The other night, I was browning some hamburger for dinner. I had planned to make a skillet casserole that called for pasta, tomato soup, and frozen corn. The meat was sizzling away, and I had started the water to boil for the pasta when I went out to the garage freezer only to find that I was out of frozen corn. I didn't have any leftovers in the fridge, either. I didn't want to just waste the meat, so I went to one of my fallback meals. A fallback meal is something my family likes, that has a minimum of ingredients needed, that I can pull together at a moment's notice. For hamburger, my fallback meals are usually Hamburger Helper or Dirty Rice (made with Zatarain's Dirty Rice mix).
I have long been a planner of meals. I have a menu stuck to my fridge of the meals I have planned for the week. It's taken me a long time, though, to learn flexibility when it comes to dinner menus. It is important to have a fallback meal or two that you can pull together quickly. In a less-frugal stage of life, being out of corn on the night I was planning to serve Curly Noodle would merit a trip to a drive-through, which can easily cost in the neighborhood of $40. Instead, I pulled out two boxes of Hamburger Helper (which I had bought on sale with a coupon and probably paid about a dollar each), and cooked up some peas & carrots to go with it. Not necessarily great, nutritionwise, but more nutritious than that drive-through meal would have been.
I am convinced that eating out is bad for both your budget AND your waistline. Plan for a couple of things that you don't normally schedule for a meal. Be prepared with a well-stocked pantry.
