Ping! Your older kid was at bat, but you missed their awesome hit because you were rummaging around in your car for Goldfish for your other kid. Spring sports are taking over your life and it’s so hard to figure out when to eat dinner in the evenings! You wonder if anybody has it figured out (the real answer is that we’re all struggling in this area), but don’t worry) because we have some ideas for you!
Recently, I had an all too familiar busy Monday evening. I tried to get around it, but there was no way to avoid running into my closest Food City for something I needed. I remembered that back in the day, my husband would sometimes pick up dinner from the hot bar there, something he remembered doing frequently in his youth. So I stopped by to get dinner for my family of four and was pleasantly surprised to find out there was even a deal where it was cheaper if you bought more than one meal (I believe it was two for $12) that included a meat, two sides, your choice of bread, and a drink. It’s essentially homestyle Southern dinners and in a world where it cost $50 to $60 just to eat fast food for four, $24 felt pretty good especially since we got real food.
So if you’re struggling to figure out how to feed everyone on practice nights this spring, the food and the cost at Food City are hard to beat, not to mention you don’t have to do any of the cooking. Of course you can always do a drive-through, but that gets kind of old after a while! And Food City isn’t the only grocery store in our area that has a hot bar or dinner options: Kroger has several to-go meals available, Fresh Market, Whole Foods, Three Rivers Market downtown, or even a Pub sub would make a great alternative to whatever your usual drive-through is.
While the Food City hot bar is my latest (re)discovery, my most frequent go-to is to make an early dinner before a six o’clock practice. This usually requires meals that include a little bit of a “cheat,” but the kids certainly never mind.
Ideas for quick “home cooked” meals might be:
- Fish tacos made with fish sticks
- Pre-pattied turkey burgers
- Salsa chicken in the crockpot (or anything in the crockpot!)
- The pre-cooked carnitas or barbecue pork from Sam’s Club
- Bob Evan’s mashed potatoes or macaroni and cheese make great sides, or a bag/box of rice
I also have a friend who almost always has something prepped so that they can eat dinner immediately after practice. Last week, she had a chicken casserole ready to go that just had to cook for 20 minutes when they got home. If you think about things you can have prepped beforehand, it really opens up your options and can save the time and money of trying to eat out one or more nights a week.
My biggest tip for keeping up with dinners during sports season (and year-round because let’s be honest, life isn’t getting any slower!) is this: MEAL PLANNING!
No joke! If you take about 30 minutes on a Sunday evening and write out enough meals for every night of the week, it will save you so much time, money, and trips to the store. Even if we’re going to eat out one night, I just put it in the meal plan. I do my best to take a minute and think ahead for how many nights I’ll have time to actually cook, and how many I’ll need something quick. Also, if you plan for half real meals, half fast meals, and one or two nights eating out depending on your family’s preference and budget, it’s easy to switch around and I rarely stick to what I said I would make on what nights. It just gives me enough of a framework to put in one grocery order for the week and be done with it when 3pm or 4pm rolls around, I look at the note in my phone and decide what I want to make. If it’s a crockpot meal, I try to put an alarm reminder in my phone, so I don’t forget to start it the next morning. Just having dinners decided saves me so much time every day!
I hope this helps a little bit if you are also in a busy season of life. If we’re going to be running around like crazy getting these kids to baseball, soccer, gymnastics, etc., we might as well be well fed.
