Daily eating properly is essential to our health.

When you are a parent with a young family the prospect is there every day: someone’s got to feed those little hungry mouths. But how do you make healthy food quickly, when you don’t have much time?

It’s never an easy prospect. There’s a lot of cultural stress about getting healthy, home-cooked food on the table every day. It’s been around for a long time – probably since the beginning of time. But in today’s reality it’s essential to cook healthy food at home if you have to keep your wallet and your family from going hungry and unhealthy.

So how can it be done without you breaking out into regular bouts of weeping?

Convenience Foods

For a start it’s important to go for convenience foods as much as possible. Supermarket are packed with ingredients that will catapult you at least halfway in to a complete dinner. Frozen vegetables, for example, have been shown by research to be just as good for you as fresh vegetables. And in many cases they are better, especially when the vegetables are out-of-season or don’t grow anywhere near you.

Frozen fruit is much easier to handle when baking than a lot of fresh fruit. What is great is that frozen fruit and vegetables tend to be picked when they are at their peak ripeness. And they last a lot longer.

As well as frozen, there are plenty of canned fruits and vegetables available. It’s important to be careful with canned foods. They often have too much sugar and salt. But it’s still a good idea to have a good stock of canned tomatoes and beans. Look for products that have reduced salt and sugar. Or just add less seasoning to the food when cooking. And never ignore leftovers. Some very tasty meals can result from clever use of leftover food.

Convenience Tools

Convenience tools can save a huge amount of time. Here are a few that we use in our family, along with a few that work great for other families.

• Rice cookers: simply toss in your uncooked rice, frozen vegetables, salt, and a few spices and you can have a tasty plate of food in almost no time. Some of the modern ones even recognise the type and weight of rice and automatically carry out their magic.
• Slow cookers: Just pour in all your chosen ingredients, which can be frozen, fresh, bottled, canned or from a package, switch it on and a few hours later you can have a healthy, delicious home-cooked dinner.
• Pressure cookers: Again dump the ingredients in and you can have a delicious and healthy plate of food, but this time in just minutes. This piece of kit works particularly well with meat or corn-on-the cob.
• Bread makers: Very suitable for home use these produce their best results when dealing with kneaded dough and are super-efficient.

Rules of Thumb

To speed things up and still make healthy food to serve to your family here are some helpful rules to keep at your finger or thumb tips:

• Eat different colored foods: The nutritionists at the United States Department of Agriculture recommend offering more dark-green, red, or orange vegetables at dinner more often as a way to a healthier life
• Protein, starch, and vegetables: Stick to this formula of mixing food groups at each meal and it will make choosing easier and provide good, filling, balanced meals every time.
• Double down: To speed things up, it’s a good idea to cook double the amount so that you can freeze what you don’t eat for a quick and easy nutritious meal at a later date

Action Plan

To make sure that you have what it takes to have healthy food you can make quickly with little time, be honest with yourself. How often do you resort to unhealthy options because you just can’t face cooking? Are you using any of the tricks mentioned above to rapidly throw together a tasty, healthy meal?

What about your freezer? Is it well stocked with ingredients you could use to make quick healthy meals when you are in a hurry? You should have at least is there one meal in the freezer that only needs heating up and serving on those days when it’s just not possible to cook. Are you in the habit of doubling the proportions in recipes so you can have plenty of food in the freezer for later dates?

You can save valuable time if you plan ahead. For example, marinating meat or fish by throwing it in a secure bag counts as cooking. But it can save precious minutes when you are in need of preparing healthy food quickly.

Just by trying to incorporate some of these tricks in to your routine, you produce healthy food quickly when you have little time.

Put it into practice

You’re in the kitchen staring inside the fridge and wondering: “What am I going to make?  What will the kids eat that’s fast and healthy?”

Here are a few options to consider:

• A whole-wheat bagel with pepper slices and low-fat cream cheese accompanied by an apple, pear or some orange segments.
• A slice of whole-wheat bread with hard-boiled egg mashed with cherry tomatoes and low-fat mayonnaise accompanies by a handful of berries.
• Leftover chicken cubed and mixed with pasta, peas, diced peppers and cherry tomatoes; plus a banana for dessert.
• Crackers, preferably whole-grain, with yogurt dip or hummus; plus a banana and blanched baby carrots.
• Tortilla with sliced turkey or chicken, with lettuce, tomato and mustard; accompanied by grapes for dessert.
• Cooked pasta with mozzarella cubes, tomatoes, and an Italian vinaigrette.
• Spaghetti with peanut satay sauce and frozen vegetables, such as broccoli, snow peas and grated carrots.

It’s magic

When it comes to making healthy food quickly, the only limitation is really our own imagination. Free it up and give it a go. You’ll be surprised what tasty delights you can conjure.

[mc4wp_form id=”236″]