Shelf Stable Meal Kit: Chili Cornbread Casserole

Libby, , , Leave a comment

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.

Shelf-Stable Chicken Gravy Dinner Meal Kit

LibbyLeave a comment

Hi friends!! This shelf-stable meal kit is a hearty, hot meal on a cold day and deeply easy. I feel like the entire thing could be made in the microwave though there are no microwave directions on the packages that I got and I wasn’t able to test that method. But the internet says it’s possible!

When we had it for dinner it reminded me a lot of chicken and noodles (you know, if you had noodles) but a very cut-corners version. Definitely not what grandma used to make but it’ll do in a pinch. Ya know?

I think this meal could feed six people easy and it cost about $10 per kit for me shopping at my local Walmart.

Queso Chicken and Rice Shelf Stable Meal Kits

LibbyLeave a comment

I saw a recipe from @yourbarefootneighbor on Facebook and thought it sounded delicious. I also thought that it was *mostly* shelf stable already and would make a great meal kit. But first I had to test out my theory. I’m not just going to put an idea in a bag!

I tested it out and I was truly astonished at how delicious this was. So while you’re putting together these meal kits for your community, go ahead and save one for you because it’s so good!! It’s a rare occasion when you can get something that’s super cheesy and creamy and also shelf stable.

Also, I made (in my opinion) a hilarious video about this recipe. You can catch it on my Instagram right here.

And here’s the printable to include in each kit!

SPAM Fried Rice

Libby, , Leave a comment

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!

Meal in a Bag Ingredients

LibbyLeave a comment

If you’re coming here from my Instagram, HI! I usually write about what I’m reading but my brain has been preoccupied, lately, about how our neighbors are currently without SNAP benefits and what I can do to help.

I. Have. A. Lot. Of. Thoughts. But I’m not using this space for that right now. I don’t even have much brain space in this moment to make this as thorough as I wish I could. Right now, I just wanted to share the info that I have about the meals I distributed around my town today.

I created 64 Servings of food in three different meal-types. I put everything you need to make a shelf-stable meal into a ziplock bag, added instructions, and then took them around to the Little Free Pantries spread around our town.

Cajun Ham and Bean Soup makes 8, 1-cup servings:

Butter Chicken makes 4 servings
Chicken Burrito Bowl makes 4 servings
Add all ingredients into one bag so that you can make both meals with one bag of rice.

I’ve been following Dollar Tree Dinners for a little over a year and a few months ago she made this video about pantry meals where I got this idea for putting ingredients into a bag.

I have been seeing her content being shared amongst all of my friends the past few days and I’m so glad that people are finally discovering this gem of a human. I love that she’s extremely mindful of what “accessibility” can mean to different people. So many people who talk about budget meals want you to do evvvvverything from scratch and some of us have to, like, work. We can’t all grind our flour by hand even if it does save us thirty five cents.