DD's absolute favourite meal is pasta with butter, cheese, chopped ham and peas. Grown ups can spice it up with tabasco or black pepper and stronger cheese. Good with tuna, too. The Chinese rice version of this is also good. Chopped spring onion/tomatoes/peppers in a bowl with any chopped cold meat, add soy sauce and sesame oil, maybe a little lemon juice. Cook rice, dump hot rice in bowl, mix and eat. Again, tabasco or something for grown ups if liked. Both of these take less than fifteen minutes start to finish and are genuinely nice but I would class them as emergency meals rather than proper cooking.
Chicken pieces like drumsticks only take about half an hour in the oven if you have something quick to serve them with? Boiled new potatoes and veg could be done in that time. Ready made sliced polenta, shallow fried in oil and with a tomato and veg pasta sauce is also good with chicken pieces or sausages.
Pasta and rice are definitely your friends, though. Could you make pasta sauce at the weekends and freeze in portions?
Risotto is fairly quick, esp if you do it with either cooked cold meat or prawns.
Toasted sandwiches actually don't make a terrible meal if you serve lots of veg sticks and something to dip them in alongside.
If you buy tinned pulses, you only need to fry an onion, add a few chopped tomatoes and some herbs and liquid (stock, wine, whatever) and simmer for a bit while you cook bacon/sausages/chicken/fish, though you could perfectly well just eat the pulses with bread or rice or something. If you or DH can buy crusty bread on the way home, that would go well.
Hope some of this is helpful.