Reply to Working Parents - What the heck for dinner

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[quote=Anonymous]8-4 doesn't mean you're prepping dinner right at 4, so you're right that it takes planning. No matter how much time we have after school it still feels like a fire drill. If you want truly quick, you're going to have to deal with something frozen or from a mix or do some kind of meal prep in advance. We sacrifice a bit of time on Sundays to make the week work.

Here is our rotation of "easy" dinners:

-Chili made over the weekend, serve with corn muffins (20 min), avocado, etc.

-Trader Joe's gyoza with Trader Joe's vegetarian fried rice, plus a vegetable. The rice can be heated up in the oven at 350 while you heat the gyoza on the stove, or you can stir fry it with a couple of scrambled eggs.

-Breakfast for dinner: pancakes on the stovetop while you have sausage patties in the oven. The pancakes take 20 minutes, tops. Serve with something like a spinach salad, broccoli, etc. depending on what your kids will tolerate with breakfast food.

-Penne with meat sauce. Pasta from a box, sauce from a jar, heat the ground beef and add all 3 to a glass dish. Heat in a 350 oven if you have time. If not, just add the meat to the sauce and serve. Even a very small kid can prep salad to go with it.

-Sausage and peppers + roasted potatoes. This is pretty hands off but there is some prep and you have to be home in time to give the potatoes ~40 minutes in the oven. If you don't have time for the oven, you take slightly larger Yukon golds, cut them into wedges, microwave for ~4 minutes, add olive oil and salt and pepper and then crisp them in the oven for a short time.

My kids can't eat dairy, but if you can, your life is even better and you can do things like quesadillas, grilled cheeses, paninis, Mac and cheese made over the weekend and heated up and paired with a vegetable, etc.

The biggest thing we did to set ourselves up for meal success is have the kids sit with us on the day we grocery shop to plan out the weeks' meals around activities and the hot lunch menu. Them seeing the work that goes into thinking through a menu that doesn't have overlap and fits with the day's schedule instantly killed any dinnertime complaining about meal repeat frequency, meal content, etc.[/quote]

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