That dangerous hour

Since returning to religiously journalling what I eat, I have once again noticed an annoying pattern. In short, if the hour right after coming home from work didn't exist, I'd have no problem at all staying within my calories. I'm good at breakfast, good at lunch, good at dinner. What does me in regularly is that single hour when I arrive home, tired and famished, kick off my business shoes and head for the kitchen to prepare dinner. Which in and of itself is a wise decision when you're famished. But cooking dinner takes time, and meanwhile, there is the fridge with the small cabanossi sausages and the block of cheese, or the cookie tin, or the container with the salted peanuts.
I have tried to keep the amounts of such things I eat small. Before writing down everything and evaluating it for content, I would have guesstimated those "first aids' to amount to just a fraction of my total daily intake. What harm can there be in something that fits in the palm of my hand?
As it turns out, plenty. Even in the reduced portions I had lately, when weighing them and calculating their caloric values they all turned out to be, for that day, the most caloric foods I had eaten. Those little nibbles had as many calories as a regular breakfast and lunch, and half as many as my regular dinner- which I ate after ingesting them.
So, I am once more faced with a dilemma. Even if I pre-cooked dinner it would mean waiting for it to heat up. Whatever I do to quench my hunger on arriving home would have to be ready-to-eat, or almost. It would also have to be something that won't spoil fast, because my working hours are so irregular that I cannot even count on being there to eat it, and I hate to spend money on buying food for the trashcan. Fruit, for that reason, is out of the question, because it spoils. The only fruit I buy is frozen, but you cannot just grab and eat that. Anything with lots of carbs won't do, either, so no bread, crackers, or such. Taking another protein shake after a mostly protein breakfast and lunch would probably put my protein consumption too high. And fresh veggies, too, have in my household been known to spoil faster than I would get around to eating them.

Perhaps the place to start is by asking myself why I am so ravenous when coming home. After all, even when I'm working late I usually don't begin to feel hungry until after I leave the office. The connection between relaxing and eating, it seems, is still strong in my brain. Let's relax= let's eat.
The best thing for me to eat between coming home and dinner would be...
nothing.
After all, there's dinner ahead, and it's not as if I were in danger of dying from hunger until then.
What I have to do is find a different way of relaxing into my evenings.
I'll see if a cup of herbal tea will do instead of solid food. That's also quick to prepare and has no calories at all.
Maybe I'll be finally getting back off this plateau then.

Julia