A More Practial Approach to Batch Cooking

It seems that everyone who is in really good shape recommends batch cooking, which means cooking up a whole lot of healthy stuff at once for meals in the upcoming week. This usually happens on Sunday.

This simply isn't practical for my life. While I do have hours available, I don't want to spend them in the kitchen. Sunday is my down day and I like to keep it that way if I can. So instead, I have an alternative method that isn't brilliant, but works for me: I cook a lot at once when I DO cook. (This is a method also known as "Leftovers").  An advantage to this method is that since I am adding new foods to my precooked supply throughout the week I have a continual, rotating supply of quick healthy food to turn into a simple and healthy meal.

I'm a cooker, anyhow. I make several dinners, at least, at home each week. And breakfast on Saturdays. And lunches for myself most days. I never have a lot of time for lunch, so having stuff to toss together in a hurry is crucial to me getting a nutritious lunch. Otherwise, I am likely to reach for something crummy to eat.

So here is what I do: If one night we have grilled or baked chicken for dinner, I grill or bake more than we need. Often three times as much. This means we can have it for leftovers another night (either as-is or in a stir-fry or some other method), and I have plenty to chop for salads or slice for sandwiches or whatever I'm fancying that day.

If I make a green salad for one meal, I make extra and put it in the fridge, ready to add some of the above chicken and cheese to for a meal, or as a side for lunch.

Same for steamed vegetables.

Steel-Cut oats take much longer to cook than regular oats. But three servings of steel-cut oats take as long to cook as one and I can put the other two in the fridge so that breakfast is ready for the next two mornings. I make mine in my rice cooker, which is quicker than the stove top method, but the cooker is kinda a pain to clean so cooking them all at once cuts down on my dish-washing.

Same goes for brown rice, but with it I make it to the capacity of my rice cooker. Brown rice keeps longer in the fridge than oats and can literally be used for all three meals (hot with cinnamon and coconut oil is delicious for breakfast!), so we go through it a lot faster.

When I brown beef for a meal, I brown more than I need. Gives me anther option for my meats for future meals on the fly.

On Saturday morning it takes as long to cook a pound of turkey bacon as it does 3 slices. I put the rest in a gallon-sized storage bag with paper towels and stick it in the fridge. Takes 5 seconds to heat 3 slices up in the microwave to go with my breakfasts and is a very nice treat during the week.

So there are some ideas. Again, this isn't rocket science- It's just making use of my resources and time to the best of my abilities.

The easier and more convenient you make it for yourself to eat healthy, the more likely you are to do so.

I would love to hear any ideas YOU might have about making eating healthy more convenient!

Food Snubbing: Corn and Potatoes

I want to apologize for taking so long to get to the next subject in my "Food Snubbing" blog series. Aside from my regular life of mother, wife, grandma, personal trainer, and homemaker, we've been dealing with the way-to-long installing of counters and back splash in a rather gi-normous kitchen (had no sink or counters in there for a week!), painting of said kitchen, plumbing emergencies, massive hail storm that required lots of insurance people and repairs, and trying to find a MIA ex-husband to get him to sign off so that my husband can adopt my teenage daughter. (After 5 years of virtually no contact, a small miracle occurred: He was located and signed the papers! Relieved is not an adequate enough word.)

Here is a picture of the beautiful daughter who is in the process of getting, finally, after 10 years, adopted by her REAL Daddy, the man who has raised her since she was 6:

And here is a picture of part of our newly countered, tiled, and sinked kitchen. I am SO enjoying it! (And yes- I am bragging a little. After the process taking 5 weeks, I feel entitled to show it off!)

At any rate, much of the above is still in the process of being worked out, but there is at least a bit of a respite for me to handle the next Food Snubbing Topic: Corn and Potatoes.

I'm not really sure that the snubbing of corn is all that common. I just heard someone at a Weight Watchers meeting once say that the reason Americans are so overweight is because we eat corn. Huh? My thought was that it probably has more to do with super-sized portions and eating too much processed foods than the sole introduction of corn into our diets.

I've also heard that corn is for animal consumption, not people consumption. Er...... How many plants do animals and people both eat? Yeah.... That one falls apart pretty quickly for me.

Besides: Wasn't it the Indians who introduced corn to us? Didn't they eat it? Weren't they pretty darned healthy?

Now, let's move on to potatoes. Actually, it's not all potatoes that have a bad rap. Sweet potatoes are looked at as the Holy Grail in the potato world. White potatoes are generally seen as too high in starchy, quick-digesting carbs. Well, yes... but this is starch the way God intended it to be. We've found time and time again that when we eat stuff the way God grew it, not the way man modified it to be, it's good for us.

Also, you know how many famines potatoes saw people through? Talk to the Irish.

