How to Keep Your Meals Healthy and Interesting

When you’re running a household, it’s really easy to get into a rut when it comes to meals. How often do you end up serving the same foods again and again? You find a few meal that the kids like, and end up rotating between them.

There are probably a few reasons we end up stuck in this rut. Often, it’s a simple matter of convenience. We are pressed for time, and it’s easier to make meals we are familiar with, rather than reading carefully through a new recipe to learn how to make a new creation.

When we make the same old meals, at least we know the children will like it, and we won’t have to expend any energy convincing them to eat it. The fact is, too, each family tends to have certain foods they actually enjoy–and these foods will feature heavily on the weekly menu.

There’s nothing wrong at all with eating the same meals several times a month. At the same time, you don’t need to be trying dozens of exotic, time-consuming recipes with ingredients you don’t have on-hand in your kitchen.

The key is to find simple, nutrient-dense meals. We all have those nights when we are just too exhausted and/or pressed for time to put in hours of effort in the kitchen. These are the nights we need something quick and easy. This is when many parents will reach for something simple, but not nutritious. Meat pies, chicken nuggets or even a burger from the drive-through find their way on the dinner table on such evenings in some households.

The good news is, though, that there are healthy foods which are just as quick to prepare as their unhealthy counterparts, yet are tasty and incredibly healthy for you. Some examples of meals our family eats on nights when we are time-poor are:

A poke bowl, filled with various foods. This is great for using up those little bits of leftovers that are too much to throw out, but not substantial enough to make up another meal. A poke bowl will often have one or two starches as a base (for us, we will often use steamed potatoes or sweet potatoes, brown rice or quinoa), some leafy greens (lettuce, alfalfa sprouts or baby spinach, for example) and anything else you want to throw in, depending on what you have in your fridge. We often include such ingredients as olives, grated carrots, cabbage, chopped cucumbers, avocado, cherry tomatoes, tempeh, hummus and capers. You can season it with salt, pepper and/or nutritional yeast, or can put a dressing on it. Kids seem to love the variety of it; it’s as if they are digging for treasure! These are great as a cold meal in the summer, or the starches can be heated up as a hearty and filling winter meal.
Baked beans feature heavily on our time-poor menu. In fact, our kids’ favourite meal is baked beans with potatoes and salad. They do include some sugar, but are far healthier than many other quick meal options.
Something pre-prepared from the freezer; make your freezer your friend. When we prepare a freezer-friendly meal, we will often double or even triple the recipe so we can put some in the freezer for another night. The only trick here is planning the evening meal with enough time to thaw out the frozen meal!
Batch cooking pasta sauce is great to use as a base for a variety of meals. It’s also a wonderful way to sneak in veggies for the kids. Every few months, my wife cooks a huge pot, with ingredients such as grated carrot, zucchini, carrots and pumpkin; onions, garlic, mushroom and tomatoes; canned tomatoes, red lentils to bulk it out and add some protein (also an incredibly cheap ingredient!); tomato paste, veggie stock, salt, pepper and nutritional yeast. She will let it cook down for several hours so the vegetables become soft (and unrecognisable for the kids!), and puree it a little with a stick blender. It can be kept as chunky or as smooth and blended as you want, depending on your and your family’s taste. It can be used as spaghetti sauce, made into a vegetarian or vegan lasagna, or added to a starch such as potatoes, sweet potatoes or rice.
Over the winter months, soups made in bulk are great for hearty, nutritious, filling and quick meals. Aside from chopping and preparing the vegetables (a food processor can help things here), little effort is required. The soup simply cooks on the stove and needs to be stirred every now and then.
Food apps can come in handy for finding new and simple recipes based on ingredients you have on-hand. Many have a search function so you can find all the recipes containing a particular ingredient, and your favourite recipes can be saved. We get a lot of use out of the Forks Over Knives app and the Dr. McDougall app for healthy and simple plant-based recipes. Once we’ve made them a few times, it’s easy to adapt them, depending on what we feel like and the ingredients we have in the kitchen.

I find we will sometimes discover a new recipe and love it so much that we all proclaim we could eat it for dinner every night. Yet, a few weeks later, we’ve forgotten about it, and are looking for new recipes for dinner. To stop this happening, we have a notepad on our fridge with a list of our favourite recipes, in case we need reminding of one we’ve forgotten about. Likewise, we have a recipe folder with dividers for different categories. When we come across a great recipe, we write or print it out and place it in a plastic pocket in the correct category, and have it to refer to.

There are some good reasons to vary your foods and mix up things to include a range of fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains and seeds. You can do this while keeping it simple and cooking new and different recipes. Some of the main reasons to vary the foods you eat are:

Eating a variety of whole foods helps to fuel your body with a wide range of nutrients. The aim should be to eat a ‘rainbow’ of foods. This is because eating foods of different colours means you will be getting a large variety of vitamins, minerals, micro-nutrients and phytochemicals.
Eating the same foods each day can lead to boredom. When we get bored with foods, we can tend to fall back into old patterns and get tempted to eat unhealthy foods.
When we eat the same foods all the time, we run the risk of nutrient deficiencies, as we may not be consuming foods with all the vitamins and minerals we need.
We can sometimes eat the food so often that we can experience ‘burnout’ and not want to eat that food anymore.

Dressings and seasonings can help to keep our foods tasty and interesting. Salt (assuming no cardiovascular problems), pepper, nutritional yeast, garlic powder, various herb and spice mixes or onion powder can be the difference between a good meal and a great meal. Dressings such as balsamic vinegar can add a lot to a meal. There are many recipes online for tasty and healthy dressings. Ideally, look for ones that are oil-free, to keep the calories down and ensure it is a whole food.

With a bit of pre-planning, bulk cooking and some recipe books or apps, it is possible to get out of your food rut, and provide your family with simple and nutritious meals.

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