There are just some days after work where the last thing you want to do is stand in the kitchen and cook dinner. We definitely have those days. But that doesn’t always mean that you are up to going out for dinner either. And there are times when you don’t want to spend $20 + on takeout either. 

What we do is plan for nights like those. We call them our lazy meals, and to be honest, they have turned out to be some of our favorite dinners. 

It takes barely any time and yet you’re still able to eat it in front of your current Netflix obsession AND you’re not dishing out “going out to dinner” money. 

Our top grocery stores we go to shop for these lazy meals are Trader Joe’s and ALDI. Most, if not all of these, are stored in the freezer and so we stock up on them. We also recently discovered Wegmans’ easy dinners section, but we have yet to try some of those so we’ll stick to what we know and tried for the sake of this post. 

Here are our favorite lazy dinners:

Cheese Spiral from Trader Joe’s. This is heavenly! We sometimes eat this alone if we aren’t starving or we pair it with another appetizer-like dish.

Frozen Pizza...from anywhere although Trader Joe’s has some really good ones. We like to add our own toppings to it. We get a beef sausage and add more cheese. You can also pair this with a quick salad if you’re feeling up to it. 

Fish & Chips. Bake some fish fillets or fish sticks along with some tartar sauce and fries and you’re all set! 

Chicken Patties. Once the chicken patties are baked, you can easily turn them into burgers/sliders by combining with buns, chopped up lettuce, tomatoes, onions…whatever you prefer. You could also cut the patties up and add to a salad. 

Orange Chicken. We combine the orange chicken with fried rice or chow mein. It doesn’t take too long to cook in the saucepan either. 

Gyro Kit. Gyro kits come in clutch. All you really have to do is brown the gyro meat in a pan, which really doesn’t take long at all, and then cut up some fresh tomatoes and onions to add into your gyro sandwich. We actually don’t end up finishing the gyro meat because there is so much so we save it for eggs the next morning. (From Aldi)

Fettuccine Alfredo. If you are craving Italian but don’t feel like boiling pasta and all that, you just have to heat up the pasta and sauce in a pan all at once and then you’re done. (From Trader Joe’s)

Quesadillas. You can either buy frozen quesadillas or you can make them at home with little time. All you need are tortillas, cheese and whatever toppings you like. We tend to use leftover steak, corn, cilantro and minced onion. We put the quesadillas in the panini maker for a couple minutes and then dip them in sour cream. 

Spaghetti & Meatballs. You can get frozen meatballs from Trader Joe’s, boil some pasta and add ready-made sauce, and bam, you’ve got dinner ready to go in under 20 minutes. If you feel like putting in a little more time you can saute some fresh garlic and onion in some olive oil before heating up the ready-made sauce. It makes it tastier and doesn’t take much time to do.

Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup. You can never go wrong with a gooey grilled cheese sandwich. Our favorite combo so far has been buttered brioche bread with a slice of Muenster, Pepper Jack, a spoon of cream cheese, dried basil, salt and pepper. For the tomato soup, you can make your own or buy one that is already made and just needs to be heated. 

Butter Chicken. The butter chicken from Trader Joe’s is an individual dinner so we get two of these and heat them up in the microwave. They taste pretty good, obviously not as good as the one we get from our favorite Indian restaurant but it’s good enough for a lazy meal. When we feel like actually cooking, we use a butter chicken simmer sauce over some cooked chicken over basmati rice.

Ravioli. This is another easy one. Both Trader Joe’s and ALDI have a bunch of ravioli options. We’ve tried them with an already made pesto sauce or a homemade butter/garlic sauce and it’s turned out delicious.

If you have any other easy meals you turn to in times of laziness, please share with us in the comments below. We would love to try them out 😊