This post brought to you by Campbell Soup Company. The content and opinions expressed below are that of Stuff Parents Need.
A few weeks ago I shared a fun weekend lunch idea with you that included an organic soup only requiring you to heat it up (major score!). Today I want to show you a weeknight meal that requires a little more prep (but only a little, I promise) and that just might get your kids to load their plates full of veggies. It worked for me!
The star of any pasta dish is the sauce, and it’s also usually the most labor-intensive part of the cooking process. Not this time! I highly recommend you check out one of Campbell’s new products, Campbell’s Sauces. There are SO many great flavors and possibilities for helping you get great food on the table fast. For the pasta bar idea, I decided something extra cheesy was the way to go, so I opted for the Cheesy Broccoli Chicken sauce. To make this sauce, simply empty the contents into a sauce pan and heat it up. That’s it! Isn’t that just music to your tired mama ears?!
I chose to offer two different types of whole wheat pasta (we went with shells and penne). Cook those according to package directions. The other offerings can really be as creative as you want. This is also a great time to clean out your crisper drawers of veggies or to use up leftover meats! I cooked and crumbled bacon, and I also steamed some edamame and some broccoli. I also offered up some parm cheese for sprinkling on top.But the options are really unlimited! Being able to get dinner on the table very quickly on a week night is critical for me, and this idea is a great one for my family. You can even cook your noodles ahead of time and store them in the fridge. Same goes for the bacon. There are slight tweaks you can make to the prep so that you can literally get this dish on the table less than 10 minutes after you walk in the door, which is awesome!
But now I want to show you what’s even MORE awesome: by giving my kids full control over how they built their dishes, and by offering such colorful and fun options, I noticed that they LOADED their pasta bowls with veggies! #WINNING!!!!
And thanks to the presence of that tasty Campbell’s Sauce in the bowl, my girls ate everything that they put in their bowls. We still had enough leftovers for me to serve the meal one more time, which made me love this concept even more. It was already not much work, and then I got two meals out of it, to boot! 🙂
I think one of the really great things about the Campbell’s Sauces line is that they each come with a recipe idea on the back of the packet, but you certainly aren’t limited to those suggestions. You can come up with a ton of ways to put these major time savers to use in a variety of dishes that can now be that much easier to prepare. Campbell’s Sauces come in varieties intended for the Slow Cooker, Skillet, Oven and Grill. Definitely check them out on your next grocery shopping trip and get some new ideas for saving time in the kitchen on those crazy week nights. And to get some inspiration for delicious Campbell’s recipes, simply follow @Campbells on your favorite social media site.
