It always feels good to start the week off with a wholesome dinner that won’t set back your budget. Luckily, following Meatless Monday — the practice of making dinner meat-free every Monday — can make that quite easy to accomplish, particularly if you lean on affordable pantry staples like canned beans and tomatoes, root vegetables, and tofu. Here are 10 great vegetarian recipes that won’t break the bank.
“Go register for your wedding,” the other brides said. “It will be fun!”
Turns out, I was not programmed with that particular bridal chip.
I don’t use the word “literally” lightly, so when I tell you that I literally stood in the middle of the Macy’s housewares department only kind-of-jokingly yelling, “Representative!” as if to an automated answering service, I assure you that I am telling the truth.
Keep a bag of frozen tortellini tucked away in your freezer and you can rest easy knowing that a quick meal is always at the ready. This series on fast tortellini dinners will show you how to transform frozen tortellini into dinner using pantry staples and a few surprising techniques. Pasta sauce is just the beginning!
Family get-together coming up this weekend and you need to bring something everyone will eat? Pasta salad. Need a fast, but fresh dinner between work and soccer practice? Pasta salad. Pasta salad solves problems with its ease and straightforwardness, but we like to take it a step further by leaning on cheese tortellini to make it a little more substantial. From there, it’s just a matter of adding veggies, cheese, meats, and dressing.
In this version, we’re keeping things vegetarian with a dish inspired by Greek salad. Cukes, tomatoes, a bit of feta, and a vibrant dressing — homemade if you’re up for it — get tossed with the cooked and cooled pasta for a meal you can actually make in 30 minutes. It’s just another reason to keep frozen tortellini on hand.
As much as I truly enjoy cooking, weeknights can be rough, and the dinner struggle is real. But at the first mention of 30-minute meals, I knew that was a cooking strategy made for me. I’ve come to lean on 30-minute meals during the week for numerous reasons, but time is always the main draw. The time cap on these recipes is an easy sell, but are they delicious? Will they cost me a small fortune in pre-prepped veggies? Will there be a ton of stuff to clean up? And seriously, 30 minutes from start to finish? Lies!
No lies here — just hot, delicious meals that answer all those questions with a yes, no, no, and yes (in that order).
From an ultra-satisfying soup to sheet pan salmon, these are the five weeknight-friendly recipes that will teach you just how easy it can be to get a nourishing dinner on the table in 30 minutes.
If you’re looking to purchase a new fridge, you’re probably a bit perplexed about where to start — especially if you’ve never gone through this before. Well, we’ve got you covered with a few of the most vital need-to-know items. Read on and you’ll be sure to stay savvy as you navigate the fridge market.
(Image credit: Forrest Clonts)
You and I both want weeknight dinners done in the time it takes my 5-year-old to take off her jacket and hang it up in the hall (feels like forever, but it takes about 30 minutes of prodding from front door to coat hook), and in that quest we’ve tried many, many methods. We stock our pantry with shortcuts and use fewer ingredients, but the real countdown clock on cooking dinner should start in our grocery cart.
Kelli’s got you covered on what pantry staples you’ll need to get dinner on the tables in about 30 minutes, but this post will teach you how to use the various departments of your grocery store to get dinner done faster. These grocery store shortcuts should be in your grocery cart too if you want to master the 30-minute meal.
Before you can actually execute your meal plan, you need to choose recipes you’ll cook during the week ahead. This is possibly the most important step in meal planning. When approached in a way that’s just right for you, the recipes you choose will set you up for success. To the uninitiated this step can feel overwhelming, but I assure you that it’s not when you let these strategies guide the way in selecting the recipes for your meal plan.
Keep a bag of frozen tortellini tucked away in your freezer and you can rest easy knowing that a quick meal is always at the ready. This series on fast tortellini dinners will show you how to transform frozen tortellini into dinner using pantry staples and a few surprising techniques. Pasta sauce is just the beginning!
Put down the knife and fork — here’s your excuse to have a little fun and eat with your hands. This is the quick and easy way to have a utensil-free dinner on your table in next to no time. All you need to do is cook up some frozen tortellini and raid your grocery store’s antipasti bar. Everything from veggies to cheese to meat is up for grabs. From there, dinner is a matter of threading everything on a stick. You can go a step further and finish with drizzle of olive oil and a few cracks of pepper. This is a fun way to turn a regular pasta night into something a little more playful. Make a few extra to bring to work the next day for an even better desk lunch.
I love two things most of all about chess pie — that sweet, buttery baked custard pie well-known across the South but whose reach can be tasted in everything from Canadian butter tarts to Brooklyn-ish Crack Pies — one, that it has none of the fussiness usually associated with custards and flans (separated egg yolks, tempering, straining and water baths); you could, and in fact should, make this with any little chefs in your life with ease.
I also love that chess pie pronounces any flavors you add to it exceptionally well, like it’s holding a megaphone to them. A chess pie with a splash of rum is, in fact, a rum chess pie; a chess pie with lemon is buttery lemonade heaven and a chess pie to the tune of butterscotch will stop everyone in their tracks as they walk into your home and smell the brown sugar, butter and vanilla trifecta bouncing off the walls. The taste — booming with butterscotch — lives up to the aromatic promise, way better than the butterscotch pudding pie I’d thought about making first before deciding that it was too much work for a too muted flavor.
