over the year to keep my wife and children happy with minimal prep time.Surprisingly, a lot of the best fast dinner recipes involve soup. If you keep some broth or bouillon on hand, making soup for your family is incredibly easy. You pour the broth into a pot, bring it to a boil while you are cutting up some vegetables and throw them in along with a few herbs. That's all there is to it! The broth is already pretty flavorful, so you don't really need to wait for the flavor of the veggies to soak into the soup. For other fast dinner recipes, I use a seven beans soup mix which comes complete with everything I need for a hearty stew. Usually, I'll throw in some chunks of beef, some fresh basil or something else to spice it up.
Speaking of basil, pesto is one of your greatest assets for making fast and easy dinner recipes. Often, I'll prepare a bowl of pesto at the beginning of the week and serve it several times with different meals. Pesto is great over pasta, with toast, with chicken – you name it and you can serve it with pesto on it. It also keeps very well, which means that you can make it ahead of time instead of using it all at once.
One of the keys to fast dinner recipes that I've found is to be creative in how you reuse leftovers. Often, I'll have some leftover soup, but not enough to serve for another meal. When that happens, I usually cook it down and use it for something else. Bean soup becomes bean dip, chicken soup is great over rice once it is concentrated down, and left-over tomato soup along with ground beef makes some world-class sloppy joes with a bit of tinkering.
I also use my children's tastes to my advantage when I'm making fast dinner recipes. My wife is not a picky eater, and my kids love hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries and other typical American junk food. I don't let them eat it too often, but at least once a week I put together a simple dinner of microwaved hot dogs or grilled hamburgers. The kids get a treat and so do I: an extra 20 minutes of free time.
