food

Shelf Stable Meal Kit: Chili Cornbread Casserole

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Today I have another new meal kit recipe! Feel free to make this for yourself or your family or go ahead and print off the recipe card and add it to a gallon sized bag along with the ingredients and fill the pantries in your neighborhood or drop off to a friend who could use a night off from planning dinner.

I haven’t kept up with creating my videos about filling the little free pantries but I’m happy to say that I kept up my commitment of filling them weekly from the time I started in September till the end of the 2025. I’m proud of myself for doing that! I wondered if that commitment would be too much for me but it was so easy for me to want to do it.

I don’t have a video for this one today because my bandwidth has been low. I’ve wondered about making my pantry videos because on my weird-brain-days where I’m feeling insecure, it’s easy to tell myself that I’m just being performative by posting them. But almost every time I make one, someone new tells me that it’s inspired them to go fill the little free pantries in their community and as long as that keeps happening, then I’m going to keep doing them because I really do feel passionately about how easy it is for us to ease one another’s burdens in simple ways.

That being said, I think for budgetary reasons, I’m going to have to reassess my commitment to every other week for 2026. Groceries are expensive right now which means that not only are more people needing these pantries but fewer people are able to fill them. But if we each do what we can, we can take care of one another. I’m going to try to do one Aldi grocery shop for people without kitchens a month and one new recipe for meal kits (for people who do have kitchens) a month. That feels very do-able. Especially if folks like you keep helping to fund the Aldi trips! Every month, people have helped to pay for the Aldi trips which has helped to keep that going. If you’d like to help out, too, click here.

SPAM Fried Rice

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I made two shelf-stable meal kits for our community’s Little Free Pantries and I’m already sick of beans. I’m thrilled to report that when I went around town to donate some things on November 1, the first day that many folks had to do without their SNAP benefits–they were so much more full than I’d ever seen them!!! Hooray!!!

Every single pantry has tons and tons of beans. Which is great! Because beans have so much fiber and protein and they tend to be incredibly affordable. Win. Win. Win! But in that case, I feel like I don’t need to add more beans to the stock. So I added another rule to my personal guidelines for this project.

The meal kits I’m creating must:

  1. Be completely shelf-stable
  2. Make 4 servings
  3. Cost no more than $10 ea
  4. Contain no beans

Now, I do have a few ideas for meals that don’t follow these rules and occasionally I’ll let myself bend them–but that’s fine because they’re made up anyway.

But for day one of the Bean Free Challenge we’re making SPAM Fried Rice!

Each one of these meal kits contains:

  • 8.8 oz pack of 90 second Jasmine rice $1.38
  • 15 oz can stir-fry vegetables $2.08
  • 12 oz can luncheon meat $2.00
  • 8 oz can pineapple tidbits $1.23
  • 4 oz cup of diced carrots $.55 ea (but comes in a 4-pack for $2.22)
  • 1 oz packet of fried rice seasoning $1.26

Each kit costs around $8.50 and serves 4. Prices reflect my local Walmart at the time of this posting.

If you make these for your local pantries or to gift to loved ones or organizations, go ahead and print out my recipe card to go along with it! You can fold it in half and make sure to put the title facing the outside so people know what they’re getting.

Let me know if you try this!

Page Twelve: Breakfast

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I am the kind of person who likes to have a pretty intentional breakfast. If I don’t have a legitimate breakfast before work, then I’ll be so hungry at lunch time that I will eat all of the things.

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To complicate matters, I have never really been a lover of cereal. In my formative years, I went dairy free for a while and during that time, I just never really developed a cereal-as-breakfast habit. Back in those days, soy milk and almond milk and other dairy-free options weren’t totally available in my tiny town grocery store. So my mom would stock up on boxes of rice milk whenever we went into town and I hated it. I could choke it down if I had to, and I probably wouldn’t mind it as much as an adult but I couldn’t bring myself to pour it on my cereal on the daily. I got real into toast, though. Mostly toast and peanut butter.

These days it’s toast and smashed avocado with a tiny sprinkling of sea salt. That’s my ideal breakfast. A close second is a scrambled egg and sliced tomato with salt and pepper. I don’t tend to steer toward sweets for breakfast unless they have a lot of, I guess, health food components that I know are going to keep me full and nourished. Like extra nuts or wheat germ or dried fruits. Oatmeal, by the way, totally falls under the “sweets” category for me but probably not for anyone else. So this is what I’ll eat in a perfect world. But that world doesn’t exist, today, because payday is tomorrow. Which means that the fridge is getting a smidge low and it’s time to get creative.

There are no eggs, no bread, obviously no avocado. All of the sugar cereal has been on my shelf for, not kidding, a year. So I’m not eating that. No oatmeal. But what’s that way back in my cupboard? Grits. Hmm… grits is essentially cream of wheat, right? And that’s totally a breakfast food. Okay. So, grits. So we’re having grits for breakfast. Like cowboys or something. I’m not really sure of the demographic that regularly noshes on grits for breakfast.

Then I went through my cupboard and pretty much took out a spoonful of anything that would offer me some nutritional benefit.

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A spoonful of almond butter for protein, a big scoop of wheat germ for all of the things (I am an enormous advocate for wheat germ, add it to anything you can think of. I even put it on ice cream.), and a drizzle of agave because I want it to be a little sweet but I don’t want my blood sugar to go crazytown bananapants while I’m at work. And then I just threw in a few other things for flavor on whatever whim happened to stop by.

I have to tell you that I’m going to be adding grits to my regular breakfast routine. Necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention.

Grits for Breakfast for One

1 c. watter
1/4 c. quick cooking grits
1/2 t. vanilla extract
1 T. nut butter
1 T. wheat germ
1/4 t. cinnamon
1 t. agave nectar or honey

Bring water to a boil in a small pan, add vanilla extract and grits and stir. Turn heat down to low and continue to stir until grits reach desired consistency.Remove from heat, stir in extras and top with a splash of milk.

What else could we add to it?
Has necessity ever delivered you something delicious?