If you're in the UK nearly any supermarket sells couscous! Or at least I used to buy it all the damn time from the Co-Op. Seconding couscous, btw. If you've got leftover pasta sauce but can't be arsed with the actual pasta, put it on couscous. I used to put my leftover bolognese on it. My usual can't-be-assed thing is.... half a can of baked beans (other canned things in a tomato sauce would also work probably, but i personally dislike most other canned things in tomato sauce. Also reliably informed that american baked beans are different to british ones, so? uh?). Half a can of tinned sweetcorn. Frozen peas (when I say peas i mean petit pois, btw. If you mean something more like garden peas and you don't like them, try petit pois, they're smaller, crisper and sweeter and just generally better in every way). Seasonings to taste- things that work: pepper, chilli flakes, sweet chilli sauce, sometimes like brown sauce. If you're up to chopping, you can put things like other veg and cooked sausage or ham (if you have slices then you can just shred them for ease). If you want you can also grate in cheese. Put either in bowl in microwave for between a minute and two minutes, or on a saucepan on the hob until hot through. Eat.
Oh man, i forgot onigiri! That stuff is the best. Basically take a handful of cooked rice and squeeze it into a ball. Variations: Put stuff inside-- i usually do a bit of whatever leftover stuff ive got, but chicken and tinned tuna are my favorite proteins and Im addicted to those little purple pickles. Cooked spinach is pretty good too. Chopped egg. Cherry tomatos. Put stuff outside--plain salt, any of the eight million different kinds of furikake (plum is my favorite!), seaweed (wet your hands and it'll bend and stick much more easily!), sprinkle of vinegar an sugar to taste like sushi rice. Mix things in before making the ball: dashi flakes, scrambled eggs, green onions, chunks of cooked veggies like squash or beets or whatever, small chunks of meat. It takes <5 minutes once the rice is cooked and needs only a relatively small amount of anything to flavor the rice and lasts all day/overnight easily. I used to totally live on this stuff.
My go-to meat for desperation pasta is "chunks of chicken breast cut up really small" but, yes. A handful of those itty bitty salad shrimp will also do the job. Pretty much any way to vary up instant ramen makes for good desperation cooking. My prefered method is chow mein via making noodles and then pouring out almost all the water before adding the flavor packet. Works pretty well and then I can just dump chicken/veggies/extra teriyaki sauce in to improve it. (I can't texture leafy greens so "eat veggies directly out of fridge" is me like. All the time. Sugar snap peas are my preference.) ...British baked beans involve tomato sauce????? American ones are basically beans in a mild/sweet gravy, usually (with the canned ones) flavored by a chunk or two of bacon fat. Which reminds me that dogs and beans (chopped up hotdog thrown in baked beans) is another Thing that's good for low spoons. Depending on your preference for Amount of Hotdog, put 1-1.5 hotdogs in per Standard Size can (we usually do three for a giant can). My family usually adds additional brown sugar and BBQ sauce to modify the gravy a bit (makes it thicker+more flavorful), but it's pretty good just like that. Microwave until hot, initiate noms. Honestly hot dogs can be used to add A Protein to a lot of things. They'd probably be acceptable for the Ramen Variety Bowl.
I buy tuna in oil and just have that spooned onto bread or toast. Saves me the step of having to make tuna salad out of it. Soak up the leftover oil by dipping the bread into it. Miso is another option for "soup base that takes no effort to prepare". Drop in dried seaweed and tofu if you're feeling fancy. You can get rice cookers that have steamer baskets over the rice part. Put rice and water in the bottom tier, put the basket in, pour some frozen veggies on top, push button. Dried vegetable soup mix is good for when you want to make a soup more complicated than "I stuck pieces of meat and pasta in a pot with water for a while" but don't have many fucks. If you have a health food store nearby, I have a soft spot for muesli, which you can cook exactly like oatmeal in the microwave but has a bunch more interesting stuff in it like nut pieces, grains other than oats (note that it won't be gluten-free, as wheat is often one of the other grains) and dried fruit.
To be quite honest US baked beans sound awful. xP Yeah, british baked beans are just haricot beans in a very light tomato sauce. Doesn't even really taste that much like tomato half the time. Like so:
Little Smokies. Those little cocktail sausages. Heat them up with BBQ sauce or slice them up into your beans/pasta/grains or wrap them in canned biscuit/croissant/breadstick dough and bake them or just put them into your face.
