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I do tons of prep on Sundays. Without it I would not have meals on the table.

DH gets home with both girls at 5:30. I get home around 6pm (most nights). We follow a simple protein, carb, veg routine - thats our goal for each night. Some nights its fancier than others. Here is this weeks plan, the stuff made Monday would normally have been made Sunday if not for NY Day:

-Chili (prepped Monday, eaten for dinner Mon, lunches for me, and leftovers once this week for dinner). Served with roasted veggies and corn bread.
-Carnitas (Made Monday, will be eaten Tuesday night, lunches for me, and maybe leftovers) served with avocado, rice, tortillas and green salsa.
-Chicken N Dumplings (will be made Weds, eaten Wednesday and leftovers for kids), self contained meal - nothing served with it.

For myself, I also make some extra proteins, loads of roasted veggies.

Our weeks always look this same way - usually two meals made on the weekend, crock pot meals, or maybe a casserole DH can pop in the oven.

I also keep nuggets, mac n cheese, ravioli, etc on hand. In the event a night get particularly hectic we just pop something frozen in the oven for the kids and worry about ourselves later! That probably happens once every 2 weeks for us!

Its hard...for sure...but meal prep is what makes it work for me. I spend 1-3 hours hands on prepping...

I just adjusted my work schedule to help make this happen for my family. Instead of the 8-4:30 that I worked before (30 min commute, pick up daughter, be home at 5:15), I am doing 7:30-4, getting home by 4:30. DH and I will prep dinner for half an hour (we use an online recipe service and do a bulk of the prep on Sunday), I will pick up our daughter from daycare (thankfully it is less than a mile from our house) and then we will eat an early dinner shortly after I get home with her between 5:00 and 5:15.

It's definitely a challenge. I hope this works for us.

DON'T COOK DURING THE WEEK!
I know that not many people will be able to handle this, but my husband and I eat the same meal for lunch all week and another for dinner.
On Sunday we make a big batch of two meals (this week was Kale & Bean soup for lunch and chicken salad wraps for dinner) we make enough for 10 lunches (5 each) and 8 dinners (4 each). We also prep all snacks and other pieces. this week we had clementines, bread to go with the soup, and yogurt.
So by Sunday night, lunch and dinner is completely ready for the entire week. It is such a relief to not have to worry about food at all during the week. And we typically bring home something on Friday.

My one other suggestion if you can't handle eating the same thing in a row is to do batch cooking and then freeze in serving size portions.
For example, we make a huge batch of chili, and then freeze in our 2-cup size pyrex containers. I take 2 out in the morning, they are defrosted by the time we get home, quick zap and hot chili is ready.
So if you can't eat the same thing several days in a row, try batch cooking and freezing in individual servings, then each night you can have a different meal ready to go.

(I wrote this for a similar post, and copied and pasted it here !)

@kiddosc: We grocery shop on Sunday AMs. Then during Sunday nap time (my girls usually overlap for an hour or so) I buckle down in the kitchen. I roast all my veggies at that time (cut one - toss it in a gallon zip lock - toss it with oil and seasoning then on to the sheet pan covered in foil)...while that one roasts I cut the next one up...and so on. I usually do a pan of broccoli (3-4 crowns), a pan of cauli (2 crowns), a butternut squash and one with peppers (3 - various colors) 2 onions and 3-4 zuchinni.

I also start proteins, a while chicken usually (either crock pot or oven), some ground beef and a couple salmon filets.

I can get most of than done in 1.5 hours....the hands on part anyways...

@kiddosc: It is exhausting but I haven't found a better way! Before I had my daughter I would spend a few hours on Sunday meal prepping but I just can't bring myself to do it anymore.

Well, in my life, eating together at a restaurant or with take away at the dinner table counts the same if I made it myself, so I aim to have two dinners a week where we cook from scratch. The other two are out and one is pizza night (where we make pizza from the dough that's all rolled out and comes in a "tube.").

Plus, there are 6 meals over the two days of the weekend, those count too! We don't really eat casseroles or crockpot type foods, so it's a challenge during the week, so I have to do some kind of cooking, but once I have a plan, I can get on with it.

