3 Easy Dinner Ideas For When You Can’t Be Bothered Cooking

This post is sponsored by Woolworths

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ou know what the worst thing about being a grown up is? Having to decide what to cook for dinner every night. I love cooking and I love eating but sometimes I really don’t have the energy for either. I also quite often get dinner stage fright. Like I just can’t think of a single thing to make and I can’t even google anything because you can’t google a non-idea.

You know what I mean? It’s like when someone tells you to look up a word you can’t spell – how are you supposed to do that when you don’t know how it’s spelled? It’s the same thing when you draw a blank at dinner time. So this week I’ve teamed up with Woolies and Created with Jamie (and their new range of meal kits that I’m legit obsessed with) to bring you 3 easy dinner ideas for when you can’t be bothered cooking… or you want to cook something a bit fancy but you have no idea where to start.

Grab a meal kit

I’ve been a fan of meal kits for years because they’re a cheap and easy to way to cook an awesome meal without spending hours in the kitchen or having to fork over $20 just to buy the herbs for a fancy dinner. I tried the Created With Jamie Spiced Chicken Tagine and the Created with Jamie Sticky BBQ Beef & Cajun Rice last week and I can see them becoming firm staples in the future. They’re based on Jamie’s own favourite recipes (Lovely jubbly!) and packaged into kits so you can make them at home without having to shop for all the individual ingredients. I bought them last week when Mr Smaggle was away and because they serve two people (perfect for couples!) I kept the leftovers and had them for lunch the next day. They re-heated beautifully (even the chicken and if you’ve been reading Smaggle for a while, you’ll know I’m very weird about re-heated chicken).

 

To be honest, when I first looked at the meal kits I was like ‘For two people?’ because it looked a bit on the small and I’m a total greedy guts but I followed the serving suggestion and I was totally full eating just one portion and saving the second portion for the next day. The chicken one is Middle Eastern flavoured with couscous and spices and the beef one is just a delicious sticky BBQ pot of awesome. They’re also really cheap! Each kit was about $15 and I got two meals out of them. That’s $7.50 per meal. I can’t even get two takeaway coffees for $7.50. They’re also both almost one pot meals (not including a microwave dish here and there) so you literally have 1 frying pan and a few plates to wash up when you’re done.

Toss a tin of salmon over a handful of lettuce

In summer my standard dinner is a huge handful of baby spinach, a small tin of salmon, some sliced cucumber, half an avocado a little drizzle of sweet chilli sauce. It’s healthy, easy, delicious and filling. YOU ARE WELCOME. Tip: this also makes a banging lunch and you don’t even need to prepare it – you can just chuck all the ingredients in a bag and assemble it at work.

Buy a cooked chook

One of Mr Smaggle’s favourite dinners is an old staple in the Jacobs family. We call it a Mouse Plate and it’s pretty much a plate full of little nibbles of food. We usually have some cooked chicken, cheese, carrot sticks, celery sticks, hummus dip, a boiled egg and some cherry tomatoes. It takes about 5 minutes to put together and it’s healthy and delicious. Plus there’s always left over chicken for sandwiches the next day. Bonza.

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What’s your favourite ‘couldn’t be bothered’ dinner? Have you tried the Jamie Meal Kits?

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P.S Did you know there’s a Smaggle newsletter? And Smags on Facebook? There’s lots of cool shit in both places so make sure you go to there.