You Want a Healthy Meal, But… You’re Tired. Why Should You Be Cooking Each Night?
You’re home late. You’re hungry. You want a nice meal, but you can’t face cooking a nice meal from scratch. (If you’re like me, you do NOT want to be cooking each night!).
You’re tired. So you choose a take-out or convenience food or a restaurant meal.
They’re quick and easy.
But they also contain things that you have no control over (preservatives, artificial additives for example), and the ingredients might not be the best quality – you’d choose better yourself.
But you want convenience.
And when this happens often, you know you’re not eating healthily, and you’re not being green and eco-friendly either.
The Solution
A little bit of advance planning can solve these problems.
Suppose you’re cooking a beef casserole or stew. It takes very little extra time to cook double or even 3 times the quantity.
Why would you make more? To store or freeze, for that next time you’re home late and don’t want to cook, but need good food.
What I Do at Home to Avoid Cooking Each Night
In my home, Sunday is Prep Day. We make a large quantity of a particular dish (or several), sometimes we freeze it, sometimes we store it in the fridge and eat it later in the week.
We turn up the music and make it fun. (There’s often a bottle of wine involved somewhere too!) 😛
That way, we don’t face the cooking chore when we get in from work, tired and hungry. It’s all there, ready for us – good, healthy fresh food using ingredients that we trust because we bought and prepped them ourselves.
We also prep some salad vegetables too on a Sunday – for example, de-seeding and chopping bell peppers and then storing them in an airtight container ensures we have enough of those ready-to-serve as a side salad during the week, and the same for tomatoes and other veggies.
Sometimes we’ll part-prepare a meal, for example, cook the meat or vegetable part of a cottage pie, and then when we’re ready to eat it, we only have to cook and mash some potatoes to place on top and heat through.
We don’t have a slow cooker but they’re also a great idea. Or of course you could use a trusted food subscription where you get a box of food delivered and you and you just need to cook. It’s good because everything is in the right quantity and much of it is prepared, but you still need to cook rather than re-heat – and you need to be sure you trust the company to deliver top-quality ingredients free from additives.
It Just Makes Sense!
It just makes perfect sense to prepare more food when you’re cooking anyway. It really takes very little extra time, for example, to peel 8 carrots instead of 4.
And you’ll get paid back that time to you each day that you don’t have to cook a full meal. (It’s a relief not to be cooking each night!).
You can come home, tired and hungry, and just reheat your own food. Add a ready-prepared salad out of airtight containers and – Perfect!
Do you prepare food in advance? Let me know in the comments below. And please Share this post (Share buttons below and right) – thank you!
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