Summer Meal Ideas

Salads are good for the adults, not sure if your 5 yr. old eats them. You can get the Easy Mac individual cups for your son (or the adults) to cook in the microwave and possibly add diced ham (already packaged in the store), or cut up weiners. The black bean and corn salads are good and I've seen the frozen mixture of that which might could be thawed out and not cooked on the stove. I think some of those recipes for that salad call for a light dressing on it. The store bought (Costco and Sam's) roasted chickens are huge and you can make several dishes out of them, like sandwiches, chicken salad, wraps, etc.

How about some things in the crock pot? You could do chicken enchilada filling or meatballs in pasta sauce for meatball subs. Chicken salad? That doesn't heat up the kitchen. I was also going to suggest pasta salad or even spaghetti. I made my salad with chopped cooked chicken (can use the roasted ones from the store), various bell pepper colors, purple onion (if you like it), finely diced serano chili, cilantro, canned corn (drained), canned black beans (drained and rinsed), grape tomatoes (halved). The dressing is a whole bottle of zesty Italian mixed with a tsp-TBSP (depending on your taste) of chili powder. It is good and better the second day. What about cooking on an outdoor grill?

There are some great websites that can help you out, kraftfoods.com; bettycrocker.com and recipezaar.com The last one allows you to look up recipes by name, ingredient, or even other members. You can create a cookbook to save the recipes you find. All 3 are free. Happy eating!

There is a pasta salad box at Target (Archer Farms brand) that is Tuscan/Italian style and I believe all natural. I think you can cook the pasta in the microwave. I usually add diced ham, black olives and mozzarella cheese to the pasta and call it a meal. Both of my young boys love it and my husband says it's his favorite meal.

kraft foods website has lots of crock pot meals.
You can make tons of stuff in there... Pulled pork for sandwiches.
its easy and you can just let it go.