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The Busy Parent's Guide to Dinner

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You know the feeling. It’s 5:15 p.m. and you’re just getting home. You haven’t set out a thing to thaw for dinner, and you are empty of ideas for what to fix. Blue box macaroni and cheese again? Maybe this time you could dress it up with some leftover kielbasa in the fridge’s meat drawer?

We’ve all been there.

Getting dinner on the table “is absolutely not an easy task,” says Gretchen Kunkel, a mom of three and president of KC Healthy Kids, a nonprofit dedicated to improving children’s health by increasing opportunities for healthy eating and active living in Kansas City. “With busy schedules, it’s just not something that happens unless you plan for it.”

Phyllis Pellman Good, whose Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook (co-compiled by Dawn J. Ranck) took the slow cooker world by storm when it came out in 2000, writes on her website, Fix-ItAndForget-It.com, “My concept of how food got on the table: tiny appliances for prepping; big table for eating.”

If only getting food to the table were that easy.

Here are some tips for how to get dinner on the table quickly and efficiently:

Love on your crock pot. When Dawn J. Ranck and Phyllis Pellman Good compiled Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook: Feasting with Your Slow Cooker (Good Books 2000), they were on to something from the book’s very title. Fix it and forget it? How can the busy parent resist? Reasons to love the slow cooker abound. They are versatile, come in many sizes and, Ranck and Good write, “they prefer cheap cuts of meat.” It’s no wonder that, in an informal Facebook poll, more than 30 percent of responders said the crock pot was their number one tip for getting a good dinner on the table in the midst of a busy day.

Designate one meal prep day per week. Claudine D’Angelo-Dotzman, a friend of mine who is a mother of five, designates Sunday as a weekly meal prep day with her family. “We make five full meals together and freeze them,” D’Angelo-Dotzman says. “Then whoever happens to be home on any given day heats it for the rest of us.”

Regular designated meal prep times can take on many forms. A parent might spend an entire day cooking meals for the whole week. Or, an ongoing chore for older kids might be to chop veggies or measure out portions for recipes one night per week. Possibilities abound. The number one key to prepping meals for an entire week is intentionality. In other words, be intentional in your planning.

Lean on E-Meals. E-Meals.com is a site geared toward saving time and money with weekly grocery lists and recipes. You choose a meal plan based on your family size, eating style or favorite grocery store. Plans range from “Classic Meals” (think pork chops and cheesy chicken) to “Clean Eating” (ginger soy chicken, lentil, lemon and yogurt soup) to “Kid Friendly” (slow cooker spaghetti with meat sauce, chicken alfredo pizza). Once you sign up, you receive a meal plan in your inbox each week, along with a grocery list for each of the included week’s recipes.

Plan a Social Prep Session. Business such as Dream Dinners and Kansas City’s Social Suppers thrive by helping out busy families with ready-to-go meal kits and in-house meal prep sessions.

“My biggest struggle and what I hear from many guests is planning and lack of time,” says Jana Day, owner of a Dream Dinners franchise in the metro area and a mom of three. “Families are so caught up in activities and they are trying to get their families around the dinner table but just need a little help.”

One meal prep session at Dream Dinners takes 60-75 minutes, according to Day, and guests leave with 6-12 meals to enjoy over the forthcoming 4-5 weeks. Meals are typically under 500 calories.

Whether you set aside an evening to assemble your own meals at a franchise location, pay to have your meals assembled for you, or, in the case of Social Suppers, purchase a ready-made meal from the franchise’s freezer, these businesses exist to make meal prep and planning easier on busy families.

“We are trying to get people to sit back down at the dinner table with healthy, conscious meals that don’t take a lot of time,” Blankenship says.

Plan for leftovers. Rather than planning seven meals per week, plan four or five and allow leftovers to carry the family through the remaining evening meals. Planning for leftovers not only reduces food waste (a 2011 study by the National Resources Defense Council suggested that the average person in the United States throws away about 20 pounds of food per month), it saves on kitchen cleanup and weekly grocery expenses.

There’s no way around it. Serving dinners that are quick and easy to make is all about the planning. As one Louisburg mom of two puts it, “Staring into the fridge for 15 minutes trying to decide how to make a meal out of what you have doesn’t work.”

But Kunkel maintains getting a good dinner on the table each night is important.

“It’s not easy,” she says. “It’s all about planning and making sure we’re providing diverse foods. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. And you just keep going at it.”

Kate Meadows lives in Louisburg, where she throws her energy into writing, editing and being a mom to two boys. KateMeadows.com

 

serves 6

This soup is a terrific option for a busy night, because it is simple yet hearty. Most soup recipes make a lot, so there often are leftovers enough for a second dinner meal. And with a variety of food groups represented, there’s not much else to worry about once the pot is boiling.

 

Ingredients

Instructions

In a kettle, cook sausage and onion until sausage is brown and onion is tender. Drain mixture on paper towels. Return sausage mixture to kettle. Stir in potatoes, water, salt, marjoram and pepper. Bring to boiling; reduce heat. Simmer, uncovered, about 15 minutes or until potatoes are just tender. Add corn and evaporated milk. Heat through.

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