These 3 Recipes Promised I Could Serve A Delicious Family Meal in 15 Minutes. Here’s What Happened.

I’m a Mom to two somewhat adorable boys who’s spent the past six months or so learning a whole new way to run a household, trying to maintain a remote work schedule while managing my kids’ remote school schedule and general descent into homebound chaos. It seems like everything we knew about how to keep the family’s schedule moving has changed and changed again since the spring.

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With new wrinkles popping up all the time, I’m happy to have anything in the household go right on the first try, which is why I’m always on the hunt for mealtime solutions that fly with my eaters and don’t take more time than I have available (none). RAGÚ^® sauce offers a variety of recipes on their website, sorted according to a whole variety of factors, including prep time. There are dozens of recipe suggestions for their RAGÚ^® Old World Style^® Traditional Sauce alone. So I wondered- could I actually pull off any of their “15 minute” meals in such a reasonable span of time, and more importantly, would the charmers running around my kitchen eat any of them?

Stuffed Shells with Hearty Greens

First up was the recipe for stuffed shells– a great spin on a simple pasta dish that my kids had never seen. This was a great opportunity to spring a new recipe on the family that would secretly be saving me time and effort. The 15 minute prep time turned out to be true- I had wilted the greens and prepped the ricotta before my pasta water had even boiled, and everything was covered and in the oven before I even knew it.

The bake time offered a break from the stove that I easily filled with a little kid time and a family vacuuming party, and everybody jumped for the chance to dig into their shells. It’s an important lesson- it’s not hard to prep a quick dinner if all you’re serving is toast, but to have something as hearty and appealing as these shells on the table takes a bit more ingenuity and RAGÚ^® Old World Style^® Traditional Sauce.

Farmer’s Stack

With one success under my belt, I decided to try a dish involving an element that I had never attempted before: polenta patties cooked on the skillet. RAGÚ^® sauce’s Farmer’s Stack recipe is a great presentation of these patties in a vegetable-forward tomato sauce- here I was trying to find faster ways to feed the family and I’m serving new stuff that the kids had never seen.

Though I’d never prepared it quite this way, the polenta was easy to put together and get cooking in the skillet. This was definitely the main project in this dish- when I do this again I may prep the patties ahead of time and freeze them. The real time saver is the sauce- I added a little onions and garlic to the RAGÚ^® Old World Style^® Traditional Sauce so that I could claim it as a custom recipe, and we were good to go. This, on top of the two servings of vegetables in every half cup of the sauce, is what’s known as Family Veggies Goals. The crew enjoyed the final meal and went back for my entire reserve of polenta patties. Served at the table, this dish played much more like a lighter spin on chicken parmesan than a polenta dish. It’s definitely going into the rotation.

Spaghetti and Turkey Meatballs

Having impressed the family with two relatively novel dishes, I thought I would treat myself and my gang with a recipe that seemed like an obvious home run- spaghetti and turkey meatballs. The twist here is that we are not yet a turkey meatball home- I was eager to see if I could pull those off. As it turns out, my beef meatball instincts served me well, and it was very possible to get the meatballs together and cooking in the pan while my pasta was boiling.

Once everything was simmering together, the turkey meatballs took on the sauce beautifully, and the result was a dinner that my boys really dug into. The turkey meatballs were lighter than what we’re used to- the vote to switch over to turkey was unanimous at the table.

I’m glad I picked up three new recipes here that will broaden the family’s horizons a bit without costing me afternoons of prep time. It’s a good illustration that it’s possible to elevate simple recipes with a novel idea or two without creating heaps of new work.

RAGÚ^® sauce helps busy families enjoy more time together thanks to the delicious taste of RAGÚ^® Old World Style^® Traditional Sauce. For more quick and delicious recipes, visit Ragu.com.