We've got two working adults and three kids — we're very familiar with the scheduling challenges this causes. (Once your daughter starts having extracurricular activities, things will only get more hectic!)
First off, if you want the whole family to be eating the same meal at the same time, a snack on the way home for your daughter is pretty critical to tide her over. Granola bars, fruit, carrot sticks, trail mix: something light enough that she will be hungry and eat her meal later, but substantial enough she won't be complaining for the next couple hours.
The key thing that worked for us was planning menus in advance. This provided a number of improvements:
- Much less worry about "what are we going to have for dinner" or rooting around in the fridge seeing what we can throw together.
- We buy most of the week's groceries based on the shopping list generated at the same time as the week's menus. (Vegetables and meat we won't necessarily buy very far ahead, but we can create sticky note reminders [e.g., "Buy chicken breasts and tomatoes on way home Thursday"].)
- I can incorporate bargain hunting in a sensible way. If chicken is 50% off this week, that's great, we'll have a lot more chicken than usual. However, there's still going to be a reasonable limit to how much we can eat (and/or freeze) — just because it's an amazing deal doesn't mean I should buy so much we get sick of it and/or end up throwing some away.
Recipes are chosen based on how much time we've got, not just how much we like them. Everybody's home by 5 on a weeknight for us, and we've usually eaten by 6. That's key because the kids need to have food before they go to whatever soccer, ballet, karate, or guitar lesson is coming up for the evening. Tuesdays and Thursdays are our busiest nights, so those are spaghetti, sandwich, or beans and rice nights.* On evenings we have a little more time to prepare dinner, there are number of favorites that take longer to cook, but we still know the cook time and know the kids will eat it. Friday through Sunday, when there are very few commitments, we get to try new recipes, cook complicated dishes, or fire up the grill.
* Another possibility is to take advantage of pre-cooked meals (fast food, things from the grocery store, etc.) but that is typically more expensive and less healthy, not to mention requiring an extra trip out of the house. For us it is only very rarely worth it and it sounds like you also prefer to cook your own meals, but I mention it for the sake of completeness: some families use that convenience to ensure they can eat together.
Try to prepare as much in advance as possible so the cooking process takes less time. For a couple favorite bread recipes, I've got the dry ingredients pre-measured into bags so I don't have to measure. Many meats can be trimmed, chopped, or cut to size days in advance (and even frozen that way to store longer). We're currently trying to pre-cook more dishes to be able to eat more interesting, complex dishes on very busy nights. There are dozens of good cookbooks and food websites that have slow cooker or freeze-ahead casserole recipes. (This level of pre-cooking does require a much bigger time investment on the weekends, which is one of the main reasons I haven't been able to do as much as I might like. I can always commit us to a couple of hours for planning and shopping, but finding an entire day to cook fourteen days of food at once is harder for me.)