I love chili! I grew up on it, but my mom made it the old-fashioned way, with dried beans that had to be soaked overnight, fatty ground beef and large chunks of tomatoes. Much as I loved it (and made it that way myself for years), once I became a single, working mom, I had to come up with an alternative if I wanted to keep eating chili.

So, I developed this easy vegetarian chili recipe. I went vegetarian because my girls became finicky about eating beef during their teen years and neither white chili nor ground turkey were too mainstream in the early 90s… at least not that I was aware of. So I developed this recipe that has lots of protein, but it comes from TVP and beans, rather than from beef.

These days, I often make this recipe using ground turkey because I cook now for my hubby and mother, both of whom like meat, but if you want to stick with the vegetarian version, you certainly can.

You’ll find my Easy Vegetarian Chili recipe here on my Thrown-Together-Meals.com website, along with some suggested variations. It’s certainly not the only vegetarian chili recipe out there, but it is uniquely mine and it’s fast and easy, not to mention healthy! Hope you enjoy…

When I went to London to visit my daughter who was studying abroad a few years ago, she took me to a London pub the first night to try out quintessential pub food. I decided to try Bangers and Mash, as it sounded interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of onions, sausage, mashed potatoes and gravy.

Several years later, I discovered a similar Americanized version in a Rachael Ray cookbook. Being one of her 30-minute meals, it’s fast and easy to make, using easily found ingredients. My recipe is strongly inspired by hers, but I go it one better and make my mashed potatoes from instant potato flakes. I like them just as well, and they’re definitely faster.

If you want to make the recipe even more British-traditional, add in some peas to your sausage, onion and gravy mixture. That way, you get in your green vegetables too!

You’ll find my Bangers and Mash recipe here, on my main Thrown-Together-Meals.com website. If you love sausage as much as I do, then take a look too at my easy sausage recipes… or feel free to share one of your own favorite recipes here.

For stick-to-the-ribs heartiness, you just can’t beat Bangers and Mash! Enjoy…

Here’s a contribution from Amelia, one of my readers. It’s a hearty winter soup made from root vegetables that are easy to find at your local grocery.

I encourage my readers to contribute their own recipes to the Thrown Together Meals website that this “Recipe of the Week” blog is part of. I’m aiming at developing our own small community of “thrown together” chefs who love creating fast, healthy, quick meals.

So, I thought it would be fun to include some of my readers’ recipes on this blog too. Here’s one that sound truly scrumptious…

This butternut squash soup is so easy to make, with only 3 main ingredients. I never liked squash growing up… at least not the way my mom cooked it! {haha} But recently, I have discovered that butternut squash can be sweetly flavorful, especially when used in combination with other ingredients.

So I hope you’ll give this recipe a try some time, and then leave your comments… either here on the blog or on the recipe page. You’ll find Amelia’s Butternut Squash & Potato recipe here. She suggests you serve it with some sourdough bread. But you could also make it with grilled cheese sandwiches, if you’d like a more complete meal.

Share your own soup recipe with us here.

Thanks and enjoy!

This Greek Chicken Rice Casserole recipe is a riff on an old standby family recipe that my entire extended family loves. The traditional version is very American. I decided to play around with different flavor profiles to add some ethnic flair to this tried and true recipe… in order to make it a bit more current.

One result was this Greek food-inspired version of MacNaughton Chicken Rice Casserole. It adds in some black olives and feta cheese and substitutes a wheat thin topping for potato chips. Plus, it has oregano, the original Greek spice, of course!

You can make the recipe healthier by using skinless, boneless chicken breasts, brown rice, and substituting Greek yogurt for at least some of the mayonnaise.  And low fat, low salt cream soup would help, as would using your own veggie broth, rather than bouillon or canned broth.

However, you mix it though, this is one delicious and flavorful recipe. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Here’s where you’ll find it:

Greek Chicken Rice Casserole

Other pages you might enjoy on the Thrown Together Meals site include:

• Easy chicken recipes for dinner
• Make ahead casserole recipes
• Kathi’s test kitchen, where I test recipes from famous cookbooks, other foodie websites and more

Another recipe I grew up on… and that I always loved… was my mom’s Swedish meatballs. If you like meatballs and brown gravy, you’ll like this one!

It actually doesn’t take all that long to make your own meatballs from scratch, but if you’re really in a hurry… as I was the night I invented this recipe… you can use frozen meatballs. They come in both a beef and a turkey variety in many stores, and they can save a lot of time. Personally, I don’t think they have as nice a texture as the homemade version, but you can’t beat the convenience.

I use something called “Wondra” flour to make all my gravies and sauces, because it makes lumps a thing of the past. It’s a superfine sifted flour that comes in a shaker can. It doesn’t cost a whole lot and it really works great.

