My mom has been staying with us for 3-4 weeks at a time, taking care of Lil Miss Wagon during the day while we’re at work. She also happens to do all our laundry, make our beds, and cook 3 meals a day for us. We keep telling her she doesn’t have to do all this extra work…!! But she insists. My mom is an angel.

She also knows that I’m not the biggest cook. I’m a pretty good cook (if I do say so myself) but the planning, shopping, and prepping really stresses me out, and since I don’t get home until 5:30pm on workdays, there’s just zero time to throw something together in time for Wagon Jr. to eat dinner and get to bed by 6:30pm. The only thing that would work for us is slow cooker meals, but with LMW’s bedtime sometimes extending all the way to 9:30pm (and our new bedtime being 10:00pm!) there’s just no time to even prep that the night before. So my mom has been coming up with meals that even I can’t make excuses for not cooking for my family. This sausage veggie bake is hearty, relatively healthy, and ridiculously easy, and everything can be prepped DAYS in advance. The only caveat is that it needs to bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, so it will be a weekend kind of meal for us.

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Ingredients:
Sausage (we use sweet italian sausage, but you can use any kind really)
Fresh vegetables (we usually use red, yellow, and green peppers; mushrooms; potatoes; cauliflower; broccoli; carrots; onions), peeled and cubed (about 1 inch)
Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper

We boil the sausage in advance to cook it through and take out a little oil to make the dish a little healthier. But you can saute it in a pan as well. Then you just slice up the sausage, throw it into a baking pan with all the cut vegetables, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and mix it all up a bit. Then bake in a 350 degree oven for about half an hour or until the vegetables are cooked to your liking. You can add stuff to create a sauce, or cheese on top, but we keep it plain to keep it as simple (and healthy) as possible.

What’s great about this recipe is that you can use whatever veggies you have on hand in your fridge, and it’s a great way to use up bits of fresh produce before it goes bad. Since we always have a few onions and potatoes handy, we can just throw in a spare pepper, half a zucchini, an unfinished bag of baby carrots, etc. I coupon stockpile sweet italian sausage and kielbasa in the freezer for grilling, so that’s always on hand as well. And you can prep the entire contents in advance, storing all the cut up veggies in one ziploc bag and the cooked, sliced sausage in another, so when you are ready to cook dinner you just throw it all together, add the olive oil, salt and pepper, and bake.

We serve this dish with rice since we always have a rice cooker-ful made!

What’s your go-to ridiculously easy meal?