Meals without stuff

[khorrell]

Hi everyone! I'm hoping to tap your amazing knowledge to help us get through the next few weeks. We are moving and will be without our things for a bit at each end. I've been planning meals that I can prepare with as few tools as possible, and I wanted to know what y'all think. Our stove and refrigerator are staying with the house, so we will have them. While I don't mind resorting to some convenience foods, I'd hate to eat frozen lasagna & chicken nuggets the whole time. (Plus they are so expensive!) Also, I will hopefully only have the food I'm buying each day, so I'm trying to avoid small portions of ingredients unless I can plan ahead and pull out my seasonings, etc. into single size baggies.

Right now I've resigned myself to hand-carrying one pot & lid, 6 sets of silverware with plates & bowls, and a can opener. The cookie sheet is quite old and too big for the oven in our new house, so that will just be given away or discarded.

Thanks so much for any suggestions that you might have.

[gt0163c]

Okay, so single pot meals but you also have an oven and a cookie sheet. You want something that will use up all/most of the ingredients with each meal. And I'm assuming that no-cook meals will work as well.

Salads come to mind. You could either buy the bagged salad or by small quantities of salad fixings (or both, probably depends on the size of your family). You could bulk these up by adding precooked meat (lunch meat, frozen precooked shrimp or some of the Tyson (or similar) precooked meat that's meant for fajitas, grocery store rotissary chicken). If your family will eat hard boiled eggs for breakfast or other meals, you could boil up a dozen eggs and add hard boiled eggs as well. Or, you could scramble them in the bottom of the pan (not as easy as in a skillet, but it's doable).

Precooked meat could also be added to rice and canned vegetables to make a rice dish. Cook the rice first then toss everything else into the pot and heat it up. Brown rice, black beans (canned in your case), chicken and salsa topped with shredded cheese is a favorite of mine, especially when I'm living out of a hotel and have a limited kitchen. Recently I've also found that I like canned tuna, as long as I put A1 on it. Canned tuna with A1 and some garlic (powdered is fine), broccoli or green beans and rice is something that I've been eating about once a week for a while (and I do have access to a kitchen). Defrosted frozen broccoli should heat up pretty easily in a pan. You might have to cook things seperately and then toss them all in together to get things finally heated, but with a bit of juggling, that shouldn't be too difficult.
Macaroni dishes could be made in a similar way to rice dishes.

If you don't mind jarred or canned spaghetti sauce, spaghetti is a good one pot dish. Garlic bread can be baked/heated in the oven.

Oven baked potatoes would be easy, adding some canned soup would make it a full meal.

I'm not certain it would work, but depending on the type of cookie sheet you have (probably best not to use an insulated one), you might be able to use that like a griddle on top of the stove. If you can make it work, that would open up all sorts of possibilities including grilled cheese (I like mine with a fried egg in the middle), fried eggs, browning pork chops, hamburgers, chicken breasts and lots of other options.

[khorrell]

Thanks for all the great ideas...it doesn't seem like it should be this hard, but with all the other things whirling around my head, I'm just stumped. And I'm going to try the A1 on tuna...it might be better for me than the mayo I usually use.

[kav122]

I have a question...since you have a refrigerator and stove, is there anyway that you can take a day before you move and make some meals, portion them into tupperware, and then freeze them? When you move into the new house, you can just dump one into a small anything and pop it into the oven or nuke them in the tupperware? Ok, maybe that sounds more complicated then when I was thinking about it in my head.

[gt0163c]

Originally Posted by kav122

I have a question...since you have a refrigerator and stove, is there anyway that you can take a day before you move and make some meals, portion them into tupperware, and then freeze them? When you move into the new house, you can just dump one into a small anything and pop it into the oven or nuke them in the tupperware?

That is another option, at least on pre-move end.
Make up a couple of casseroles or dishes in disposable aluminum pans and either refrigerate or freeze. This could be a double batch of something you're making to eat now. These can then be heated/cooked in the stove and the pans recycled/thrown away. Although this will take extra time in advance (which is probably in short supply with an upcoming move) and require a bit of knowing how long you're going to be in the house (which sounds like it's in question). But, it is another thought.

[Xin Lu]

When my parents were remodeling their kitchen they ate sandwiches every single day. It's actually not so bad because you can get all of your food groups in a sandwich!

[khorrell]

As my children bypassed our lovingly prepared dinner for cereal, I thought that maybe we could just eat cereal for a week or so!

Though that probably isn't as nutritious as sandwiches.

[purplefdu]

I dunno if you add some fruit and maybe an egg you could easily have breakfast for lunch all week.

The rice/noodles/pasta with meat, veggies and sauce/seasoning seem like your best bet. I know thats what we normally did around moving, although sandwiches were pretty popular as well.

[spencer]

Quick sandwiches, lots of fruits, boiled eggs...

[cindybythesea]

What I recommend is just make some nice sandwiches. Use some nice bread and chsee, throw some sprouts on them, etc. people will actually be quite impressed. It's simple to make nice good sandwiches if you have the right ingredients.