Skillet meals

I have a confession to make.

Sometimes I don’t want to cook.

In fact, often, I don’t want to cook. After 30+ years of putting dinner on the table for my family, these days, some days, I just don’t feel like cooking. Sunday is typically a day when I do enjoy spending time in the kitchen, preparing a big batch of something to freeze or eat throughout the week, but last weekend I wasn’t having any of it.

One option for days like that, for many people, is take-out. For a person with food allergies or sensitivities, however, eating restaurant food can be a challenge. It’s a challenge worth mastering, certainly, but again, some days I’m just not in the mood to find something I can safely eat, or to take any chances of experiencing an adverse reaction to the food I’ve eaten.

Leftovers are another handy option for not-wanting-to-cook days, or one of those batches of food I’ve put in the freezer on a more productive Sunday, but I my fridge was sadly empty and although I wanted something hearty and filling, I wasn’t in the mood for the chili in the freezer.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

So in short, I needed to cook. But I didn’t want to.

Days like that call for what I think of as an easy skillet meal – the skillet version of what I’ve heard people refer to as garbage soup, a “recipe” which basically calls for throwing everything left in the fridge into a pot to make soup, before it goes bad, rather than throwing it out in the trash a few days later. For me skillet meals typically involve leftovers sautéed in olive oil with garlic, onion, salt, pepper, spices, and whatever other vegetables I feel like chopping up. But again, I was fresh out of leftovers, and I didn’t want to chop anything or spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

Luckily for me, throwing together a skillet meal while feeling incredibly lazy is still doable. In a perfect world each meal would be a balanced combination of protein, carbohydrate, and fat…but the world isn’t perfect, and neither are all of my meals. Still, it wasn’t hard to throw together a reasonably balanced dinner using what was in the freezer and pantry. My protein came in the form of a chunk of frozen ground turkey, which was fairly quick and painless to brown in my handy skillet. Fat was provided both by the meat and some olive oil, and carbs by a variety of frozen vegetables. On this particular day I used a previously sautéed and frozen onion/garlic/red pepper combination, peas, lima beans, corn (which is safe for me), green beans, broccoli, a little cilantro I found hiding in the freezer, and a can of diced fire-roasted tomatoes. I was in the mood for simple flavors*, so with the addition of salt, pepper, and cayenne I was done, most of the work having been performed by a gas flame while I hung out nearby reading a book.

The resulting dish may not have been on anyone’s top 10 recipes list, but it was warm and satisfying. And sometimes that’s all I need.

*A good spice mix can make the difference between a delicious meal and a humdrum one. In my opinion nearly everything tastes good when sauteed in olive oil with garlic and onion, but a simple thrown-together meal can be flavored in just about any way imaginable. For some simple spice mixtures to keep on hand, check out these flavoring combinations:  Mexican   Italian   Greek   Indian