The Simple Formula I Use for Gluten-Free Meals When I'm Too Tired to Cook

Have you ever had one of those days where work has completely drained your brain... 

You're hungry. 

You still need to eat gluten-free. 

But cooking an elaborate meal is the last thing you want to do? 

I think we've all been there. 

The good news is that eating gluten-free doesn't have to mean spending hours in the kitchen. 

Today I'm sharing my favorite low-energy meals, the staples I always keep on hand, and the simple formula I use to put together quick gluten-free dinners without sacrificing nutrition. 

If you've ever stood in front of your refrigerator hoping dinner would magically appear, this episode is for you. 

Save money, and no more guessing for dinner!  Use code GFE to get 20% off annual membership at thedinnerdaily.com. Plan meals for less than $4/month and save money at the grocery store!

Transcript

Disclaimer And Burned-Out Cooking

Carrie Saunders 0:00

Quick reminder before we get started on this episode. This podcast is based on my personal experiences and isn't medical advice. Have you ever had one of those days where work has completely drained your brain? You're hungry, you still need to eat gluten-free, but cooking an elaborate meal is the last thing you want to do. We have for sure experienced these things when our kids were still all in school. This summer we've really experienced a lot because we've been running around a lot. But the good news is that eating gluten-free doesn't mean that you have to spend hours in the kitchen. Today I'm sharing my favorite low-energy meals, the staples I always keep on hand, and the simple formula I use to put together quick gluten-free dinners without sacrificing nutrition. Let's dive in.

Meet The Gluten Free Engineer

Carrie Saunders 0:46

Welcome to the Gluten Free Engineer Podcast. I'm your host, Kiri Saunders. In 2011, I was diagnosed with celiac disease, a moment that changed everything. But I was determined not to let it hold me back. With my two engineering degrees, I set out to reverse engineer the gluten-free lifestyle, breaking down recipes, safety tips, travel hacks, and everything in between to rebuild a life I love. Whether you have celiac disease, gluten intolerance, or simply choose to live gluten-free, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we simplify the gluten-free lifestyle, make it fun, and prove that you don't have to miss out on anything.

The Real Goal On Busy Days

Carrie Saunders 1:23

Welcome back to the show. Today we're talking about my stable, quick, gluten-free meals to make your life so much easier because we all know the life can get really busy. Sometimes work takes everything you've got out of yourself, but you still deserve a good meal. So the goal isn't to cook the perfect meal. The goal is to make gluten-free easy enough that you can stick with it even on your busiest days and still feel good.

Protein Veggie Starch Formula

Carrie Saunders 1:48

So my formula for low-energy meals is instead of memorizing recipes, which I just can't help but I have quite a few memorized in my head. I do try to think in building blocks whenever I don't want to be fancy and I just want to be simple. So I start with a protein. Not always, I'm going to admit this, but it's a really good idea. I'm really trying on this adding vegetables into my life, much more. But you can add frozen vegetables, you can do a fresh salad, whatever's easy to you. Sometimes when I'm in a quick pinch at lunch, I will just get baby carrots and just eat those as a side. And my husband doesn't know that because he's usually not home for lunch. So he might be listening to the episode and giggling because I really don't eat that very many vegetables. Like I said, I'm trying. But I do find the baby carrots are so easy for me to just grab and eat at lunch. So pick something that you don't have to chop if you don't have the energy, something really easy and simple like that for a vegetable.

Rice And Potato Speed Tricks

Carrie Saunders 3:01

And then I recommend you adding a starch. It is a good idea to have a balanced meal where we have protein, vegetables, maybe a fruit, and a starch. So starches can be easy. We can do rice, we can do gluten-free noodles, we could do potatoes, tortillas. So some things that I do here to make this part easier is if I know I'm going to have a busy week, you can make rice ahead of time and we make it in our pressure cooker. So that it's actually really good. Um, and one tip I found lately is I've started rinsing the rice. I know you're supposed to rinse the rice, but it actually tastes better and it warms up better in the microwave for leftovers. If you have rinsed it first, we've found we use basmati rice. That's the style that we really like in our family. And if you just add a little bit of water to a bowl and then microwave it on high for like about a minute or so, you know, to your liking as far as how hot it is, the rice comes back out like it was just brand new. It's wonderful to do that. Uh, potatoes, if you're in a hurry, you can cook potatoes in the microwave with you know just poking a few holes in it and three minutes at a time, flip it over another three minutes to two until you think it's done, until you know it's easy to stick a fork in it. So easy to make a starch quickly for dinner

