since I don’t meal plan, I follow a dinner formula most of the time.
My super simple formula is:
Protein + Veg/Fruit + Side
I know… super simple! But following this formula means that I can base my meal on one part of the meal if I need to. For example, if I know that I have leftover chicken, I will use that as the protein for my meal. If I am very short on time, I can use canned beans or canned chicken. If the garden has an abundance of green beans, I know that will be our veggie of the day.
By changing the seasonings, adding a sauce if you want, and changing the side dishes, you have a whole new meal! So we could have chicken, veggies, and potatoes three days in a row… but it could be three totally different meals.
I often keep ingredients separate (ex: not combining as a casserole), because that keeps my pickier eaters happy and they cook faster. I hear fewer complaints about someone who doesn’t like a sauce or a veggie. So if someone wants to eat plain noodles, it’s no big deal. I also always serve raw veggies at every meal, so if a child doesn’t like whatever veggie I cooked, they can skip it and opt for raw.
Easy, healthy dinner ideas
Here are some of our favorite easy, healthy dinner ideas that mostly follow the dinner formula:
- Scrambled or fried eggs + smoothies (I always put veggies and fruits in my smoothies) – could add breakfast sausages or toast or serve the eggs on a tortilla
- Baked potatoes in the Instant Pot with toppings (sour cream, bacon, cheese, broccoli, chives, scallions, etc.)
- Scrambled eggs + frozen mixed veg + cilantro rice
- Sheet pan pancakes with fruit – using your favorite pancake recipe or a box mix, pour the batter into a shallow baking pan, cook at 350F until a toothpick comes out clean (20-30 minutes usually works for me); can serve with breakfast sausage or bacon
- Burrito bowls – cilantro rice topped with ground beef or black beans, tomatoes, cheese, guacamole, etc.
*Quick tip: if your ground beef is frozen, let it sit in warm water for 20-60 minutes to thaw. Even if it only partially thaws, it will be enough to start cooking it. I cook partially frozen beef in a dutch oven on the stove, with the cover on – I find this cooks it a little faster! - Snack dinner – beef sticks, cheese, raw veggies, fresh or dried fruit, nuts, crackers, tortilla chips and guacamole or salsa
- Egg bake – eggs, veggies, sausage/bacon, cheese; mix together and bake in the oven at 350F until a toothpick comes out clean (20-40 minutes, depending on how large your dish is – shallow dishes cook faster!)
- Bread pizzas – lay slices of bread onto a sheet pan; top with tomato sauce, cheese, veggies, pepperoni, etc; bake or broil until cheese is melted
- Noodles (brown rice ramen noodles are the quickest to cook) + veg + leftover or canned meat – you can add a sauce or just add coconut aminos
- Sausage + potatoes + veggies baked all together on a sheet pan for 35 minutes at 400F.
- Cut chicken (or leftover/canned meat), steamed veggies, potatoes cooked in the instant pot and then mashed
It can be tempting to keep pre-packaged foods on hand for nights like this, but we try to avoid processed foods a much as we can. Homemade soups are excellent for nights like this or we can pull out all the leftovers and have a smorgasbord.
As my kids get older, I will also ask them to pitch in on making dinner on days when parenting has kind of taken it out of me, or I’m busy with another kid or a project. Usually one of my older kids will make dinner one day a week, as part of their weekly responsibilities. This helps them to learn skills and gives me a night off. ;)