I served this recipe with rice, but it’d be just as good with mashed potatoes or even egg noodles.

To get this recipe, click on this Swedish meatballs recipe link. And then, please feel free to leave your rating and comments, either on that page or here on the blog. I’d love to know what others think!

You can also find the following on my main Thrown-Together-Meals.com website:

• More easy ground beef recipes
• Cookbook reviews
• Gift guide for cooks

Have fun exploring!

Do you like lasagna as much as I do? Mmm… hearty goodness, Italian-style! But let’s face it… traditional lasagna isn’t necessarily the healthiest meal around, no matter how great it tastes. In fact, my mom, never known for her tact, said to me yesterday afternoon when she heard I was making lasagna… “Wow… I’m surprised you’re making that… it’s not very healthy!”

My response was that THIS lasagna recipe was going to be healthy… and low fat. It was also thrown together, since I made it by using up foods I had on hand, without a set recipe. I’d had some ground chicken in the freezer for a while, along with some eggplant, so I thought why not combine them for a new take on lasagna?

You’ll find this delicious Chicken Veggie Lasagna recipe here… I hope you enjoy it! We sure did!

I’m always looking for new quick & easy & delicious dinner recipes too, so please feel free to share your favorite recipes, won’t you?

Or, if you have a favorite cookbook, I’d love to have you share a cookbook review with my other visitors too…

In fact, on that note, did you see my latest Rachael Ray cookbook review? This time it was her Just in Time Cookbook. Find out what I said about Rachael’s Just in Time offering right now…

That should keep you busy until next week!

I love fish! And tilapia is one of my favorite fishes… no bones to speak of in the fillets, tender, no strong fish taste and it takes on the flavors you cook it in wonderfully. And you can get some great deals on it at the grocery store. Recently, I’ve been buying a big bag of frozen tilapia fillets, so I always have some ready in the freezer any time I get the urge for a little fish. Fish is healthy for you too.

So last night, I threw together this easy fish recipe using tilapia and other ingredients I happened to have on hand. The result was Ginger Lime Tilapia. Sort of an Asian flavor profile, I guess you’d say. We just thought it tasted good!

You’ll find the Ginger Lime Tilapia recipe here on the main site. I think the key to its great flavor was using fresh ginger, cilantro and basil. You can buy a hunk of ginger and then freeze it, to keep indefinitely. Just take it out and grate it frozen right into your meal as needed. That way, you won’t end up throwing out the spoiled ginger root like I always did till I learned the freezing trick.

As for the herbs, most grocery stores these days stock fresh cilantro. You can buy a bunch for under a dollar and it’ll keep for about 2 weeks. If you use cilantro as much as I do, you’ll probably pretty much use it up in that time, but if you do have to throw any out, since it was so cheap, it’s not too hard to take. Or, you can shred some up in a food processor with a little water and then freeze it in portion sizes for future use. Not quite the same, but still better than dried.

And basil plants are easy to come by in season. Buy one and keep it on your kitchen windowsill or counter. Then, just pick off a few leaves any time you want some basil flavoring in a dish. The smells of fresh basil and cilantro are enough to make me swoon!

Who says a husband can’t make quick, easy and delicious meals too? My husband can! Egg meals for dinner are his specialty… well that, and primavera style pasta… so recently on a grocery shopping night, he volunteered to whip up a new thrown together egg recipe, using up some cooked potatoes we had in the fridge for another meal.

The result? Husband Hash!

It wasn’t the prettiest meal, but we all thought it tasted darn good. You can find the recipe for Husband Hash here on the main site.

What kinds of meals have you men (or for my women readers, the men in your life) thrown together for a quick, easy and mouth watering meal? Please share in our Share a Recipe section of our Egg Recipes part of the main site, won’t you?

Threw together a new dinner meal the other night. Had some frozen chicken breasts, was in the mood for rice and as I stood in my kitchen, thinking “What to make? What to make?”, I felt an inspiration for “Island Chicken”.

What’s that, you ask? Well, to me, it was fresh, tropical flavors. All of my meals include lots of veggies, because I’m very into healthy eating. And I had gotten a great deal on red, yellow and orange bell peppers at the store last weekend. So this seemed a great way to use them!

You can see the recipe on my Thrown-Together-Meals.com website. My family (and I) loved this meal!

We love our pork chops at our house! Usually I just make my go-to standard pork chop recipe, using cream of mushroom soup, but this week, I decided to mix it up a bit with a different flavor profile and also aiming at a more healthy dinner recipe too, since I’m currently focused on losing weight while still enjoying good food.

So, here is this week’s pork chop recipe, Italian-style. Hope you like it as much as we did! To view this recipe, got to our main site, Thrown-Together-Meals.com at our Italian-seasoned pork chop recipe page. You can also find more great pork recipes or share one of your own special recipes. Enjoy!