I will second the toaster waffles. I like spreading peanut butter or nutella on it ( or both, you know, variety, spice, all that jazz)
This is also a great thread for inexpensive food, for the most part, so thanks everyone for that too.
I find it acceptable to be spongey and damned by gods. :D So that works. But. Actual suggestions: - Hummus and pita. - Stirfry: rice cooker + rice + chopped veggies, push button and wait. - Bagels! Bagels are delicious. Basically, I just keep some kind of grab-and-go bread-type food around, and a big bag of apples, and just take that. :\
My mom has a bunch of "cannot can, must nutrition" foods. She's eating a bowl of cottage cheese and pineapple chunks right now. Let's see, what else.... Chicken or tuna salad (canned meat + mayonnaise + sweet pickle relish) on crackers or with lettuce. Peanut butter, on crackers or with apple slices. Scrambled eggs with canned black beans, cheese, and salsa. (You can heat the beans etc. in the same pan as you cook the eggs in so it minimises dishwashing.) I like making fried rice with kimchi in it. Butter in pan, kimchi in butter, leftover rice in kimchi, soy sauce in rice, heat, stir, eat. Add an egg or two if you have them/feel like it.
When I am really not feeling cooking, but also don't want to order in, I fry potatoes from the freezer (frozen tiny cubes of potato) with some sort of meat (whatever I have, mostly bacon or ham, though smoked chicken is good) until it's the desired doneness and then scramble some eggs over the entire affair. It's really good :) Though tonight my low spoons food was getting Chinese delivered :P
.... you barbarians COOK müsli holy shit what'S WRONG WITH YOU????????????????? müsli with like little cookies and chocolate bits and dried strawberries is my go to 'fuck real food' thing because pour müsli in bowl, pour milk after (if you are fancy and rich, almond milk is the milk goddess just sayin), ignore the fact that müsli is not lactose free and pray that the milk being lactose free is enough, ignore actual pills for lactose intolerance you totally have actually living on cereal and müsli, the university student in Germany saga they now grow tiny vegetables apparently that are small and tender enough that you do not need to cut/skin/peel them. Cucumbers and carrots i've seen, apart from, obviously cocktail tomatoes, so thats a fresh thing you can eat straight out of the fridge. Make the raw vegan community proud Also apparently soy sprouts can also be eaten raw? I think that might be how you make hummus, but idk, basically open can of chickpea puree, pour in a bit of lemon juice and pepper, mix, eat with your fingers because you dont even care anymore actually healthy fuck-it-food because chickpeas are your friend. also possibility: Get bag of frozen veggies of kind you like, whichever you like, get leftover pasta, put in casserole, put cream cheese and seasoning on top, cut some sausage in there if you wanna maybe? add abit of milk so it doesn't dry out, throw copious amounts of cheese, bake I prefer mozzarella cheese here but I have been given the impression that Americans do not always know what that is. Also I might be a cheese snob.
Toast pizza. Needed: 1 toaster oven, bread of any kind, tomato sauce of any kind that isn't ketchup, cheese of any meltable kind (cheddar, provolone, mozzarella, or heck fakey american cheese slices). Toast the bread first, but not really dark. Spread tomato sauce on toast. If you happen to have any kind of topping available (pepperoni, salami, torn up bits of ham, mushrooms, olives) that you like, put them on next. If you have black pepper, oregano, or basil, and like 'em, put them on. Then a good layer of cheese. Put them back in the toaster oven and toast for about 45 seconds to a minute and a half, at a guess, but watch it to see if the cheese is melting right. When it looks good, pull out and eat. Repeat this until you are not hungry. You can even do this with salsa instead of tomato sauce, especially mild salsa. Or Taco Bell mild sauce. It works. Not great eatin', but warm and at least to me cheery-making when I lack spoons for one reason or another.
I don't know how affordable they are in the US, but edamame/green soy beans are tasty and pretty easy to prepare. You can buy them frozen and pre-boiled (either in the pod or shelled; I prefer the ones in the pod as a snack), so all you have to do is defrost them and sprinkle on some salt. Heating them up a little is even nicer.
-Chips and salsa -Buy a big bag of pretzels and eat it -Spinach in a can + vinegar + microwave -Canned beans + microwave -Potatoes + microwave + butter or chili -Instant rice + soy sauce -frozen fake meat + microwave -Frozen pizza + oven I am thinking about energy not cost here because I have been lucky enough to have enough money for the things I want, so some of these might be too pricey for those with less money.