Tacos And Burger Night Basics

Carrie Saunders 4:17

time. Now I want to give you a few example go-to meals that are quick for us. So we always have some sort of cow in our freezer. We get a quarter of a cow from a local butcher that's fully grass-fed. It's the best meat ever, honestly, and it's way cheaper than the store. We're paying about $7 a pound for everything: hamburger, steaks, brisket, filet mignon, everything is $7 a pound. So so much cheaper. The really nice thing about that is we always have tubes of ground beef frozen in our freezer. So anytime I want to whip out some tacos, real quick, it's really easy to do. Each of those tubes and with our butcher is a pound each. So we know how much meat we're getting out. We can get one or two of those out, depending upon how many kids we have over the time, since all of our kids are college age. And I'll just thaw that in our microwave with our microwave thaw feature, and then I'll put it in a pan and finish the thaw and browning it, drain it. I season it myself. Um, the siete um brand taco season is excellent. Now I can't eat that one because it has tomato in it, unfortunately, but it's delicious. I will attest to that. So if you need to make your own season, it's really simple. Just salt and pepper, some chili powder, and maybe some garlic and onion salt, too, if you'd like. Really easy to make your own taco season. Don't don't worry about having to go buy your own and worry about whether there's gluten binding ingredients in it. Now, the CHA brand is definitely perfectly safe. They are grain-free and um gluten-free, but you can make it on your own. Then all you really need is cheese and veggies, and you're done because you can use corn tortillas of some sort, whether it's soft or hard-shelled, and now you've got your veggies, your protein, and your starch. So it's really easy to make tacos. I can probably have tacos done in about 15 to 20 minutes with little to no fuss. Now, another one we like is frozen burgers. So we were getting for a while there butcher boxes, frozen, pre-made patties. As of late, they've been out of them, unfortunately. But frozen burgers are great for doing this. And what you can do is you can cook them straight from frozen, and it really doesn't take that long. You can either use your cast iron, you could use your grill, or just a hot pan, just start it hot with a little bit of salt. So, what my grandmother always taught me to do is when you're cooking meat, especially beef, you put a little salt in the bottom of the pan before you brown it or before you cook burgers. And then I'll also add some pepper. And then you can just get a gluten-free bun if you want. We love to keep um the cannonbread gluten-free buns in our freezer. We'll get them from the store. I'll slice them the rest of the way. They're mostly sliced, but not fully. And then when you put them in the freezer, when you've already sliced them, they're easy to take out one or two of them at a time and pop them apart, pop the top and the bottom apart and toast them, and then they come back to life. Many times when we're doing burgers, we tend to pair it with tater tots or waffle fries or something like that. We do have to be careful in our family. We have to get the Alexia brand because it's soy-free, um, because we can't do the soy and the other brands, but just make sure if you do something like that that is gluten-free and any other allergen-free for your household. And then you could do those baby carrots, or maybe you do pepper sticks. Like maybe you cut up a red or green pepper and just make pepper, you know, sticks and eat that. You could dip it in gluten-free ranch dressing too, if you'd like, or maybe some tops of broccoli. I haven't done that in a while, and now I'm thinking I need to get some broccoli florets because I do like raw broccoli. I don't like most of my vegetables, I don't like cooked, so I go have to go for a raw. Um, so that's a really quick, easy, fast meal. You can make that one again in about 15 to

