When time is a concern, simple recipes for dinner should help you manage the family’s evening meal. Usually, a simply made dish requires less than five ingredients, not too heavy, and doesn’t take too long to prepare and cook. As the wise women would say, “Keep it simple, sweetheart.”

While convenience foods make the home cook’s kitchen work easier, cooking from scratch is ideal since the seasonings can be controlled and the freshness of ingredients assured. Still, the home cook can use soup mixes, marinades, canned vegetables or sauces in addition to the from-scratch ingredients, primarily to save preparation time.

For the main course for dinner, choose fish and chicken which cooks faster and seasons well. If you can afford the extra time, try our barbeque chicken recipe, which is first baked with a seasoning of lemon and garlic, then finished on the grill.

Vegetables can also make for a simple dinner recipe. The peeling, cutting and slicing are sometimes the only thing you need to do with them. In the Autumn Waldorf Salad as well as the Beet Salad, that’s what you do, in addition to the dressings and mixing them in a nice salad bowl. Salads like these do not require you to pre-cook anything or create multiple layers that still need to be assembled later on.

A delectable side dish to the main courses would be baked cream onions, which takes under 30 minutes to cook and serve. Even simpler is the asparagus with almonds, since asparagus need only to be blanched for about two to three minutes tops then sautéed with the almonds and butter. From simple recipes for dinner, you not only get a nice, hot meal for your family but also more time to enjoy the dinner conversations from beginning to end.