Fast Suppers for Frenzied Days
By Alice Osborne
Do you love fall and harvest time? I do too, but boy can the days get crazy. While there's an abundance of fresh garden produce and fresh fruit now at great prices, the simple fact is this great food doesn't take care of itself.
So if you're super busy canning and freezing the bounties of your own home garden, or that of your local farmer's market, you know how wonderful it is to have some easy dinner ideas up your sleeve.
Here are some suggestions from the great site, CookingLight—ideas you might turn to when you need a fast supper for a frenzied day! They're calling these ideas "Super Fast..."
Super Fast Pizza: keep a few Boboli pizza bases on hand. When wanting a quick dinner, spread with a thin layer of your favorite marinara sauce, and toss some shredded cheese and lots of thinly sliced fresh veggies on top (zucchini, summer squash, tomatoes, green onions, arugula, mushrooms, etc.). Bake per package directions.
Super Fast Chicken and Veggie Tostadas: leftover chicken breast is your ticket to a speedy meal. Dice up the chicken and cut up lots of fresh veggies. Cover tortillas with this mixture and bake at 350 for about 15 minutes. Serve with salsa and shredded cheese.
[My idea] Stuffed Tomatoes: cut the tops off some nice big tomatoes and scoop out the insides. Fill each with macaroni salad, or potato salad, or egg salad, or tuna salad, or? You get the idea. It's hard to go wrong with leftover salads and fresh vine-ripened tomatoes.
[My idea] Garden Wraps: flat bread or whole wheat tortillas come to the rescue at our house often. These will take the above-mentioned leftover salads, or just a mixture of fresh veggies chopped and combined. Add a little mayonnaise, a dash of Spice Hunter's Garlic or Spice Hunter's Deliciously Dill, and you have a meal that keeps 'em coming back for more!
Finally, at the risk of sounding like an infomercial, this is where my Cook'n Recipe Organizer really comes in handy. I keep a collection of super fast dinner ideas-menus as well as recipes in a chapter I created just for this purpose. I love how I have a one-stop shop for storing this information. On a frenzied day, I just don't have the time to go hunting through my recipe files, cookbooks, or folders of clippings! I figure I've saved hundreds of hours in the past year because of this amazing product. So get yourself some great go-to recipes and meal ideas and create your own chapter-you never know when a frenzied day might sneak up on you!
- www.footage.shutterstock.com
- www.motherearthnews.com
- www.boards.elsaelsa.com
- www.cookinglight.com
- www.easyrecipes.com
- www.thelittlegsp.com
- www.open-knowlege-society.org
Alice Osborne
Weekly Newsletter Contributer since 2006