Please help me with super easy, super quick and super tasty meals for the entire family

[SecondsAreTheBest]

Hi. DC1 is 7 and very fussy (and significantly underweight). Dc2 has just turned 1, loves food (and according to HV we need to watch the portion sizes) but isn't really good with anything that's slightly hard to bite off or chew. Both kids love pasta, vegetables and plain rice.

I'm a vegetarian, have very little time and am a lousy cook. Dh and me aren't fussy though and are happy to eat what the kids are eating.

I'm looking for a few easy and healthy recipe ideas that I can prepare for all of us that both kids (especially the older one) will eat. The only staples I've got are pasta with tomato sauce and grated cheese or rice with vegetables. Sometimes ready made food or take away but I'd like to cut down on those. Ideally something that I can quickly adapt to add more calories for dc1 or add meat at a later stage.

Thanks so much!!

Check out Taming Twins.

She's on Insta but also has a website.
I'm a veggie and using a lot of her meals at the moment.

I meal plan and shop on a 2 or 3 week basis and almost always use some of the ideas from the current plan or previous ones.

It's saving us a fortune and cutting down massively on waste too.

Current favourites are the chorizo gnocchi (I use the chorizo shroom dogs from Sainsburys) and any orzo recipe.

I think in the current plan we also have

Spanish omelette with salad,
Creamy 'bacon' pasta (using vivera 'bacon' bits)
Mince and dumplings (I make a vegan mince with loads of grated veg, tinned tomatoes, gravy granules and lentils)
Halloumi bake
Red Thai curry,
Various pastas or pasta salads
Halloumi tacos with avocado
'Mexican' salad (corn/avocado/tomato) with chicken or Quorn crispy nuggets plus rice & peas
Lasagne

Etc etc!

Heat up a tin of ratatouille or cook up some frozen, chuck in a sachet of micro-rice. Cook for 2 mins. Done. Serve with frozen peas.

Try using quorn fillets to make a casserole just sauté onions,carrots,celery, add quorn and stock and if you have any thyme or bay add flavour.Casserole for an hour, you can serve with mash, use a mix of potato and sweet potato to reduce carbs.
A vegetable ragu, onion, celery, peppers,courgettes,carrots etc, chop everything small and fry gently add tinned tomatoes and cook for 20 minutes, this is a great base for a lasagne or any pasta dishes.
A bechamel sauce to top a lasagne is easy to make in a microwave, lots of recipes online.
Quiches are easy to make and freeze, you can buy quality pizza bases, lots of easy recipes online.

Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out!! Those dishes in your second post sound really nice.

Haha so I would like to cook a littlebit fresher than that (though I'm perfect fine with frozen vegetables). Making rice is not a problem. We probably have it too often though. Older DC eats it so it's a safe bet but isn't excited about it anymore.

DC1 won't eat anything with gravy (apart from gravy). I mean nothing very liquidy. She loves lasagne though apparently but i always thought that's too complicated. Same with quiche. I'll try to find some easy recipes. Thanks for the tip.

Tacos are always a big hit at our house. We do a spicy mince, spicy black beans, lettuce, chopped tomatoes, grated cheese, avocado with lime, sour cream, salsa and jalapeños. Everyone bulls their own.

Try cous cous instead of rice for a change.

Get your 7 year old helping out in the kitchen - when they’ve helped make dinner they’re more willing to try their own creations!

Greek salad with feta
halloumi pasta bake in a tomato sauce
sweetcorn fritters with salad
vegetable curry and rice
quorn mince tacos
stuffed peppers

Funnily enough, tonight, we had a storecupboard dinner including pasta, tinned tomatoes and grated cheese.

I found a few sausages in the freezer, thawed them, cut them into little bits and fried till brown. Then fried a finely-chopped onion and half a green pepper. Threw in some mixed herbs and a tin of tomatoes, cooked the pasta (happened to be macaroni as that what I found first) and mixed the whole lot up, then put it in a dish with grated cheese on the top. 20 minutes in a medium oven, just the job.

What ready made food and takeaways are you having? Anything you can cook at home?

