Quick and easy meals for the busy month of December

December is the month when you realise you want to see all your friends and family ahead of Christmas to give gifts and join in with festive celebrations. Let alone preparing for work Christmas parties, school nativity plays, and more.

This means people usually take a lot less time over cooking and shopping for food. So, for those evenings when you only have a moment to spare for lunch or dinner, having some quick and easy recipes to hand is invaluable during this non-stop month.

We have come up with a list of our favourite quick and easy meals:

Speedy Suppers

When you’re thinking about a speedy supper, soup springs to mind. Our corn and butternut squash soup with maple syrup recipe turns a butternut squash into a sensational soup in just 25 minutes. It is also a great recipe, full of goodness, with onions, celery, squash, and fresh ginger, to counter the inbound Christmas indulgence. The addition of dark maple syrup strengthens the sweetness of the squash and gives it a deep, robust flavour.

If you’re looking for a lighter option, a beef and noodle stir-fry with maple Asian greens takes just 8 minutes to cook! A stir fry is a fresh and crunchy recipe in comparison to a subtle, smooth soup. This recipe champions fresh, green vegetables, including broccoli, Pak choi, and spinach, which are great for offsetting the food-filled Christmas period. Maple syrup works in harmony with the Asian flavours of sesame and soy to create a delicious dish.

If you’re at the point where you don’t even have the time to stir a pot, then a maple fish parcel is the recipe for you. It is as easy as bundling all the ingredients in a parcel made out of foil and greaseproof paper and drizzling with golden maple syrup for its delicate and super sweet taste. You only have to put it in the oven for 12 to 15 minutes before the fish is falling and flaking into pieces. This recipe is focused on a salmon fillet, but it can be adapted to fit any fish you may have in the fridge, like cod or haddock.

Quick Vegan Recipes

Ratatouille is a French favourite and one we have reworked with squash to make a squash ratatouille with maple syrup recipe. It is a dish that celebrates vegetables and how delicious they can be. Maple syrup is added to add a dash of sweetness. This dish is full of goodness and can be multipurposed either as a vegan main or a side dish for any meal. All it takes is some chopping and less than 10 minutes of your time to cook.

We also have a super quick recipe for a vegan Thai green curry and we believe being vegan shouldn’t make you miss out on flavours as good as these. This quick curry takes less than 20 minutes to make, and you can easily put your rice on to boil in advance. Maple syrup gives this famously fragrant curry a subtle sweet touch to balance out the flavours. We also flavour the rice with jasmine to give the dish an extra punch of perfume.

Swift Sweets

There is always that moment after finishing dinner when you get a hunger pang for something sweet, but don’t want to wait around for a cake to bake. Our maple syrup sponge pudding is the perfect cake-based pudding that only takes 6 minutes to make in the microwave. It is a quickfire cake mix with golden maple syrup on the top for an extra splash of sweetness.

However, if you’re a cold dessert fan, we have our frozen strawberry, maple, and yoghurt bark recipe for you. A creamy and indulgent sweet treat that gains its natural sweetness from an assortment of berries and maple syrup. Although this recipe needs to be frozen overnight, it takes a matter of minutes to pull together, no more than 10 minutes.

If these recipes don’t tickle your fancy, then we have a dedicated section for 30-minute meals in our recipe section here.