The Best Back-Of-The-Box Recipes

Preparing a home-cooked meal doesn't have to be intimidating. While we here at The Daily Meal love to whip up creative new recipes, we recognize that some people find the idea of cooking spontaneously to be more fearsome than fun. For the intimidated home cook, it can be hard to know where or how to start. You don't just go from heating up leftover takeout pizza to whipping up homemade soufflé in an instant.

For the Best Back-of-the-Box Recipes gallery, click here.

The best way to start cooking homemade meals might just be by turning around the packages of your favorite food products and seeing what recipes the manufacturers recommend on the back of the box. Often using basic ingredients and food hacks that save you time without sacrificing flavor, back-of-the-box recipes have been the saving grace of mothers and new chefs for decades.

Did you know that you can produce homemade gumbo from a Campbell's soup can or serve a prize-winning meatloaf with help from Quaker Oats? All of these recipes take minimal time and average skill to execute, and they highlight some of our favorite brand-name foods in ways we never thought of before. Best of all: They're homemade.

From appetizers and main dishes to dessert, these are some of our favorite back-of-the-box recipes, just sitting on your grocery store's shelves waiting to be taken home and put to use.

Stop letting the kitchen intimidate you and get some help with these best back-of-the-box recipes. Before you know it, takeout menus will be a thing of the past.

Lauren Gordon and Carolyn Menyes and Daisy Nichols contributed to this story.