So we have a similar schedule - I usually get home with the kids around 5:15, my husband is home at 5:45, we have dinner on the table at 6. I do all my meal planning and shopping on Sundays, and I've got a pretty good rotation of meals that I can have on the table in 30 minutes or less. Once a week I give myself a cop out meal (grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, quesedillas, scrambled eggs on toast). On Friday we get take-out. Sundays I have more time, so that means I need 3 meals. I'll usually try to do one crock pot a week, and often one pasta. I cook a lot of dishes out of the cookbook Skinnytaste Fast and Slow. I batch cook roasted tomato sauce and freeze it and then I'll buy fresh tortellini.

@kiddosc: Like another lady said, you could just as easily do the prep after the kids go to bed.

Mine go to sleep at 7 and 8, so sometimes between those I do some meal prep...sometimes I sit and snuggle with DD. Then after 8 I have time also.

Or, if you are a morning person you can do it before work.

I really think getting a few "staples" nailed down is whats key. Like, a whole chicken in a crock pot. No time required, a million potential uses.

@kiddosc: I responded a bunch in this thread, most of which was food-related. Hope its helpful!

http://boards.hellobee.com/topic/tips-for-two-woh-parents#post-2792152

We do a lot of chicken breast which cooks quickly. Sautéed tonight in a white wine sauce. Side of roasted butternut squash ( I do save time by buying conveniently precut and prewashed veggies). One pan roasted chicken breasts and veggies yesterday. Tacos. Pasta. Everything I make takes less than 30 minutes and I rarely do weekend prep/precooking. So we come home and kids watch a show while I get dinner ready. Then we all eat together (DH walks in right around when I am finishing). Then about 30 minutes play together and then bath and bed.

I had a list of meals that we all like that are about 30 min. (Sadly I list my list). On the weekend I'd pick 5 meals and shop fir what was needed. I'd try and pick items that could be turned into something else the next night. For example cook extra chicken breast and the next night have chicken fried rice. Some nights I'd just plan soup & sandwich.

I've never been into meal prepping on the weekend. I have to get back into this, it saved time & money.

I love following these threads because this is an ongoing struggle for me, too. I get home about 5pm. We have to take our 2 year old upstairs for bath and bedtime by 6 at the latest, 5:50 is better. He refuses to nap at daycare which means he needs to go to bed at 6:30. And he's a WRECK in the evenings when he gets home, which means I definitely don't have 30 minutes to cook because he's usually clingy and crying and super needy. And I want to give him attention when I get home.

So I try to cook some on the weekends during naptime - like this weekend I made a turkey breast in the crockpot, cooked 2 lbs of ground beef - one for tacos, one for spaghetti. And I "pre-cook" the night before sometimes, like I will cook pasta and put it in the fridge, so the following evening I just heat up the servings of pasta and sauce. That is about all the cooking I have time for on weeknights (i.e., using the microwave). I could do a lot more with 30 minutes.

I also use a lot of convenience foods as others have said - we love Trader Joe's frozen brown rice, steamer bags of veggies, etc. My 2 year old likes the Birdseye steamable veggie pasta, so I make him that like once a week. Sometimes dinner is turkey deli meat, cheese, toast, fruit. Whatever! That's the best I can do. I will often feed that to the 2yo and my husband and I might eat frozen TJ's burritos or something. I figure it's better than McDonald's.

It's just survival. Give yourself grace. Some weeks I do better about meal prepping on the weekends. Some weeks I am just exhausted and I know we're going to be eating chicken nuggets from the freezer. Baby #2 is coming in May so I know it's going to get worse.

We don't do family dinners!

My husband doesn't get home till about 7 on an average night, sometimes later or a bit earlier. The kids can only wait till about 6pm for dinner, so they are typically done or almost done eating when he arrives. *however*, I do try to cook most nights, or more realistically, I try to pair any processed pre-made foods with something not processed--that's just my own personal rule. I'm a working parent and I get home around 4:30 on an average day. So I have the time theoretically, but I also have other tasks during that 4:30-6 pm time slot (unpacking school backpacks, cleaning out lunch containers, repacking lunch containers, taking out trash, and you know, playing with my kids!), so I really minimize the time spent cooking during the week.

To save time, I buy a lot of pre-cut/washed veggies from my grocery store like sweet potatoes cut into fry shapes (to make unprocessed sweet potato fries), already spiralized veggies or already-riced cauliflower or other veggies. Then I mix these into whatever pre-made elements of dinner I use.

