I’m one person and won’t have a fridge for a few weeks as mine died. I can’t stomach any more canned soup. Any ideas for small meals I can make with shelf stable ingredients?
Some produce does surprisingly well at room temperature. Potatoes, onions, and gourds can last for months if stored properly. We keep our tomatoes on the counter and they’ve lasted for weeks at a time. As a general rule, if it’s found on a shelf rather than a cooler in a grocery store, it’ll be good for at least several days outside the fridge.
Everything I need to make rice or noodles is shelf stable. Pasta’s probably your friend here too.
Beans can be kept dried or canned. Dried is far cheaper, but can be more labour intensive for cooking. So if I’m just making something for myself, canned is a good choice too.
Lots of seafood is pretty good canned. Fish and crackers is something of a lazy/comfort food for me.
I had some fridge trouble in the recent past, and it was super lame. Good luck, and I hope you get a replacement soon
You’re a godsend. Drafting my shopping list based around your reply. Thanks!
In regards to the beans -
Buy dried if you want to have beans for dinner tomorrow night, and begin preparing them with dinner tonight.
Buy canned if you need dinner tonight and don’t want to begin preparing tomorrow’s dinner in addition to tonight’s
Vegetable stir-fry, curry or similar should be easily do-able. There’s plenty of fresh veg that will keep long enough out of a fridge or canned asian veg is decent. Tomato or pesto pasta. Stew made with canned beef isn’t bad. Omlette.
Do you have a cool bag/box? Grab a bag of ice and you have a fridge for a few days. Even a plastic box would do the trick.
Canned chickpeas are one of our staple proteins. Mash them into something resembling tuna, roast them to get them crunchy and toss them over couscous or rice, etc.
Shallots are great if you’re cooking for one or two people and don’t expect to use an entire onion. We sometimes cut up a shallot and a tomato and saute them in some olive oil before dumping some pasta into the pan for a quick meal.
Also +1 for potatoes and gourds. They’re in season and keep well on the counter.
Where I live it’s authumn/winter, and cool enough outside to not need a fridge.
Back in my student days we would hang beer in a plastic bag out the window to keep chilled.
Maybe that’s an option for you.
You can open up many avenues of feeding yourself “well enough” if you reconsider your definition of a meal, and consider actual cooking/food prep to be an option.
Cheap and storage-friendly ingredients off the top of head are potatoes, rice, (dried) pasta, flour, cheese, eggs (no need for refrigeration, just don’t wash off the protective layer), onions, garlic, tofu, and many hardier vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, and up to a point even iceberg salad, cucumbers, mushrooms (keep dry and airy if fresh, they dry out), as well as various pickles as snacks, if you’re so inclined. With onions, potatoes, and eggs alone you can stuff your face for weeks without repeating a single dish. :)
I keep (vegan) crème fraîche, soy/rice/almond/oat drinks, and “cooking cream” around for weeks unrefrigerated as great milk and cream substitutes, but the milk-based products have a solid shelf life as well as long as they’re unopened. This is perfectly viable for various creamy sauces or dips, and for cereals as a snack or breakfast option. With a nice oil or butter and a few seasonings you can whip up a surprising amount of simple meals, starting with classic pasta with a tomato sauce of your liking, to the typical trifecta of “carbs, meat, and veggies with optional sauce” that passes for an actual meal. You can easily build almost any kind of sauce you wish from stable ingredients to go with whatever, too.
There’s a good bunch of great thai curry pastes around that go well with a handful of veggies and rice, and keep cooking effort to a minimum. If I’m particularly lazy, I boil a pot of potatoes and eat those straight with sour cream. Leftovers are due for the chippy treatment in a pan with onions and eggs, or just eaten cold as a snack with salt or leftover dip. Same goes for rice, the amount of stuff people throw atop their rice to chase it down is astonishing. Lao Gan Ma chili crisp is great, a straight sweet chili sauce works in a pinch, and if you’re into chinese cooking anyway, you can throw almost anything in a pan, fry it up, and toss it to your rice with a generic “brown sauce” deal.
The biggest issue I see is fresh meat, though. That’s quickly a serious hazard when kept at room temp, so I’d suggest to try reducing your meat intake as long as you’re unable to store it properly, and otherwise cook the same day you buy. Truth be told, a lot of the vegan meat substitutes are surprisingly good by now, even though they’re highly processed garbage and pretty expensive for what they are, but they keep unrefrigerated much longer and safer than the real deal. Don’t expect a good steak, but anything “chicken” is nigh indistinguishable, IMHO.
All the other things do keep “fresh enough” at least for a couple of days, but you’ll need to consider what you buy and when you are able to cook beforehand so things don’t spoil, especially if you cannot buy fresh groceries more often than weekly for any reason.
TL;DR: For a generic meal, combine potatoes, rice, or pasta with a vegetable of your least distrust, optionally fresh meat if available, and a decent sauce. In a pinch, sauce + anything also works just fine, and sometimes even without sauce. Just don’t take pictures for Insta when horking down a bowl of pasta with ketchup, we’ve all been there.
This is a great post. +1 for potatoes and onions. (Just don’t store them together, they spoil each other faster)
One thing I’ll add is that if the OP is in the United States, commercially sold eggs have the bloom washed off them before they get to store shelves, so they MUST be refrigerated.
You can get dehydrated egg products that are shelf stable until you use them. They’re not perfect but for most purposes they’re good enough.
Dried lentils are an incredibly versatile ingredient, keep forever, are cheap and healthy, and unlike dried beans, do not require overnight soaking to use in a meal.
Your biggest issue is going to be the protein source, most of them require refrigeration.
Try things with canned meats, like canned tuna with Mac and cheese.
You can get canned chicken to go with some sort of pasta and tomato sauce.
Canned beef with potatoes.
Just be careful of making too much so there’s no leftovers
Unwashed eggs don’t need refrigeration, and are superb protein. Assuming OP isn’t in northern america, they should be easy to come by.
Dried legumes, such as lentils, beans, nuts and seeds are all excellent sources of protein and don’t require refrigeration.
@Kit Sorry for being late to this thread. As someone else said, if it’s also getting cold where you live, you can put things outside, in the shade. Here there are 12 degrees Celsius, but in the night it will be 1. Either way, in my country, if there is any vegetable out there we pickle it (we’re mostly doing this with cucumbers, green tomatoes carrots and cabbage, but you’re free to experiment). Here’s a simple recipe for that:
youtube.com/watch?v=Ql1sCw00Zz…
You’re basically putting these vegetables into salty water, or in a mix with water and vinegar, along with other stuff. If it’s not that cold, it’s even better, as the vegetables will become pickled faster.
You can also search for Romanian pickles or reteta muraturi on YouTube (if you’re okay with not understanding the language).
Another thing that we do is polenta. We usually eat it with cheese and sour cream, but as these require a fridge to keep, you’re free not to use them.
youtube.com/watch?v=WUmbtQu1eL…
This video is in Romanian, but the steps seem pretty clear. Here’s what you need:
- hominy
- 2 teaspoons of salt
- water
- butter/olive oil (optionally, for a more creamy consistency)
The rest should be self-explainatory.
Lentils are fire. Ramen isn’t bad either. If you like fruit, you can buy them in small portions and bring them home to eat each day.
