The days when you need to cook dinner faster than you can get a pizza are far more numerous than the days when you have time to cook a three-course meal.

Today I will show you how you can turn leftovers into a delicious meal for two adults and two children. It’s about making dinner for the whole family in just 20 minutes. The goal is to make the pizza delivery man cry!

We had a ton of leftovers in the fridge. This was not always the case, but this weekend; we invite the whole family to celebrate children’s birthdays. Our son’s two birthdays are in the summer, so we decided to get them together and have a great party. This arrangement worked well for those who would have to travel a long distance, twice, to get here.

26 family members, including children, attended the party and we all had a great time. When everyone left, the four of us were devastated.

Today, we went back to work, school and kindergarten for the four of us. Experience told us that we wanted to be able to quickly make dinner today. Fortunately, there were tons of leftovers left from the party. By the standard, I had made almost twice as many meatballs as I needed and I really wanted to do something with it.

So, I took a bag of root vegetables (2 pounds) and some balsamic vinegar. My plan was to toss it all together in a pan. Let’s see how it went.

4.40 p. M. – I put the tubers, meatballs, and balsamic vinegar on the kitchen counter.

4.42 p. M. – Now I cut the 20 meatballs into quarters. I put a tablespoon of oil in the pan and heated it up.

4.43 p. M. – I fried the meatballs for about 4 minutes at the highest temperature to make sure they were cooked through.

4.47 p. M. – I took the meatballs out of the pan and added the root vegetables to the skillet. The temperature was still at the highest level. The bag said that the tubers should be fried for about 9 minutes.

4.56 p. M. – After frying the tubers for 9 minutes, I added the meatball chunks, stirred, and added a quarter cup of balsamic vinegar. At this stage, it was important to stir the mixture to ensure that the flavor of the balsamic vinegar was evenly distributed. I did this for a couple of minutes.

4.59 p. M. – Dinner was ready!

Dinner was served quite early today. That’s because all of us, especially the kids, were tired after a long and tiring weekend.

Shouldn’t I have used fresh vegetables?

Fresh tubers would be great in this dish, but sometimes you just don’t have time for that. This dish was meant to work in the hustle and bustle on weekdays!

Although fresh ingredients would always be an improvement, using pre-cut veggies was a much better alternative to ordering a pizza!

This portion was large enough to accommodate two adults, a six-year-old and a two-year-old. If you think you would need a little more, I would recommend having garlic bread or a salad as a side.

If you wanted sauce with this, I would recommend a dip of remoulade, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce.

The kids loved it.

In an ideal world, we would always be using fresh organic ingredients for all of our meals. Sometimes you have to accept that it is simply not an option. Everyday life has too many nights like this to resort to ordering pizzas every time or to go. Dishes like this are a much, much better alternative. And it’s tasty too!