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Aldi shoppers are sharing ridiculously easy meal combinations that require few ingredients and little prep

• Aldi shoppers on Reddit have been swapping great dinner ideas built around a few inexpensive, easy-to-prepare ingredients.

• The smartest trick isn't necessarily finding the absolute cheapest food at Aldi it's more about keeping meals around that are easier than opening a delivery app.

• Frozen chicken, rice, vegetables, ravioli, and Aldi's seasoned pork roasts can all become the foundation for multiple quick meals with plenty of leftovers.

We've all been there. There's technically food in the refrigerator, but nothing looks enough like dinner to stop you from opening DoorDash.

Aldi shoppers on Reddit may have found a solution: Don't just stock up on ingredients. Stock up on meals that practically assemble themselves.

A recent discussion in the Aldi subreddit asking for low energy dinner ideas generated dozens of combinations involving frozen foods, prepared meats, pasta, rice, and vegetables.

I dug through those suggestions and other recent Aldi discussions and found six ideas worth stealing. This will be particularly helpful on nights when the alternative is an expensive takeout order.

1. Make your own sweet-and-sour chicken bowl

This was one of the most popular suggestions, and it's about as easy as dinner gets.

Grab Aldi's frozen honey-battered chicken, sweet-and-sour sauce, frozen broccoli or mixed vegetables, and your choice of rice or noodles.

Cook the chicken, microwave, or steam the vegetables and toss everything together.

One shopper suggested Aldi's Asian medley frozen vegetables, while another uses the same basic formula with General Tso's chicken, broccoli, and jasmine rice.

The bigger hack here is worth remembering: Use a frozen entre as a single ingredient rather than the entire meal. Then add inexpensive things like rice or vegetables and youll stretch it farther and make it feel a lot more like takeout from Panda Express or Chipotle.

2. Turn ravioli into a dump-and-bake dinner

Keep frozen or refrigerated ravioli, a jar of marinara, and shredded mozzarella around and you've essentially got emergency lasagna.

Instead of cooking each component separately, layer the ravioli with sauce and cheese in a baking dish and bake until everything is hot and bubbly.

You can use the same strategy with Alfredo sauce and throw in broccoli or another vegetable.

This is exactly the type of meal that's useful to have in your back pocket: three ingredients, almost no chopping, and very little cleanup.

Pro tip: Create an I don't want to cook section of your freezer. Keep two or three complete meal combinations together rather than scattering the ingredients throughout the kitchen. When you're tired, you shouldn't have to invent dinner.

3. Put pesto and tortellini on emergency dinner duty

Aldi shoppers also recommended combining tortellini and pesto with ground beef and whatever vegetables happen to be around.

You can make it even easier by skipping the ground beef and using leftover chicken or another precooked protein.

There's also a clever way to keep that jar of pesto from becoming food waste. Aldi shoppers recommend freezing leftover pesto in an ice-cube tray, then transferring the frozen portions to a freezer container or bag. Pull out only what you need the next time pasta night rolls around.

That's particularly useful if you're regularly throwing away half-used jars.

4. Turn one pork roast into multiple dinners

Aldi's seasoned pork shoulder roasts have developed something of a following among shoppers looking for inexpensive, low-effort meals.

The formula couldn't be much simpler: Put the roast in a slow cooker, let it cook for several hours, shred it, and serve it in tortillas with cheese, onion, cilantro, or salsa.

One shopper reported paying $5 to $7 for the carnitas roast, while another recent shopper said a roast costing less than $6 produced dinner plus enough for lunch the following day. Prices vary by store and location, of course.

But don't stop at tacos!

Use the leftovers for quesadillas, burrito bowls, nachos, or sandwiches. Several Aldi shoppers say they get multiple meals from a single roast.

Pro tip: When you're comparing convenience foods, don't look only at the package price. Calculate the cost per meal. A $6 or $7 item that becomes dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow may be a better value than a $4 convenience food that feeds you once.

5. Build a burrito bowl instead of ordering one

Rice is your friend here.

Start with rice, then add beans, corn, salsa, shredded cheese, and whatever protein you have available.

One Aldi shopper recently reported making roughly six Mexican-style meals for a little over $14, or about $2.40 per serving, using Aldi carnitas, pinto beans, corn, salsa, cheese, and rice. That's one shopper's experience rather than a nationwide price comparison, but it illustrates how inexpensive ingredients can stretch a relatively small amount of meat.

That's also the real savings trick: Let rice and beans do more of the work.

You don't need a Chipotle-sized pile of meat in every bowl to make it dinner.

6. Stretch frozen General Tso's chicken

Here's another way to get more out of a prepared meal: An Aldi shopper said they bulk up a package of frozen General Tso's chicken with diced chicken patties and frozen vegetables, noting that the package contains enough sauce to cover the additions.

You don't necessarily need the extra chicken. Adding broccoli, peppers, or a frozen vegetable mix and serving everything over rice can stretch a relatively small prepared entre across more servings.

It's a simple principle you can apply to lots of frozen meals: add the cheap stuff yourself. Rice, pasta, and frozen vegetables generally cost considerably less than buying another prepared entre.

Keep one no-brainer dinner on standby

This may be the most useful hack of all. Pick one dinner your household likes that requires almost no thought and make sure you always have the ingredients.

Maybe it's tortellini + pesto.

Maybe it's General Tso's chicken + broccoli + rice.

Maybe it's ravioli + sauce + cheese.

The specific meal doesn't really matter. What matters the most is having something available on a random Wednesday night when everyone is hungry and there is ZERO motivation to cook.

It's those weeknight dinners, when youre tired, that the delivery app sitting on your phone tends to scream your name, just waiting for the opportunity to ruin your food budget for the month.