15-Minute Meals for Moms on the Move

What’s inside:

• 6 dinner ideas you can prep in under 15 minutes (easily!)

• All are easy to pack and eat in the car (aka the “SUV dining room”)

• Each includes: ingredients, quick prep instructions, and a tip for reducing mess

  
  

This spring, life looked a little like this:

A high schooler (no license yet) with daily lacrosse practice after school. A middle schooler with soccer twice a week. And a tag-along little brother with baseball one night a week. And by “night,” I mean practice starts at 5:30… on a field 25 minutes away. We’re home by 7, just in time to start his bedtime routine.

And that’s if nothing else is going on. Most nights, all three kids had overlapping activities that made it impossible to get them everywhere on time without calling in reinforcements.

Thank goodness for the village.

Our little baseball player had four neighborhood kids on his team, and their families often stepped in to drive him to and from practice when we had a lacrosse game across town. Soccer? Same deal—shared rides, text threads, and a whole lot of carpool gratitude.

But even with help, one thing still felt impossible: dinner.

Drive-throughs were too pricey to make a habit of, and there are only so many nights you can make chicken in the crockpot before the complaints roll in. Nuggets, fries, or chips had officially become my default. And while they’re convenient, they don’t exactly scream "fuel for athletes."

So, I made a plan.

To help break the dinner slump and add a little fun to those on-the-go evenings (especially for my youngest, who lives for eating in the car), I put together 6 quick, car-friendly meals you can prep in 15 minutes or less. Bonus: they travel well, make less mess than you'd think, and feel way more satisfying than yet another bag of fast food.

Grab the Target bag for trash, toss in a stack of wet wipes, and get ready to level up your drive-time dinners.