Easy Dinner Recipes for Beginners

First up in our easy dinner recipes for beginners: these poke bowls! This delicious spin on a Hawaiian inspired poke bowl features seared salmon and veggies in a colorful bowl. What makes it so easy? The salmon is seared in literally 1 minute: talk about quick dinner recipes! Then throw it in a bowl with rice, seasoned cucumber “noodles”, sesame carrot ribbons, and red cabbage and you’ve got one very, very delicious dinner.

If you’ve got an Instant Pot, it’s even easier: make the rice in our hands-off Instant Pot Rice method.

This mushroom pasta is quickly becoming a fan favorite recipe: and luckily it’s also one of our easy dinner recipes for beginners! It stars fresh herbs, goat cheese and lemon is one of our easy dinner recipes that tastes like it took all day to make.

The pasta is smothered with creamy goat cheese, the mixed mushrooms are sauteed with fresh thyme and oregano until they’re super savory, and there’s a pop of fresh lemon to round it off. Oh and there’s some nutrient dense leafy greens, too. It takes only 25 minutes to put together.

Next up in our easy dinner recipes for beginners: you can’t get easier than this! On nights that we have no idea what to make, we turn to pita pizzas! Just top pita bread with shredded cheese and toppings and broil until the cheese is melty and the pita is a little crisp! We do this all the time and it’s always a hit with kiddos.

You can do any type of pizza toppings you like: pesto and tomatoes, margherita, veggie pizza, vegan pizza, and Thai pizza are some of our favorites.

Here’s a dinner idea for when you’re not sure what to cook: Chickpea Tacos! This chickpea recipe does heavy lifting with a short cook time and big flavors. Garbanzo beans might not strike you for tacos, but they make a flavorful filling coated in cumin, chili powder, and smoked paprika, punched up with a hit of zesty lime. Throw it all in a tortilla with guacamole and toppings, and this fast weeknight dinner is done in 20 minutes. 

This vegetarian chili is so flavorful, you won’t miss the meat! It’s a crowd pleasing hit with vegan, vegetarian, and meat eaters alike. This one takes about 45 minutes to make, but it’s truly easy to make. It requires only a little bit of chopping the onion, and we’ve got video tutorials to help you out!

Top it with cheese, sour cream, and all the fixin’s: or to keep it vegan, use our Vegan Nacho Cheese or Cashew Cream instead! It’s a go to in our easy dinner recipes for beginners.

Serve with: Easy Vegan Cornbread

Next in our easy dinner recipes for beginners: this incredible Swiss Melt sandwich! It might be the best sandwich ever: and it’s incredibly easy to make. After trying this the first time, Alex said that it tastes like a healthy version of a Big Mac!

Start by making homemade coleslaw (you could use a purchased bag of coleslaw mix in a pinch, just make our best coleslaw dressing). Add a melty cheese on top of a salty pretzel bun. And what seals the deal is our secret sauce: Russian dressing, the star ingredient in a Reuben sandwich. It takes only 20 minutes to make: so why wait?

This classic Italian pasta is seriously easy (though, the name in Italian is not so sweet!). This easy dinner recipe for beginners features olives, garlic, and red pepper flakes in the Puttanesca sauce for tangy burst of flavor. Or, use our Easy Marinara Sauce for a more straightforward take.

The one is one of our favorite easy dinner recipes for beginners because it’s more of a concept than a recipe! This bowl is filled with hummus, pita crisps, cucumber, red pepper, shallot, leafy greens and rice. You could add any other proteins that you’d like: leftover cooked meats, chickpeas with olive oil and salt and pepper, and so forth.

This is a great “use up leftovers” trick! If you have an Instant Pot, we have a great Instant Pot rice method; or for another quick cooking whole grain substitute quinoa.

This one is seriously easy and people always love it! These noodles are smothered in a creamy peanut sauce and mixed with Napa cabbage and red pepper. The trick here is using our method to “cook” the red pepper by pouring over the boiling water from the noodles when draining them.

It’s a fun shortcut that makes for crunchy tender red pepper strips. Combine that with frizzled Napa cabbage and some lime, cilantro and chopped peanuts, and you’ve got a delicious dinner.

People have been making our tomato coconut cauliflower curry for years, and it’s one of the recipes that we hear makes it into the weeknight rotation for readers and followers. This one requires a bit more chopping: sweet potato, cauliflower and onion: and we’ve got video tutorials to show you how to do it!

Once you’ve chopped the veggies, it’s a breeze to simmer up: and you can clean as you go. It’s one of our top easy dinner recipes for beginners that we recommend because it’s oh so tasty. An even easier version: try our Weeknight Chickpea Curry.

And to round out our easy dinner recipes for beginners: this supremely quick shrimp couscous! It cooks in just 15 minutes and brings big flavor. This garlicky shrimp couscous features juicy shrimp, quick sauteed in a bit of butter with minced garlic, served with lemony couscous and sprinkled with parsley.

While couscous is a pasta and not a whole grain, it cooks up in 5 minutes so it’s perfect for easy dinner recipes. If you have more time, feel free to substitute the grain of your choice: quinoa is also relatively fast. Throw some fresh parsley over the shrimp and couscous and it’s a totally gourmet meal in 15 minutes.