Last Minute Dinner Ideas
I received KFC Chicken Checks for this post. All opinions are my own.
I’m a really lucky lady. Most of the time, my husband will cook dinner for us. He loves to cook and he’s great in the kitchen, which takes a lot of the evening stress off of me. But when he gets off work and he’s tired and not feeling up to cooking, all of a sudden it’s a scramble trying to figure out the answer to the kids nagging question — what’s for dinner? Here are my three shortcuts for figuring out dinner last minute!
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Last Minute Dinner Ideas
Keep 3 easy recipes on hand – I have a few recipes that I keep specifically for these stressful nights when I didn’t start thinking about dinner until the evening. These are recipes that don’t take a ton of thought and I always have the ingredients on hand for them. Find recipes that will work for your family and keep them aside as your last minute dinner ideas! Here are mine:
— Tuna Casserole is my boys favorite and makes everyone happy.
— Cooking pasta using a variety of sauce and noodles to mix up this regular makes it feel fun and different. Sometimes, we even just do noodles a splash of butter, and Parmesan cheese.
— Chicken Salsa bake is my other fallback recipe – just throw a few ingredients in a baking dish and toss it in the oven.
Get Creative with leftovers – Let’s face it, you probably have some type of leftover in your fridge staring you in the face. But who can get excited about having the same meal the next night? Often, you can make the leftovers feel new again by serving them in a different fashion. For example, we’ll serve pulled pork on hamburger buns with barbecue sauce. To switch it up, we serve up the pork the next day on tortillas with a bit of salsa. You don’t even have to change the recipe, just switch up the presentation.
Bring home Take-out – When all else fails, don’t stress about picking up dinner. Sometimes, picking up dinner can relieve that added stress. Just choose to pick up the meal and bring it home so you can still all gather around your family dinner table for what’s really most important about meal time – conversation! Plus, you can “cheat” and use paper plates and utensils so clean-up is already done, too!
This year, KFC is encouraging moms to take a break from cooking. Their 10-piece meal comes with two family sized sides and 4 biscuits along with your choice of original, crispy, or grilled 10-pieces of chicken. For a limited time, now through May 25th 2014, you’ll score a free full sized family cake when you purchase a 10-piece meal! You can choose their classic rich double chocolate chip cake or the NEW sweet lemon cake.
My boys are so little that this one bucket fed the 5 of us for 2 full meals while my husband was out of town! Talk about a dinner shortcut!
