What Ingredients Make The Best Easy Dinner Recipes For The Family?

Other than on Thanksgiving Day, there is not one household I have found where someone wants to spend all day cooking in the kitchen. In fact, most families I know would want to spend the least amount of time in the kitchen possible on a day to day basis. This means there is a desire to focus on quick and easy dinner recipes.

Well every dinner is made up of the ingredients that go into it. When it comes to easy dinner recipes for the family, we must stick with fast cooking, easy ingredients. We use a rule of thumb in choosing ingredients. When cooking with kids, is it something they can cook by following directions and with minimum supervision. We want to be able to assign them a cooking task and have it be simple enough for them to see it through to completion. In order to achieve that, we have to follow the K.I.S.S. principle right from choosing our ingredients.

So what do we use to prepare these easy dinner recipes for the family?

1) Chopped meat. Ground beef is so flexible it can be used in a multitude of recipes to offer a solid meat product that can be used in burgers to Italian food to Mexican food to casseroles. If you are fat content conscious, you can substitute ground turkey for the ground beef.

2) Chicken tenders. This is the easiest for of chicken to use. Generally speaking, they can be used in almost any meal that calls for chicken. The difference is that the smaller pieces cook more quickly.


3) Steak. Chuck steak is affordable and can be broiled in just a few minutes of each side. If you slice it before you cook it, it will fry up quickly as well.

4) Spaghetti. How can you go wrong with something that boils up in under 10 minutes. Kids love it, too!

5) Tuna fish. One of the quick standby meals in our house tuna noodle casserole. We have this perfected with a 20 minute start to serve process.

6) Canned ham. This is easy to throw into the oven as is, or you can slice it into ham steaks, which will cook up really fast. You can also dice it for use in casseroles.

7) Par-boiled rice. This cooks faster than regular rice and is less sticky. You can mix in almost anything to make it a meal.

8) Frozen vegetables. Using frozen veggie come out fresher tasting when cook, hold more nutrition than is in canned veggies, and cook into one pan meals easier

We work pretty hard to come up with recipes that can be cooked in one dish if possible. Whether it's a crock pot, a frying pan or a baking dish, it still one dish and makes clean up easy. The time and energy saved by think through these easy dinner recipes for the family is well worth the process.