Fast Chicken Parmesan Dinner

Carrie Saunders 8:00

20 minutes. Now, something we did the other day, my mother, my mother-in-law was over. We were having a good old time. I didn't expect this many people to be at our house, but we made it happen. I had chicken, fresh chicken in the fridge, some chicken breast, and I had jarred pasta sauce. And so I made grilled chicken parmesan for everybody, and my mother-in-law absolutely loved it. So all I did was cook those chicken breasts in a cast iron pan with a little bit of salt and pepper, really simple. While I was doing that, I started water boiling and I used Jovial Brand gluten-free pasta. And then in another pot, I was warming up some pasta sauce. For me, I put um, I think I used a nomado sauce that time for me, since I can't have tomatoes. And so everything was cooking at the same time, and I had the meal done. I think this one was done in about 20 minutes, 20 to 25 minutes, because the chicken breasts were kind of thick, but it was a delicious meal. We had our veggies via the sauce, we had the carbs via the pasta, and we had a good amount of you know, protein via the chicken, and it was so tasty. So that was a great other quick goate meal that I

Korean Beef Bowl Pantry Sauce

Carrie Saunders 9:12

like to do. And then another one that I like to do is our Korean beef bowl. Um, we have this recipe on the glutenfreeengineer.com. You can head on over there to get it, and I will work to add these other recipes I'm talking about to our website soon. So feel free to search for them, see if they're there by the time you listen to this. But the Korean beef bowl is great. I take that frozen ground beef, like I talked about with the tacos, I thaw it. It's a very simple sauce. We use coconut aminos instead of the soy sauce. It's just lots of staples that you have in your pantry. You just mix up the sauce while you're browning the beef, and you have that rice cooking either in your pressure cooker or you've already cooked it from a day or two before and you're just warming it up back up. You can add any fresh veggies if you want. We don't, this one we tend to skip the veggies on, I'm going to admit. And if my fitness coach, Brittany, is listening to this, she's gonna giggle at this because she's working on me to get me to eat more vegetables. But basically, it's ground beef, a simple sauce, and rice, and it's so delicious. And like I said, you can add whatever veggies you want to

Make-Ahead Meatballs And Leftovers

Carrie Saunders 10:15

it. And then finally, I love to make meatballs ahead. This is one of my, you know, help yourself in the future type of deal. So on a weekend, we will make meatballs sometimes, and we will take two pounds of ground beef and two pounds of fro of sausage. Now, both of these are not frozen at this point because it's really hard to work, obviously, with frozen meat. So we do get these fresh at the store. These don't come out of my freezer. So you do have to plan ahead. And so we just mix those up with some Italian seasoning, salt, and pepper, and I put in an egg or two, depending on how you know how the texture is, and potato flakes for the binder, for the other binder. And you can mix those up, roll them out, use them fresh for that dinner, and then freeze the rest in Ziploc baggies. So we will freeze, say, 20-ish at a time, like we know that that'll feed three of us, and we'll put those in the freezer anytime we want. We can pop those out and we can thaw them right in the pan and brown them at the same time, and put the pasta sauce on top whenever they're browned, and then that'll finish the cook while we're doing the noodles. So it's really quick to do leftover meatballs from frozen meatballs that we have handmade. I think that meal takes us 15 to 20 minutes just for the time it takes to boil the water and finish cooking the pasta and them in the meatballs. So it's a really, really quick thinner for that. And then finally, leftovers, don't underestimate them. They can be a great next meal, and it can be something really quick. So, hopefully, this helps you come up with some great ideas on how to make really quick gluten-free meals. Again, just have a protein, a starch, a vegetable, and potentially a fruit, depending upon your dietary needs. And you can have a quick meal in only 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes 25. And we will see you next

Share Subscribe And Website

Carrie Saunders 12:06

week. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Gluten Free Engineer. If you found value in this story, please share it with someone who might need encouragement on their own gluten-free journey. For more tips, recipes, resources, and even links to my YouTube channel, head on over to theglutenfreengineer.com. It's your one-stop hub to make gluten-free living simple, fun, and full of flavor. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss out on an episode. The Gluten Free Engineer Podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. I share my personal experiences and stories about living with celiac disease and navigating a gluten free lifestyle. This podcast does not provide a medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional for medical questions, concerns, or advice specific to your health.