So my short answer on potatoes and corn? As long as they are minimally processed, I'm eatin' 'em.

The trouble with both, I believe, happens when we start to mess with them: Same problems I listed about white flour waaaaaaaaay back when I did the wheat blog. We smash 'em up and mix 'em with things like white flour or sugar or shortening (or all!), and then fry them (with corn, this is called a hushpuppy), which makes them fatty and super-high-glycemic, and NOW you have a problem on your hands.

Ever had fresh corn on the cob? Or a potato baked to perfection with just a little salt sprinkled on it? Yum-o! But when you add butter and sour cream and bacon bits and cheese and... well..... you get the point..... When you do all of these things.... heck!..... you can no longer taste the food you used as a base to pile all this junk on. Just put the goo in a bowl to eat it, and save the poor, unsuspecting, perfectly healthy potato or corn from being guilty by association.

One thing I do want to point out about both of these foods, though (as well as peas), is that the body treats them more as a starch than a veggie. So if you have potatoes or corn with your grilled chicken, you need to add at least one more veggie to your plate for a truly nutritionally balanced meal. And potatoes or corn AND a roll? THAT truly is high-carb. Just sayin'.

So, minimally mess with them: Bake, boil until JUST done, steam, shuck, and grill. Then count them as a starch and not a veggie, and you can enjoy without guilt.

Handy Dandy Gadget Blog #1- My Bread Machine

Do you ever look at a kitchen gadget or tool and think "I wonder if I'd use that?".  Yeah.... me too.

So I thought I would do a series on three gadgets I would have normally thought were a big, fat waste of money and kitchen space, yet have wound up becoming indispensable to me in my never ending quest to eat healthier.

The first "gadget" (although it's really more of an appliance) I am going to herald the value of is my bread machine: 

My first bread machine was given to me 13 years ago, I believe it was, by my then-mother-in-law.  I remember opening it and thinking "Oh, yeesh!  Some big thing I'll never use and have to find a place in my already-too-small kitchen for."  Suffice it to say, I was less than thrilled.

But, because she had paid good money for the thing and couldn't stop talking about hers, I dutifully read the instructions and put the ingredients for a loaf of bread in it.  I thought it would be inedible and I'd never use it again. Instead it kneaded, let rise, kneaded again, let rise again and then baked a loaf of bread just as delicious as any I'd made the hard way (read: tons and tons of kneading) in the past.  It was shaped tall instead of long, which made a rather funny looking loaf.  But to get a homemade loaf of bread for almost no effort, what did I care how it looked?  We were just going to eat it, anyhow.

Here is a picture of the inside, so you can see how the pan is shaped. This should explain why the loaf is tall instead of the traditional long shape: 

And that started my love of bread machines.

I finally used that old bread machine to death.  Literally.  It died mid-loaf one day when it just stopped kneading.  I replaced it promptly with the Corney Bakery brand bread machine pictured above.

Then I started on a quest to improve my health and the bread machine turned into a towel hanger for a long period of time.

One day I found myself with an overwhelming amount of ground flaxseed.  There was no way I could use it all up before it went bad. The bread machine caught my eye.  I'd been developing recipes of my own and  thought "I wonder.......?????".  As I Googled whole wheat flax breads I started to figure out the basic principles of how to bake with flaxseed.  So on a wing and a prayer I tossed what I believed to be the correct ingredients into my beloved bread machine.  Sure enough, out came a delicious and chewy whole wheat bread to rival anything else I'd ever tasted.

It was official:  My bread machine and I were dating again.

Since then, not only have I regularly used it for a variety of whole wheat breads (one of our favorites is an Italian Herb Bread recipe I created), but I have also used it on the "dough" setting for whole wheat biscuits AND (I saved the best for last!) a wonderful whole-wheat pizza dough that I developed a recipe for.  Topped with my grandma's pizza sauce, part-skim mozzarella, fresh-grated Parmesan, lean meats, and sliced fresh veggies, it's hard to top a home-made, delicious, and healthy pizza.
 

And let me tell ya, the bread machine makes the whole process a LOT easier!  Just toss the dough ingredients in, put it on "dough" setting, and let it do the hard part.  When your machine screams at you that it's done, take the pan out, punch the risen dough down, cover it, and stick it in the fridge until ready to use.  Being cold makes it a little easier to handle and gives the crust a nice texture when you bake it.

Double bonus?  My teenage daughter, who would rather skip breakfast, will gladly eat leftover pizza for breakfast the next morning. It's a healthy breakfast chock-full of whole grains, good fats, proteins, and even a few veggies to fuel her pretty little head for school.

I love knowing what is in the foods that my family is eating.  By using the bread machine, I am able to avoid any chemicals or "what is that?" type ingredients that I often find on packaged breads, doughs, and crusts.  And, of course, fresh-baked always tastes better.