So I might make pasta--I brown ground italian sausage then mix butternut or pumpkin puree with a jarred (no sugar) pasta sauce, for a semi-homemade slightly healthier pasta dish. Or I might buy a rotisserie chicken to shred rather than cooking the chicken myself for enchiladas or shredded chicken tacos. That kind of thing.

Any convenience food that I can buy that isn't processed is utilized often in our house.

I've also made it a habit to always include some veggies into an otherwise unhealthy dinner. Like if I don't feel like cooking and I do a package of Trader Joe's orange chicken, I made sure to do half steamed rice/half riced cauliflower so we aren't all loading up on the processed orange chicken, and then I throw a side of broccoli in that as well. Anything I make that has a tomato paste/sauce base always gets a squash puree as well. I add squash puree to taco soup, to pasta sauce, and pizza sauce, and to red curry sauces (both indian and thai). Little health hacks make me feel better about using a lot of fast, premade dinners.

I'm a firm believer in big batch everything....so a huge pork roast in the crock pot over the weekend allows you to have 2 meals plus maybe 2 more worth of shredded pork in freezer. So maybe pulled pork one night, pork tacos another, or rice/pork/hot veg with soy sauce next time. Or we do a whole chicken in the crockpot and shred on the weekend so already cooked chicken is in the fridge to add to salads, sauces, inside tacos, enchiladas, etc. I also do big batches of rice and pasta on weekends so just have to reheat portion sizes on the day of. When I ate dairy, I'd prep a double batch casserole on the weekend (one for that week, another for the freezer) that is slightly undercooked so reheating just finishes it off without drying it out. (lasagna, baked ziti, chicken parm casserole, enchiladas, taco burger pizza, etc). So between the meat/starch, new casserole, a frozen soup or casserole from a previous week and leftovers there's that week's weeknight menu. Hot veg or salad is prepped day of always. Never found a good early prep method as I tend to like that really fresh. It took some fine tuning for this to become habit though.

@skipra: really? I find it just the opposite. Any meat is super easy to make--throw it in the oven or sautee and done. But good veggie sides take me forever. Sweet potato fries---wash the potatoes, peel the potatoes, cut the super hard sweet potatoes into fry shapes, soak the fries in ice water (they bake better), dry the potatoes, add all the spices and flour--then bake for 45 minutes. That's a long time and then you just have a side. And then veggie burgers. I've only made them homemade once and those took forever, too. Or do you mean the bought frozen kind?

I end up buying a lot of expensive veggie items that are prewashed and precut, just because doing all that is such a time suck on a weeknight. But it doesn't escape my attention that buying spiralized zucchini noodles are 4x the price of just buying zucchini and spiralizing it myself. But again, a time suck.

@Anagram: well I am mostly vegetarian so maybe all meat doesn't take that long but it's been my experience when my husband does it that from fridge to plate it takes forever. Funny you think sweet potatoes take so long. I cook the several times a week and it's like 2 minutes to prep and 15 to cook. Mine would be burnt to a crisp if I baked them for 45 minutes! I skip soaking them. I do think it makes a big difference for regular potatoes (and they often do take 30-40 min to cook so we skip them) but my LO prefers them just baked. Also there are some great frozen veggie burgers out there or they are something easy to prep on the weekends and quick to heat during the week.
Has anyone mentioned cous cous as a grain? Trader Joe's has a whole wheat version. Cous cous, a frozen veggie, and canned chick peas would take like 5 minutes to make.

I agree with @jennlin821, meal prep and and batch cooking are life-changing if you can do it! We were able to do it twice, and it was soooooo nice to just reheat during the week.

Sadly it never lasts for us. There's always "too much going on" and we quickly get off track. But my husband gifted me an Instant Pot a couple months ago, and like @youboots I absolutely love it! I can cook so many of our favorite meals in about 30-40 minutes from prep to finish. I use it 3-4 times per week.

@Anagram: I agree...the meats are the easy part for me...

We usually have 1.5-2 hours before the kids have lights out, but on gym days we have less than an hour. We make it work by choosing easy prep meals that the kids will actually eat. For example, last night was salad and an English muffin with cheese on it. Home at 6:35, kids in bed with lights out at 7:30. Veggie sandwiches with hummus are another good one! Find the meals that are quick for you, and keep those in heavy rotation.