I'm also a fan of crockpot and electric pressure cooker meals.but yeah, those can be pricey. I like the T-Fal optigrill, it can make burgers from frozen in about 10-15 minutes. It can make a small pot roast in about an hour. Other useful tools: An electric pressure cooker can cook things faster than a crock pot and can also cook rice (albeit less convenient than a simple rice cooker). You can pretty much steam anything in there - potatoes, for example. That will give you an alternative to just pasta.
Put in the rice, water and flavour (butter, bouillon, frozen peas, etc), turn it on, and less than half an hour later the rice is ready. Do you have a rice cooker? It makes cooking rice dead simple. Mashed potatoes are fairly simple to make. Starches: Pasta and bread as the obvious choices, but don't have to be the only thing you do. Vegetables: This would be the easiest part, just have a good variety of frozen veggies. Defrosting is the slowest part, but since it's pre-cooked you just need to heat it up after. Either way you don't get to choose exactly what you buy, but since you prepare it beforehand and freeze it you should have a good variety stocked up, and it can all be heated up in the microwave. You see the pattern there, right? Some grocery stores will discount meat that's expiring the next day, you can get a good discount that way. You can also pre-cook sausages, pot roast, etc and freeze individual portions. You can then use it to make taco meat, pasta sauces, etc. Protein: Pre-brown ground beef then freeze it in portions. Meal prepping helps - aim to get some protein, vegetables, and starches in your meal. Crock pot recipes are usually easy (dump everything in in the morning, it's ready by dinner time).