Easy Meal Ideas

You simply never know when you’re going to need a quick and simple meal for your family. A child may get sick, someone may have a breakdown, or you may just need to take the time off in the evening after a tough day. Whatever the reason is, having some quick and simple meal plans ready to go will serve you well. There are a lot of different meals you can make quickly, and below are a few tips.

While you can always order take out for meals, that will often add up quickly, especially if you have multiple mouths to feed. Add on the fact that you’re often going to struggle to make everyone happy, and it’s probably not something you can go to on a regular basis. We like to make take out a rare occurrence rather than a regular part of our lives so that our kids enjoy it more when we do order out.

Building your own meals doesn’t have to be difficult. The number one thing you have to do is get comfortable with basic and simple ingredients to base your meals around. You don’t have to make the most presentable meal every single day, and you don’t have to make something that has dozens of ingredients. Building a meal around a few main items and then letting people spice it up as they like is perfectly acceptable.

Base your meals on having a protein, a vegetable, and a side of some sort. This allows you to put basically anything out for dinner in any mix and match order. For example, you may have chicken legs, a salad, and macaroni (plain) on the same plate. You may switch the chicken out with fish a few nights from now. And you may replace the macaroni with rice or potatoes another night.

Building your meals around mix and match ideas is the easiest way to have easy meals that you can turn to when needed. You simply allow everyone in the family to add whatever spices or sauces they’d like on top of the meal to make it enjoyable for them. I love spice hot sauce, so you’ll often find that mine have some type of hot sauce on top. The kids enjoy salt and pepper as well as the garlic parmesan seasoning.

The other meal that is a common go to is some type of stir fry. This generally includes a rice base, chopped vegetables (frozen vegetables from the store) and eggs. We also like to add additional protein into this meal with some diced chicken or pork, but not always. Make sure that you include soy sauce in your stir fry as well as it really adds a nice flavor to it. Top with hot sauce or whatever spices you’d like.

Teaching kids to get comfortable with basic and simple ingredients will go a long way in their future as they’ll be able to enjoy most any food that they make or want to try. Getting comfortable tasting food rather than masking it under layers of butter and oil allows you to actually enjoy the food. It’s much easier to eat new foods once you actually know what things taste like.

Have some basic meal plans that you can go to on any given day. You’ll save a lot of money rather than going out to eat, and you’ll help your family learn to enjoy a larger variety of foods.