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.

Quick and Easy Dinner Recipes - Tips, Ideas and Recipes

Here are our two favorite quick and easy dinner recipes -

Spicy Chicken and Potatoes

-Grab a pre-cooked chicken from your local grocery store deli and a bag of home fries from the frozen foods section. Add a bag of pre-washed salad, one medium sized yellow onion and a jar of pepperoncinis to your shopping cart.

-Toss the potatoes in a frying pan with a little bit of pepperoncini juice and let them start browning. De-bone the chicken and add it to the potatoes. Dice up the onion and add. Cook on medium for about 10 minutes and serve right from the pan.

-Take the bag of salad, cut off a corner and add in salad dressing. Shake up the bag and you have an instant tossed salad.

Worcestershire Sourdough Burgers

-Grab a package of ground beef, pre-sliced cheddar cheese, loaf of sourdough bread and a yellow onion. Add to your list a bag of frozen french fries and a bottle of worcestershire sauce.

-Fry up a couple of hamburger patties adding worcestershire sauce after you flip the burger the first time. Put the frozen fries in a frying pan with a little vegetable oil. While the patties are cooking, pop the sourdough bread in the toaster.