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Yeah ...
Strategies against this include cooking for several people (well, that ain't happening), doing meal prep several days in advance / cooking larger portions that you can eat over a couple of days, and buying frozen ingredients (still better than buying entire frozen meals). Some non-frozen ingredients keep for a long time, too, e.g. dried rice or noodles, onions, pickled vegetables.
Something that worked for me is always shopping for a specific meal. Instead of buying ground beef because I might want burgers or tacos or chili, I instead buy everything for a chili. It’s lead to less “oh I forgot I had this beef in here” and more “I better use this nice, fresh beef to make chili because otherwise I’ll go hungry.
It’s not a perfect system, and seems really obvious in hindsight, but has been a paradigm shift for me.
better use this nice, fresh beef to make chili because otherwise I’ll go hungry.
My issue is that I often end up choosing the "go hungry" option over the chili option
and I love chili
I think one of the tricks is to purposefully plan time to cook that's not right before you're planning to eat, so it's an activity/hobby, not a necessity. If I have to cook when I'm hungry, I'll probably just make do instead, but if I say "ok, Saturday afternoon, I'm gonna make a pot of soup, because that'll be delicious later," it's a lot less dreadful, imo.
I do a mix of this with food prep. I'll buy a bunch of ground beef and make a bunch of burger patties, and freeze the ones that I'm not using right away since I can pull them individually out of the freezer and throw them straight onto the grill or into a pan. Or I'll buy the stuff for a big stir fry and then have leftovers for like 3 other meals.
I like making a chili and freezing the left overs in an icecube tray, then poping them out and storing the chili cubes in the freezer. Like, it will basically last forever in the freezer, and this way it’s pre portioned and I can just nuke how ever much I want at some indeterminant time in the future.
Works well with any similar kind of sauce.
Ice cubes of chili? Either I eat way to much or you are very much more behaved with portion control and eating several times a day.
I'm pro one meal, eat until full.. fast till I pick a time a time to eat the next day. Then again if I made chili I'd put garlic/onions in the pot bottom first, then meats to brown, then all other ingredients. Cook it all in one pot then when done eating, put the pot in the fridge on a heat mat. Eat the same thing until it's gone.Which would usually only take a 2-3 days.
Having someone else in the house and having to make other meals makes meals so much harder..
"We had that yesterday" - apparently what many other people say.
This, I typically make a stir fry or something that will last a long time for me
100% the longterm ingredients. I have an emergency meal which is just rice, frozen peas and carrots, and crushed cashews. I probably have green onion and definitely have numerous sauces available, too.
Your emergency meal sounds healthier than most of my regular meals, lol! It's usually just fries, zucchini and some kind of frozen meat or fish (all baked). Fresh zucchini probably doesn't last long enough for OP's needs, but it does last really long for fresh produce. Though part of it is that I kind of follow FODMAP so onions and legumes are out for me.
Not sure what FODMAP is. Regardless, if it works for you it’s pretty much always better to eat something than go hungry, and really if baked fries are the only “negative” there I mean how bad is it really? And it’s not like I don’t ever eat fries.