6 dinner ideas when you have no plans and already ate your emergency pizza

So you already ate your emergency freezer pizza. It’s 5:45, nothing is defrosted, and the fridge is not empty, you’re just out of ideas. This happens to me more often than I’d like to admit, and I plan meals for a living. Some weeks the plan just doesn’t happen.

These are six things you can make on those nights. None of them require a store run, most of them are more of a formula than a recipe, and a few of them barely count as cooking. I’ve linked 4 of the recipes below, and for the other two, this is the idea:

A snack board counts as dinner, and unusually like to hit four things: something protein (nuggets, salami, hard cheese, hard boiled eggs, leftover chicken), something crunchy (crackers, pretzels, cucumbers, carrots), something sweet (grapes, apple slices), and something briny if making it for myself (olives, pickles).

Mac and cheese with cottage cheese. Make the box as directed, then stir about half a cup of cottage cheese into the hot pot off the heat. It melts into the sauce. Blend it smooth first if you want, but I usually don’t. That’s it, but you can also add whatever needs using: frozen peas or spinach, shredded chicken, sliced kielbasa browned in a pan first.