4 Quick and Easy Dollar Tree Meal Ideas

The ingredients for four meals

I have one chub of sausage, one bag of frozen green beans, this box of beef stroganoff, and a pack of potato gnocchi. I went ahead and took that sausage chub and divided it into one tablespoon servings.

First up, we're making this pan-roasted gnocchi with green beans.

1. Pan-fried gnocchi

I started by heating half a cup of water into my pan and adding one cup of the dried gnocchi into the pan. I started stirring it around as it softened.

Then I took three tablespoons of my sausage and divided it into little mini meatballs that I put into the pan and let cook all the way through as I stirred it. I am using just a dash of salt and pepper and then half a teaspoon of chicken bouillon.

Then I took half a cup of my frozen green beans and let them steam for the last two or three minutes of the cooking time as I mixed them all in.

Here is our first dish, all finished.

It is very simple, but it will make a filling and quick, easy lunch for me throughout this week.

2. Creamy sausage pasta

I took a cup and a half of water and went ahead and put a cup of pasta in once that water had started to come to a boil. In the pasta dish, you also find this little packet of seasoning with cheese and cream and all that in it. I went ahead and took a heaping two tablespoons of that seasoning mix and put it into the pan.

Next, I took six tablespoons of sausage, and I'm going to just crumble this, cook it separately, and then set it aside.

Then, I added my crumbled and cooked sausage into that mixture. I went ahead and cooked this until the pasta was nearly tender and then added in a whole cup of those green beans. This will make two servings worth. I did go ahead and make several meals that would serve two, so I'd have a second meal.

I went ahead and put one serving worth onto a plate just so you could see what it looks like plated up. This one was delicious.

3. Cheesy pasta skillet with crispy gnocchi

I went ahead and took three tablespoons of my sausage, crumbled those up, and cooked them in a small pan. I set it aside once the sausage had gotten slightly brown on the outside and was cooked thoroughly.

In a one-cup measure, I cut up some of my gnocchi into small pieces. This is just going to help them cook through because we will be using the grease from that pan that we just cooked the sausage in to crisp these gnocchi up and make them like a crunchy addition to a pasta dish.

I added those into my hot pan and then just stirred them around frequently until they had gotten a lot of color on them and it had started to crisp up.

I added half a teaspoon of that chicken bouillon into it just to coat it and add a lot of extra flavor, then gave it a good stir.

I made sure everything was evenly coated with that chicken bouillon and that everything had gotten a good color on it and was crisp (but it should be a little bit chewy still!) Then, I set it aside, added a cup of water into the pan, let that heat up, and then added in 3 fourths cup of pasta from that pasta meal kit.

I mixed in 2 tablespoons of that creamy sauce mixture from the pasta meal kit and then mixed that all in, added in my sausage, and added half a cup of green beans.

This one looks very similar to the last dish, but the taste and texture will be slightly different because next, we're adding that chicken bouillon-coated crispy gnocchi.

So it's going to have a little bit more of a chicken bouillon flavor added to the noodles. This one is also going to serve me for two meals this week.

I went ahead and served half of that skillet onto the plate so you could see what a serving would look like and then set aside the other one into a container so that I would have that meal for later this week.

4. Creamy gnocchi with sausage chips

We took three tablespoons of sausage, mashed it into a patty, and then fried it in this pan.

Next, I take a cup of water, let it come to a boil, and then add the rest of that seasoning blend, which is about a tablespoon and a half.

So I went ahead and stirred that in, let that thicken just a little bit before adding in a cup of gnocchi, which is what I had left from the gnocchi package, and adding in half a cup of green beans as well. This was the last of the green beans.

Then I took my sausage and cut it into strips. I used my shears. Then I folded it in, and it will cook just a little bit longer there so that way you can rest assured that it's been fully cooked.

If this is thickening up too much, which mine was, I went ahead and added about a fourth of a cup of water into it, and then I cut up a little bit of green onion that I had growing on my windowsill onto the top just for some added color.