Hearty Filling Main Dishes

Easy to make and easy to afford main dishes for a real food table.

When you're new to scratch cooking you'll want to get something delicious and filling on the table as quickly as you can. These recipes will help smooth out the inevitable bumps and rough patches we all come across while learning to make real food. Making things as foolproof as possible at the beginning so you don't need to worry about how dinner will turn out.

To start with pick out just one or two of my recipes below, or pick from the simple Granny Picks I've found on Pinterest on the right. It'll help keep things easy to start with. Once you have more experience under your belt you can let go with some more exotic creations :-).

Main Dish Recipes

View more recipes like these on Pinterest

Easy Pizza Rollups

One of our fellow “Granny Plan” followers was asked by her family to make pizza as her first dish. Now pizza isn’t super-duper hard to make, but there is the issue of the crust. If you’re making the crust yourself it can take a little practice to get it down just right. Plus, it takes a bit more planning to have the dough soaked or fermented and ready for dinner. So while task-wise it isn’t the easiest first dish, taste-wise pizza is so popular it is sure to be a hit with kids and adults alike. So what to do?

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Chicken Cacciatore Soup

I’ve been on a soup jag lately. Must be the end of winter here in Texas that brought it on. I love soup and make it through the summer months but it is so much more delicious in the wintertime! This soup is one I make once or twice a month for a little variation on our usual chicken rice soup. My sister made a fabulous chicken cacciatore when I was a kid … a very fond memory. I came up with the recipe as a way to enjoy those flavors, but with the convenience of a fairly quick soup. My big sister’s recipe had a day long cook time, but this soup takes about 40 minutes of pure cooking time, where the cook doesn’t need to do much.

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Easy Beef Vegetable and Rice Soup

This soup is an easy to make wintertime favorite. If you keep both broth and cooked beef in the freezer you can whip up a batch of this rich satisfying soup in no time flat! I save the bits of meat from soup bones in the freezer just for this dish. Sometimes I have some extra browned ground beef frozen instead. I make it often for lunch when I’m working at home. It’s a pretty satisfying dinner soup too.

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Chicken Nuggets – Easy and Kid Friendly

Look on any kid’s menu at any restaurant in North America and what will you find? Chicken Nuggets! Hard to believe that this dish hardly existed before fast food engineers came up with it. And of course, all the chicken nuggets you get in these restaurants are bad for you. They are all fried at a high temperature in hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. And let’s not even talk about the source of the meat!

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Fast Easy Busy Day Meal Southern Style

This is my favorite fall back plan meal. We all have days that are insanely hectic from time to time. If you keep the kitchen stocked with the stuff to make this meal you’ll always be ready for the unexpected! It takes about 30 minutes start to finish. And it’s delicious and filling even for starving men and teenage boys. This is my go to meal for crazy days!

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Grassfed Beef Pot Roast

All beef used to be grassfed. It is only with the the arrival of cheap grain after World War II that the feeding of grain to cattle became economical on a large scale. Prior to that cattle fed on the range. Why, the first feedlot in Texas wasn’t opened until 1950! So it follows that your Grandma and Mrs. Dull were cooking with grassfed beef. That makes pre-ww2 cookbooks excellent sources for beef recipes! We can learn what Granny learned from her mother from these books. Grassfed beef requires different cooking techniques. “Slow and Low” is what you want. This means to use low heat for longer periods of time. Mrs. Dull’s recipes for beef are slow and low.

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Leftover Turkey Southern Style

What would the after holiday season be like without creamed turkey to cheer us? Since my earliest memory every Christmas and Thanksgiving was followed closely by a special Sunday dinner of good old-fashioned creamed turkey. This dish is so popular at our house that I make the creamed chicken version of it a couple of times a month. But it’s not quite as good with chicken, as it is with turkey.

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