GAPS Fast foods or “Oh No I forgot to plan dinner!”
Does this seem like an oxymoron? Believe it or not sometimes I don’t plan ahead. Sometimes I don’t have leftovers waiting for lunch and some days it is 5 pm before I think “What should we have for dinner?” And some days we leave the house after breakfast and I bring a packed lunch but we don’t get home till late afternoon and I didn’t even think about dinner. Does that ever happen to you? It’s tough when you can’t go through a drive through or dial up a pizza to be delivered. Our modern lifestyle doesn’t accommodate for making all meals from scratch and sometimes it is hard to find the time in our hectic lives. My family is reading Little Women aloud at bedtime (free on the Kindle
). They are a poor family compared to their peers and yet they have hired outside help to do the cooking and much of the housework. The hired help is a woman who dedicates her days to keeping their home running and meals made. This isn’t the mother of the family. It tells you something about how much work eating from scratch was every day in those times. We at least have refrigerators, electric stoves and indoor plumbing to make it easier but still it is a lot of work.
So what do I do? Well if I am lucky I will have something sitting the freezer that I just need to thaw and reheat. I also tend to cook in double batches so that we will usually have left overs for lunch. What we don’t eat for lunch has seen us through more than one dinner. But what happens if I don’t have that? Well I still have some tricks up my sleeve in my freezer. I do have a second freezer. We have found more than one 5-7cu ft chest freezer on Craigs list for $100 and I don’t know how I would do this without them. I also have a couple of small fridges in my basement for overflow. One was my husbands dorm fridge in college and one was from Craig’s List.
So every meal needs protein and vegetables and ferments but those don’t have an easy short cut other than purchasing them. Luckily ferments are available many places and can be stored for a long time safely since they were the original method of preserving foods long term. I made sauerkraut last fall that we are still eating and it just gets better the older it is.
For protein I keep on hand frozen Applegate Farms hot dogs. The beef ones called The Great One are even made with grassfed beef. US Wellness also has GAPS legal Hot dogs for sale. And if you are local to me in St. Louis there is The Farmers Larder that sells GAPS legal sausages, keilbasa, and other cured meats at local farmers markets. (The farmers larder meats are really tasty too!) These can all be cooked directly from frozen and you will have a meal in no time.
I also keep a selection of Wild Planet Seafood on hand. Tuna and sardines are shelf stable and while canned foods are frowned upon on GAPS these are far better than sending out for pizza.
One other fast food that I keep on hand is frozen salmon. Fish is easy and quick to cook from frozen. It does taste better if you thaw it first but I rarely remember to do that and no one complains. We select wild caught pacific salmon because it is low in mercury and other contaminants.
My other secret weapon is frozen vegetables.
I keep broccoli, peas, and cauliflower all the time and artichoke hearts, lima beans, and butternut squash most of the time. I can easily make a variety of dishes from these with very little prep work on my part.
For an easy side dish put the frozen vegetables into a pot with an inch or two of broth in the bottom and let it simmer with the lid off on medium high till the broth is reduced and the veggies are cooked. Throw in some butter and celtic sea salt and it is a great, no fuss side dish. My children especially love peas.
For a little more work you can make fauxtatoes by cooking frozen cauliflower till it is soft and then pureeing it with butter and salt and the broth left in the pot. The only brand of additive free frozen cauliflower that I am aware of is Stalbush Farms but there may be others available in your area.
Frozen butternut squash isn’t great on it’s own but it adds a sweetness and richness to soups and stews. It also is my secret ingredient for lowering the oxalate value of tomato based dishes.
If you have some cooked meat and broth you can easily add some frozen vegetables (or even previously cooked vegetables), put it all in a pot and in 15 min or so have a hot soup all ready. Don’t be afraid to thow in some of your favorite spices to liven it up and don’t forget the salt.
Another trick I have used is to make soup from frozen ground meat. I just put ground meat into a pot of hot broth. Break it up while it cooks. After it is mostly done throw in some frozen vegetables to make a complete meal. This will make your broth really rich so you may want to add some water to thin it out a bit. Don’t forget spices.
One last trick I have is instant broth. Before we traveled last fall I cooked down some broth and then dehydrated and powdered it. If I run out of broth I still have quite a bit of that on hand. I will throw some into a dish that calls for broth and add water. Voila, instant broth!
