Quick and Easy Dinner Ideas

easy dinner ideas

I invite you to read my ideas, add your own, and share them with friends.

one. My relatives eats lots of fresh vegetables, so my largest lifesaver is to make use of "almost there" prepared foods. There is no disgrace in using prewashed produce. Bags of prewashed lettuce are amazing gifts to the busy mama, if it means the difference between your relatives actually eating a salad and skipping the salad because it takes long to wash and prepare all the veggies. Same goes with those bags of broccoli, carrots, celery, and sugar snap peas.

Plenty of supermarkets also have bread in the bakery that is  baked all the way you through. You take it home and pop it in the oven for five or ten minutes and out comes delicious, crusty, warm bread. This is such a treat in my relatives!

Here's a quick and simple variation on a traditional tossed salad and it takes only a couple of minutes to assemble. Start with pre-washed kid spinach, toss in some dried cranberries and toasted walnuts and serve with a light raspberry vinaigrette. Yum.

easy dinner ideas

two. Make an extra-large pot of chili (or chicken noodle soup) on the weekend and freeze or refrigerate the leftovers. Pop some cornbread in the oven (a quick mix takes less than twenty minutes to bake) and serve with a green salad.

three. The slow cooker is your mate. Share favourite crock pot recipes along with your friends. The best recipes are those, such as roast beef and potatoes and veggies, where there is no cooking before or after. In the morning, you toss in all the ingredients. In the evening, you come home, open the slow cooker and eat up. These are the only slow cooker recipes I ever make, to be honest.

easy dinner ideas

four. Pasta! As fun to eat as it is to say. In my relatives, they love French sausage in our pasta, but we are also health conscious, so they never use much of the sausage in any meal. I'll cook all the French sausage in a package, then divide it in to four portions and freeze them. Then, when it is pasta night, I defrost the meat, which then simmers with sautéed onions and the pasta sauce - and dinner is done in the time it takes the noodles to cook. Serve with a green salad and garlic bread.

On a side note, the clear glass jars that the pasta comes in also make excellent glasses for lemonade and water in the summertime. They keep a few in the freezer for chilled water and lemonade. (All right, also, chilled beer.) Classico-brand jars are well-suited for this. They are a tiny squarish and elegant. The smaller jars, such as the alfredo jars, are the right size for smaller hands.

6. Sandwich night. Pick up a submarine sandwich from the deli of your local supermarket. Take off the lettuce and tomato and toast the sandwich under your broiler at home. Then pile on even more lettuce, tomato, pepperoncinis, whatever goodies you like. Slather on some gourmet mustard and you have got a delicious almost-ready-made meal.

easy dinner ideas

five. Serve healthy pizza. Pizza doesn't must be greasy and oozing with sauce. Have a couple of premade pizza doughs (such as Boboli) on hand and experiment with healthy toppings that cater to your family's individual tastes. They love to have Mexican Pizza, for example, layered with refried or black beans, then salsa, onions, olives and a tiny bit of cheese. It cooks in less than ten minutes. Another idea they use a lot: purchase a plain frozen cheese pizza and let the children pile on their own healthy toppings.