Quick and Easy Meals- Tater Totdish
This super simple hotdish is the very definition of comfort food imho. It’s like a warm hug on a plate! Plus, it’s really easy to make and budget-friendly too.
One of the biggest secrets to making cheap easy meals is to accumulate a great list of recipes that incorporate ingredients that you actually have on hand! Having pantry staples and frozen staples allow you to easily make meals on the fly. Click here for a list of pantry staples and here for a list of frozen staples to make your simple meal creations easier. The majority of recipes on this site are recipes that we have made in our kitchen using the meals on the fly method.
We understand how important it is to not only provide a nourishing, crowd pleasing meal that is easy to prep and cook, but we also learned the importance of teaching our kids to cook, whether it was frying an egg, microwaving a meal, or following a complex recipe, we made it fun so they could appreciate the joy of cooking. Check out our Meal Wars- Kids Cook experiment here, where we set up challenges for each of the kids to cook age appropriate meals each week and we all voted for our favorite recipe!
While we loved spending a lot of time perfecting meals when time allowed, we had learned the value in understanding how to cook with what you had on hand. Meal plans did make life easier, for sure, but what if you just didn’t feel like eating what was already preplanned out? We ran into that a lot more than what is probably deemed normal, but that’s where deviations come in. The beautiful part of meal planning is you shop for or already have on hand all the ingredients you need to make it work. So you can mix and match and pick and choose at the last minute if that is where you are at.
To whip up this delicious dish, all you need are some tater tots or rounds, ground beef, Cream of Mushroom Soup, Vegetable Beef Soup, frozen peas and a little salt and pepper.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Start by pulling the thawed ground beef apart and placing in a lightly greased glass baking dish (9 x 13).
In a large bowl, mix vegetable beef soup and cream of mushroom soup. Whisk together, add half the seasonings and peas. Pour this mixture over your ground beef. Use a spatula to evenly coat the soup mixture over the ground beef. Then layer the tater tots over the soup mixture. Don’t overlap the tots, but pack them on top. Sprinkle the remainder of the seasonings evenly over the tots. Bake uncovered for 45 minutes or until hamburger is cooked and tots are desired crispiness.
Variations for this dish. You can add shredded cheddar cheese to the soup mixture if you prefer a cheesy totdish. We’ve made it with shredded cheese and without and both are delicious!
The best part is that tater totdish is a crowd-pleaser and can easily be doubled or tripled to feed a larger family or for leftovers to take to work. It’s a go-to comfort food that’s both tasty and wallet-friendly. So next time you’re looking for a quick and easy meal that won’t break the bank, give tater totdish a try!