For an easier white sauce I mix half a tub of Greek yogurt and an egg. Sprinkle cheese on after. Works perfectly for lasagne or moussaka.

The fastest tea in our house is Gnocchi with Pesto and then I chuck in green veg- whatever we have frozen peas, broccoli, courgette. We call it a Green Tea. Gnocchi is perfect for the 1 year old as well.

I would try and use protein rich foods that you all can eat such as eggs, lentils, beans etc to make your meals more nutritious.
Eggs- use in cold pasta or rice salad/ scrambled with onions and green beans/ quiche - either ready made or make your own filling with eggs, broccoli cheese etc. egg fried rice type dish.
Lentils- make a basic vegetable soup then add lentils/ lentil dahl to have with rice.
Add lentils to salad or rice salad etc.
Spinach and mozzarella or feta( or any other cheese) wrap- cook spinach till soft and put inside any sort of flat bread.

Is that pasta bake? I'll try that as a nice change to just pasta with sauce.

DC1 does like sausages but because I'm not used to cooking meat i find it very stressful. Always worried about giving her food poisoning so I cook it to death.

Yes, great idea @ gnocchi!

Thanks so much everyone for the ideas!!

This sounds intriguing. I cannot for the life of me make any kind of white sauce without the milk curdling.

Do you just crack an egg into the tub of yogurt? Do you still cook then the whole thing?

So our staple is rice either with butter and salt (for the older one) or yogurt. Then usually a source of protein, rg eggs or beans or peas and steamed vegetables. Or pasta, which both kids love. I think they are getting bored of rice though (dc1 won't have it if I add anything to the rice). Dc2 loves vegetables as well but struggles to eat them unless they are really fairly soft. We also often have potatoes or sweet potatoes with baked beans.

By ready made food I mean stuff like fish fingers or frozen pizza (which we also light order as take awaY) but I don't let the one year old have take away (too much salt) so if Im in a rush he gets ready made baby food.

I think Jamie Oliver has some good crowd pleading easy dishes, and I love Nigella's Express.
Hit n Run chicken: roughly chop (amount depends on how many people, but for three people) couple peppers, couple red onions, a dozen cherry tomatoes and a courgette. Lightly crush garlic bulbs (you can never have too many). Spread in a roasting dish, generous amount of olive oil, equal amount balsamic vinegar. Then a tablespoon hot paprika, a tablespoon smoked paprika. Toss. Then put skinless chicken thighs (two per person) on top and roast for 50 minutes. Serve with rice.

Home-made burgers.
Let the kids assemble their own.

My eldest can be fussy at times but is now a little bit older.

The main rotation of meals we have are
Sausage and mash with veggies
Roast
Curry and rice
Chilli and rice
Macaroni cheese
Chicken nuggets (I make them myself but no use as you're veggie)
Scrambled egg and/ or beans/ spaghetti hoops on toast.

My DCs love a variation of nigellas Green eggs and ham (though you could do it with cheese) https://www.nigella.com/recipes/green-eggs-and-ham for extra nutrition I add frozen microwaved then drained spinach and blitz it with a stick mixer

Veggie quesadillas are always a favourite here, I rotate mixed bean and sweet potato & black bean.

Oven baked risotto - think this is a BBC Good Food one. It’s 40 mins ish to make but is literally a case of shoving everything in the oven.

I tend to cheat a little and cook a protein while using microwaveable bags of rice to save time at the end. I also use those frozen bags of rice and veg to make “egg fried rice” with an egg and a drop of ketchup for DS.

I make a cheat veggie lasagne with thin layers of raw courgette and then ricotta cheese & mascarpone on top. The cooking time takes longest on that.

Hulk mac and cheese - cook anything green in the fridge and blend it down. Make a quick cheese sauce (I use a roux and then shove in a tub of cream cheese) and mix together. I tend to keep a couple of bags in the freezer.

Jerk prawns and coconut rice has gone down well with 20 month old DS this week. I’ll probably do sausages with a jacket potato and cauliflower cheese tonight.

Thanks all for the suggestions. Lots of great ideas here.

The Green Roasting Tin cookbook has been a lifesaver for easy, veggie ideas for us!