15 minute dinner

Despite all the times that I have moved over the years, I still forget how long it takes to get truly settled in a new place. I've unpacked the main parts of the house, but the basement and the attic remain full of taped-up boxes that really need to be unpacked or repacked. I've been methodically working through these boxes over the last couple of weeks, but I reached the point where I needed some help from my husband, so we spent the weekend digging through all the crap boxes of precious memories and lost treasures. We were so busy that it soon was six o'clock on Sunday night and we were both starving.

In Charlotte, six o'clock and starving meant that I'd cook the Dream Dinners entree I had defrosting in the refrigerator, and we'd be eating in 20 minutes. In Milwaukee, not so much. No Dream Dinners. No meal prep places anywhere I can find. No dinner help.

Excuse me while I get a tissue.

I'm starting my new job in a couple of weeks (yay!), but I'm going to have an even longer commute than I had in Charlotte (boo!). I know I'm going to be exhausted when I get home, especially in the first few weeks, and getting dinner on the table is going to be a challenge. And while I find cooking relaxing, I find grocery shopping stressful and I find clean up even more stressful, and that's not what I want after coming home from a long day at a new job.

So how am I going to make dinner every night? Yes, I understand I can cook in advance. Yes, I will use my crockpot. Yes, I understand I can get takeout on the really busy nights. Yes, we can go out to dinner. But all of those options either cost more than they should, aren't as healthy as home preparation, take too much time or energy, and/or will make my house messy.

Back to Sunday night. We were starving and I needed to get something on the table quickly, but after our pizza on Friday and another trip to Kopp's on Saturday, I also wanted something light and somewhat healthy. We had leftovers, but neither of us was in the mood for leftovers. That's when I remembered our go-to quick and healthy dinner: tortellini salad.

Tortellini salad is just a regular salad with cheese tortellini on top, and it's one of our favorite meals. It's also one of the meals that I can get on the table in fifteen minutes, and I almost always have the ingredients on hand because there isn't a specific recipe. I buy tortellini (or ravioli works too) when it's on sale and throw it in the freezer, and we usually have various salad ingredients in the house. My tortellini salad usually consists of romaine lettuce or spring mix, grape tomatoes or chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, gorgonzola, and whole wheat three cheese tortellini, and tossed with balsamic vinegar and EVOO. If we have leftover chicken, I'll throw that in too, but it's not necessary. Tortellini cooks incredibly fast and yet I can still chop all the vegetables and make the dressing in the time it takes to cook those little pasta nuggets.

I very easily could have thrown a frozen pizza in the oven or made a turkey sandwich with baby carrots - and we do eat those things- but tortellini salad felt more fulfilling and more dinner-like. Even though it's a salad, it still feels like a real meal because there's pasta, and pasta and a salad feels like dinner. Plus it has gorgonzola cheese, and that makes it fancy. Because I said so.

These are the types of dinners I need to have in my arsenal for my return to work - meals made with ingredients I have on hand (or I can easily stock up on in advance), that have some nutritional value, and that I can have on the table in 15-20 minutes. And really, doesn't every housewife need a list of 15 minute meals for those days when the kids have soccer practice or the end of day meeting ran late or you're just plain ol' exhausted from a day of cleaning and shopping and running errands and unpacking boxes of junk that never should've been moved? I know I do.

What are your 15 minute dinner ideas?