Of course there is also always breakfast for dinner. Fried eggs, Hootenanny Pancakes or Coconut Butter Pancakes are quick and easy and don’t require any prep work other than mixing up the batter.
What are your best “I forgot to plan the next meal!” solutions on the GAPS diet? Share them in the comments!
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I’m loving all these tips. We definitely need a better stocked pantry to help us out in a pinch.
You have such great tips and tricks! Looks like I’ll be searching craigslist for another deep freeze or extra refrigerator…
I never wait until dinner time to plan dinner. Not knowing just stresses me out a lot and I end up thinking about it way more than I would’ve normally. So I always have a plan in place the night before. I’m a bit envious that you can make things come together at the last minute!
I do have some fast meals, though. I’ll mix up canned tuna or salmon with mayonnaise and serve that on a salad or with veggies. Taco salad (with already cooked and frozen ground beef or roast) is also a pretty quick meal, as is a pre-cooked roast that I take out of the freezer and serve with veggies. I have several nights a week that I work until 5:30 and I don’t feel well eating late so I try to get dinner ready fast when I get home.
I also wanted to ask about your extra fridges. Do they fit gallon-sized glass jars? I think I could really use an extra fridge for ferments. We made pickles last summer and they pretty much took over our fridge. I’ve been thinking of getting a small fridge but I’m not sure whether they’re big enough to be particularly useful. Thoughts?
I’m a procrastinator by nature so I like being prepared for my own inevitable procrastination.
Hmmmm… I put 2 qt jars in the fridges. I’m not sure about gallon jars though. The small, cube shaped dorm one probably would fit 1. My other fridge is taller like the kind that is often in hotel rooms these days. You could also probably fit one or possibly 2 gallon jars.
What you need to look into is getting a chest freezer and converting it to a fridge. My understanding is that the conversion is relatively easy to do. That would be a great way to store something bulky like gallon jars that you don’t need to get at daily. Or you could move your ferments to 2 qt jars. I can fit 3 in my dorm fridge plus 2-3 qt jars. My bigger fridge can fit probably 9 2qt jars at least.
Thanks for your reply! I’d never heard of converting a chest freezer into a fridge - I will have to check that out! I think with the volume of ferments we make in the summer that your fridges would probably be too small for me.
Now, if I only had a basement or some other form of cold storage that would solve everything - but unfortunately that’s not an option for apartment dwellers here.
If it makes you feel any better my basement is far too hot in the summer to be cold storage for anything. This winter however I do have a 5 gallon bucket of bubbies pickles down there that I’m not putting into the fridge. It has been unusually warm though so we better get through them soon.
Erm, so you’re not supposed to be in a constant, last-minute panic over what to have for dinner? Why did no one tell me?!
Hey, I just realized you’re a “neighbor”! I live just a couple hours north of you, about 20 miles west of Hannibal. Howdy, neighbor!
Hi neighbor! I’ve btdt more than I can tell. Always keeping these foods on hand really makes a big difference (and my kids see them as treats!)
My last minute meal is usually steak. Sounds funny, I know, but it’s so easy. I usually thaw it in a bowl of hot water (it is best to leave it out to room temp instead of in hot water, of course, but when I’m i a hurry, I don’t really care). I usually pick a really thin steak so it doesn’t take long to thaw. I boil asparagus or something while it thaws, then I cut up lettuce, put on sk, and ranch. We have that meal all to often. And people think this diet is depriving!
Steak! We have a lot of steak from the half beef we bought. We ran out of ground beef way before steak, so we use it a lot.
We’re with you on the fish as fast dinner! We always have yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, and broth ready to go. We have veggies frozen and canned from last summer as well.
For quick, last minute meals, ginger carrot soup is a fast one. When I didn’t pull ground beef out of the freezer in time, so is taco salad.
Fast meal? I’m the only one on gaps here, so that usually involves pulling all half-used veggies out of the door shelf (quarter onion, perhaps, half-tomato, a sweet pepper I’ve been slowly cutting apart), a clove of garlic, maybe parsley, mushrooms, frozen spinach (all ingredients are optional), saute till most of the liquid is gone, add three scrambled eggs on top. Bam. salt and pepper, of course, sometimes cumin and/or hot sauce. Sometimes accompanied by half an avocado.
Eggs would be our last minute dinner. Followed by tuna fish. Although we usually have boiled chicken or beef in the fridge 7 days a week from making broth.