5 Things That Changed When our Family Swapped to a Healthy Balanced Diet
Meal planning
Embrace it!
When you decide to go against what modern cooking has become in today’s fast paced life “family meal in a box - heat for 3secs in the microwave – enjoy” and go back to knowing what’s going in your body “cooking your meals from scratch - enjoy”, there are certain life changing events that take place that you have no control over, I mention them here to prepare you and to warn you and to entice you into making the shift ;)
Warning: you will need more pots and pans because several things are cooking for the one meal. If you don’t have many, get good at timings and get inventive... I put my peas and corn in 2 mugs and pour boiling water over them twice and they’re done, saved myself 2 pots right there and they have a nice bite because I haven’t boiled them to death while attending to my other pots, ha!
Preparation: You’ll need to plan ahead, no escape! Don’t leave it for Sunday night, plan on Friday. Get inventive, use a calendar like the one in the photo, fill your weekly meal plan with 2 main dishes to be cooked in advance and eaten on alternate days during the week. Eventually you’ll be able to go back and see what you were eating 3 months ago for inspiration (and hope it wasn’t lasagna again!). The only hard bit is making this a habit, but it’s the best way to get true variety from your meals, reduce cooking hours and food waste! I have 2 patterns I usually follow:
On Sunday afternoon I prepare a meal that will feed us Monday and Wednesday and on Monday I prepare something that will do us Tuesday and Thursday; or
I do it Grandma’s way and make a big roast on Sunday, eat the left overs on the Monday, make rissoles for Tuesday and soup out of the bones for Wednesday! This is very satisfying as you get your money’s worth from that roast big time!
Eureka moments: You won’t need a microwave! Promise! Your little pot will heat it up just as well and it will be heated evenly throughout on the first go (hint, hint!)
Another eureka moment: Your bin charges will reduce… well at least ours did, we were able to come down a size of black bin and sometimes it only goes out once a month! how’s that for doing our bit for the environment?!
A 3rd eureka moment: Most of the supermarket aisles become obsolete because you don’t need to go down them! Great time and money saver! You do spend ages in the veg section looking for something you haven’t eaten in a while, but other than that you won’t need to stroll down the cereal aisle, the fizzy drink aisle, the household cleaning aisle (to be explained in another post), the free-from aisle, the desert aisle, the delicatessen etc. Now don’t get me wrong we still do eat things from these aisles including the crisps and chocolate aisle, but it’s a lot more seldom and we simply get the one or 2 things we want without any inclination to investigate new more complex tastes and flavours (aka increased chemical concoctions).
Bring home meals back to basics, make meal times family times, even if the kids stray during their wild teenage years, I have it on good authority that they come back to the family ways you taught them at the start (at least I’m counting on that being real!)