Let’s face it — a simple salad just isn’t enough for dinner. (People tend to complain.) So when you’re looking to turn those last bits of spinach, half a cucumber, and a few chopped radishes into a dinner-ready meal, here’s a trick: Reach for that bag of frozen tortellini.
This brilliant shortcut transforms the last bits of the crisper drawer into a dinner you can make for one or scale up to feed four or more. Here’s how!
If you have deep kitchen drawers (instead of cabinets), it’s easy for them to quickly become a jumbled mess of toppling plates, plastic containers, mixing bowls and other random whatnots. Can you relate? Yeah, we thought so. There’s hope, though!
Get your kitchen under control with this off-the-wall idea: Use a pegboard inside the drawer!
We have a hard time finding things we don’t want to buy at IKEA. (How is it all so pretty and functional?) But because we sadly can’t have it all, we constantly have to edit down our wish list to just our favorite things.
With the launch of IKEA’s new line, JASSA, a limited-edition collection inspired by the color and craft of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, we are practicing our restraint. Here is the one must-have from the new collection.
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!
Dinner tonight should most definitely be this almost-instant pasta soup. There’s no need to pry open a can of the store-bought stuff when you’re craving a bowl of something brothy; you can still have a (mostly) homemade soup in a matter of minutes. Everything comes together as quick as can be, thanks to the help of a few freezer shortcuts like precooked meatballs, peas, and tortellini. Simmer everything in a big pot of chicken broth and you’ve got a comforting bowl at the ready.
Pizza Friday is a well-loved weekly event in our family. To be honest, I can’t remember why or how we started it, but I do know that having this day on the calendar each week has not only brought joy to my children, but also a little more sanity to my meal planning. Friday night pizza serves two important and seemingly unrelated purposes: clearing out the fridge and holding space for family time.
Because I have strange habits, I spent a lot of time one night last week watching videos on YouTube of grandmothers and other home cooks making dal makhani, a rich black lentil dish from the Punjabi region. Unpolished home cooking videos are one of my favorite ways to learn how to make a dish that is foreign to me, and while what I’ve made here isn’t an authentic black lentil (urad) dal, it’s worth knowing why it is isn’t. For example, it would have a small portion of kidney beans (rajma) it in too, you’d definitely have soaked your lentils and beans together the night before and in almost every case, cooked them in a pressure cooker on another burner while making the spiced base sauce, and then together for a little or long while. The more authentic versions I looked at have a lot more butter and cream in them, and only sometimes began with an onion. In every case, the cook had a “ginger-garlic paste” that seemed to have come prepared, something I was previously unfamiliar with but find brilliant as they are so often better together, and of course all spices were added with eyeballed measurements.
It’s also much more loose. A traditional dal is like a gravy or a loose soup, but here I go for something thicker, almost like a chili. You can loosen it a bit with more water and serve it like a soup, or ladled over rice; you can also add a spoonful of rice to the middle, as we did with this soup to give it a bit more heft. We ate it in small bowls with some toasted naan and these potatoes and cauliflower on the side, a forever favorite.
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.
