This is one of the easiest shortcut meals you can make when you just don’t feel like cooking or don’t have a lot of time. My kids usually like the sauce but if the moon is full and they are not in the mood for it, I can still serve them pasta with butter and a little Parmesan cheese on top.

My wife isn’t eating pasta this month so the sauce is enough for her to eat as a meal. Serve it up with a vegetable and/or salad and you have a quick and easy meal.

Now if you had the time, you could make the sauce from scratch but then I couldn’t call this a shortcut meal. You could even make the pasta from scratch but then you are really going out of your way to your destination. It’s a nice trip but takes awhile.

My shortcut is to find a jarred pasta sauce that you really like that doesn’t taste fake or commercial. Is there anything as good as homemade? I don’t think so but there are some very good products on the market especially when you need something quick.

I like using a 26 oz jar of Classico Four Cheese tomato sauce made by Di Parma. My kids like it and I can purchase it at Costco but I’m sure there are plenty of other decent brands out there. Once you add the sausage, it doesn’t really matter because the meat adds a lot of flavor. - What’s Your Favorite Commercial pasta sauce?

How to Make Pasta with Sausage Tomato Sauce

To make this shortcut meal at home, brown some sweet or mild sausage. You can purchase it loose or in sausage links, it doesn’t matter. Just be careful to check the package to make sure it is not hot sausage.

I thought I was buying sweet sausage and the label said sweet sausage but when I got home, half the sausage was hot. No way I was going back out so I made the sauce hoping my kids would eat it. They tried but quickly brought to my attention how hot it was.

If using sausage links, squeeze the sausage meat  into a good sized sauce pan. Brown the meat, add your favorite sauce and let it cook for 5 to ten minutes. That’s it. Quick, easy and delicious.

Because the sauce is thick, I like to serve it with penne pasta but you can use whatever you and your kids like. Serve it with freshly grated Parmesan cheese to give it another layer of flavor and you have a nice meal.

Great for lunch the next day too.

How to Make Chinese Dumplings at Home

I recently wrote about a couple of cookbooks I borrowed from our local library. One of them was Suzanna Foo’s Chinese Cuisine and last night we thought it would be a fun family project to try her Pork Dumplings with Soy-Ginger Sauce. And it turned out to be great fun.

One of the reasons we chose this recipe is it looked easy enough for all of us to get involved in preparing and my youngest daughter loves dumplings. She lives on those Pot Stickers you can find in the frozen section at Costco. We thought this might be a nice change of pace and if she helped make them, she might even trying eating some. We were right again.

This recipe should be listed under “Shortcut Meals” because we didn’t make the dumpling wrappers from scratch.  Instead we purchased square wontons that my oldest daughter transformed into round wontons with a cookie cutter.

After transformation, the wrapper went to my youngest daughter in charge of filling the dumpling with the pork mixture. She stood there with her spoon and proudly added a dollop of ingredients to each one asking, “Daddy, is this the right amount?”

I then sealed them up and did my best to add a little pleat to the sides and turned them over to my wife who was in charge of boiling some and frying the rest. When done I thought there would be no way we were going to eat all these dumplings. We went through two packages of wonton wrappers but in the end there were only a few left for someone’s lunch the next day.

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There are nights I just don’t feel like working to hard to put together a dinner for the family. I’m sure every home cook responsible for preparing meals every day feels this way once in a while.

In fact, it’s my opinion finding “short cut” meals that you and your family enjoy are an essential part of planning out your week’s meal schedule. In my case, I don’t usually plan out the week but it’s a really good idea if you can manage it; I just make sure I have enough “short cut” ingredients in the house at all times.

What do I mean by “short cut” meals?

These are dinners you put together where one or more of the ingredients is already prepared and you build the meal around it. For example, one night this week I served Ravioli with a Carrot Fennel sauce, fresh mozzarella & tomato basil salad and baby peas for the kids. Sounds pretty good, yes?

The kids wanted their ravioli without sauce, just a little butter. My wife took some of the peas and added them to the ravioli and carrot fennel sauce making it a better dish. Kind of creating a meal on the fly.

This was a two-ingredient “short cut” meal. First, the ravioli are a commercial four-cheese brand that I purchase in the frozen section at Costco. My kids love this brand and they really are pretty good. As good as homemade? Of course not, but making homemade pasta is time consuming and not always possible when you are rushing to put a meal together in the middle of the week.

The sauce was a creamy Carrot Fennel Soup from Whole Foods on sale that I picked up that day not knowing what I was going to do with it. Could I have made a homemade carrot fennel soup/sauce myself? Sure and I’m sure I will now that I tried this one from Whole Foods and enjoyed but at dinner time when I had to think of something to prepare, this combination sounded good and turned out to be an excellent choice.

The fresh mozzarella, tomato, basil salad was quick and easy and the peas were frozen and just needed to be heated up. The whole meal took less than ½ hour and all parties enjoyed what they were served. A success in my book.

So in the future you will be seeing me post a lot of “short cut” meals on this Blog.  There will even be a category for them. I think they are an indispensable part of your cooking repertoire if you are going to cook every night and survive. I also believe in “quickie meals”, take out meals and going out for dinner once in a while to break up the week.

By the way, a “quickie meal” is different from a “shortcut meal” insofar as it is one step and you don’t prepare the rest of the meal around it. For example, throwing a frozen pizza in the oven is a quickie meal. Mac and Cheese is another example. Heating up some commercial chicken wings another.  These are usually meals that we make for the kids when a baby sitter is coming over or they won’t eat something I prepared for my wife and myself.

The trick is to have a well-stocked pantry and freezer with products that are quick and easy to prepare, good quality, taste good and affordable. Over time I will show you some of my favorites and ones that have saved me numerous times when I needed to get a meal together in a hurry.

If you have a favorite shortcut meals or products you love, please post it in the comments section. I’m always looking for more ideas.