Quick Dinner Ideas for Busy People

Not everyone has the time or energy to prepare a meal from scratch every night and grabbing meals at restaurants can get expensive. For busy folks, it's often convenient to have meals ready to pop in the oven or leave food cooking at a low temperature while working or doing household tasks.

Here are a few tips to reduce time and make dinner prep easier:

Slow cooker: Slow cookers and crockpots are popular because they do not require much attention. Meat, potatoes, and soups can all be cooked on low and are usually ready within about 8 hours. To have meals ready even sooner, simply set the slow cooker to a higher temperature. Preparing ingredients ahead of time and simply adding them to the slow cooker a few hours before meals saves time and frees up attention for other tasks.

Pressure cooker: Pressure cookers are just as low maintenance as slow cookers. The high pressure they produce reduces cooking time and results in very tender meat. Simple meals like spaghetti and meatballs can be cooked in a pressure cooker in a matter of minutes.

Meal prep: Cooking large batches of food over the weekend and dividing them between smaller containers that can be frozen can save hours of cooking time every week. Rice, meat, potatoes, and beans all freeze well. These meals can be taken to work as a lunch or quickly heated in time for meals. An added benefit to preparing frozen meals at home is knowing they lack the preservatives store-bought meals tend to have.

Delivery: Food delivery services such as DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHub, and Caviar can be great options for busy people. Delivery times average between 30 minutes to an hour. Some services offer monthly subscriptions that save money by removing delivery fees.

Apps such as Amazon Fresh and Instacart deliver groceries and are great ways to save time shopping. Some grocery stores also offer free pickup to customers who order online, which makes grocery shopping as easy as ordering on the phone or computer and parking in front of the store, where a store associate loads the vehicle with groceries.

There are also meal kit delivery services like HelloFresh, Home Chef, Blue Apron, Sunbasket, and Freshly that deliver a wide variety of meals that can often be prepped in minutes. These meals save time shopping for different ingredients that may not be used again, and many people find them convenient because they don't require planning. You can often find great deals when you are a new customer, so be sure you find a special offer before trying these options out.