Don’t you wish you could eat without all that pesky cooking and cleaning? Better yet, what if you could feed your whole family well without spending all of your time making it happen? Then stick around, because today I’m sharing this sheet pan shrimp fajita recipe that you can use two ways, plus a bunch of tips and tricks for making two meals out of one cooking session.

Sounds great, right? That’s why I’ve been busting my butt to develop some fool-proof double-duty dinners for ya.

Want even more? Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you my free Double-Duty Dinner Guide with recipes like beef and veggie chili that turns into tamale pie and sweet potato chili cheese fries (in case you’re counting, that’s actually a triple-duty dinner if you eat the chili as just, well, chili one night #underpromiseandoverdeliver).

 

The Steps to Cooking Less and Eating More

Search around Pinterest and Facebook and you’ll see countless meal prep plans and recipes. And while this is a successful strategy for many people, us busy parents have an even greater demand on our time. So while meal prepping is a great way to cook lots of food at once, it still involves spending 2+ hours cooking on the weekends and then eating the same thing over and over.

But what if you used the time you’re already spending cooking to make more food? Then, the next night (or one after that) it took almost nothing to get dinner on the table? AND you were enjoying something different as well? Oh, plus BTWs you’ll be cleaning up way less too…no big deal.

It’s easier than you might think. Here are the keys to making multiple dinners from one cooking session:

1. Identify recipes that will keep well
2. Make extra
3. Store it correctly
4. Get creative with leftovers

Let’s dive into each step in a little more detail.

How to Identify Recipes that Keep Well

I bet many of the recipes you’re already making could easily be made in larger batches and used for dinner another night. Better yet, some of them could likely be “reused” with a little creativity and planning.

So how do you know what will keep well? As a general rule, items that are cooked in sauce (think: chili), patties (think: salmon cakes) or those that are cooked in their simplest form (think: ground beef) are a great place to start.

Now, which ones are best for morphing into different meals in the following days? Usually cooked meats and/or things that are on the simple side lend themselves to this best vs. more composed things like lasagna. I always think of it as starting with the lowest common denominator. Think:

• Cooked taco meat vs. taco salad
• Grilled shrimp vs. shrimp scampi
• Roasted veggies vs. roasted veggie pasta salad

Want some specific double-duty recipes? I’ve included 3 awesome base recipes – which turn into 6 easy and different meals – in my free Double-Duty Dinners Guide. Sign up for my email list and you’ll get the guide (and tons of other helpful food content) sent directly to your inbox.

Make Extra

Pretty self-explanatory. Make more than your family would normally eat in one meal. At least double.

Store it Correctly

Let’s start with some basic food safety:

• Most cooked foods can keep 3-5 days if stored correctly in the fridge. If you want to know specifics, I like the site Still Tasty
• Package cooked food in airtight containers
• Label it with the name of the item and the date you made it. I love using masking or painters tape and a Sharpie

Here’s how I stored my extra chili from the guide before freezing it:

And just because I can’t help myself, I must remind you here that smelling your food won’t tell you if it’s gone bad. Food and bacteria are much more complex than that, hence the labeling with name and date above. Just trust me, it helps increase confidence in the freshness of your food and reduce food waste.

How to Get Creative with Leftovers

Like most things in life, repurposing your leftovers can be as simple as searching Pinterest or Google.

Let’s check out an example together. Say we grilled tuna steak last night and want to use the leftovers tomorrow:

First, I head over to Pinterest and search “grilled tuna steak recipes”.

You’ll notice that this yields a lot of recipes for grilling tuna steak.

But scroll a bit down the page and you’ll hit the jackpot with something like this. You see, we’re looking for recipes that aren’t for the grilled item itself, but using it as an element of the recipe (this is where the visual nature of Pinterest comes in).

Or this:

Or these:

Make sense? It’s really not rocket science…thank goodness. With just a little forethought, creativity, and computer skills you can remake your meals and do less of the heavy lifting in the kitchen.

Sheet Pan Shrimp Fajita Recipe

This sheet pan shrimp fajita recipe is a great example of how double-duty dinners work.

On night one you make the shrimp fajitas, throw them in some corn tortillas with a little cilantro, lime and avocado. That’ll look like this:

On night two you take those same ingredients and serve them over quinoa with a Peruvian green sauce. And that looks like this:

Same ingredients, different dish and presentation all packed with nutrients and flavor. Want to give it a try?

Want done-for-you double-duty recipes? After all, you have enough to think about – kids, kids’ sports, kids’ school, work, grocery shopping…ya know.

Sign up for my email list to get your free copy of the Double-Duty Dinners Guide now with all the deliciousness and none of that pesky thinking and Googling.

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