Your Ideal Form

Helping you on your journey to your best self!

Planning

Making Cooking Easier

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How to Make Cooking Easier

Making the actual cooking of your meals easier is the best way to avoid many of the mistakes that are made when  people try to plan their meals ahead of time.

Make use of easy cooking methods

Whether it’s one-pan oven meals, quick and easy meals on the grill, or my personal favorite, the slow cooker, easy cooking methods make cooking less laborious. Using the oven and the slow cooker might result in longer cooking times, but you don’t have to watch over them or stir. Just set a timer, and when it goes off, dinner is ready. Many grilled dishes take a bit more attention, but they are often done very quickly. Fill out the form below for three of my go-to easy recipes!

Pre-prep what you can

Mornings are often a rush. Even if you plan on making a fairly simple slow cooker dish, chopping up veggies can take time. Do some of that preparing ahead of time. Chop up those veggies and put them in containers or labeled baggies so when the time comes to use them you just have to dump them in. This is also a strategy I use whenever I buy grapes to make sure they get eaten before they turn into raisins. Buy washing them and removing the stems right away, whenever I need a snack, I can just grab a handful and they’re ready to eat. There are many recipes you can find for “freezer meals” where you do all the prep but the cooking, and then freeze the food. The day you want to eat that meal, take it out of the freezer in the morning and put it in the fridge to thaw. Then, that evening, all you have to do is cook. Many of these are even set up for slow cooker meals as well.

Make bigger batches

It can be tough to carve out a big chunk of time to prepare your food, but if you do, then the process of making those meals during the week becomes significantly easier. Take the time to prepare all your lunches for the week, so that during the week it’s just grab-n-go. If you are going to make a marinade, quadruple the recipe, and store the rest in a bottle in the fridge. Next time you make that meal, you already have the marinade made, and can just pour it on to whatever meat or veggies you are making. If you are making a soup or stew, again, double the recipe, and then freeze half of it for a couple weeks later. Multiplying a recipe takes very little extra time now, but will save you a ton of time in the future!

Be sure when freezing things to label what it is and date it! Hopefully these tips will help you stay on course to reaching your goals!

For more tips on making cooking easier, check out my Ultimate Guide to Meal Prep.

Meal Planning for Healthier Eating

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Meal Planning for Healthier Eating

Success in just about any endeavor where you are trying to make a change comes down to honesty, consistency, tracking and planning ahead. Planning ahead makes it much easier to honestly stick to your plan, be consistent about it, and also easier to track since you’ve thought about it ahead of time. Planning out your meals in advance is a great way to get ahead of the game. I’ve written about preparing meals ahead of time, but this is about planning things out before you even get to the grocery store.

Promise me something

I want you to make a vow right now to never again head to the grocery store without a list. No more just “winging” it. No more just buying whatever you feel like. Even if you are only going in for a couple things, make a list. I find that when I only need a few things, I think I can remember them all, and also since my list is short, I figure I can pick up a few random extra things, and then I inevitably forget one of the items I actually meant to buy. Make. A. List. Decide what meals you will make for the week, and add the ingredients you don’t already have in the pantry or fridge to the list. You can use a pen an paper list, or one of the many list apps out there. There are even apps that will store your ingredient lists for meals, so you simply select which meals you plan to make, and it automatically adds what you need to your list for that shopping trip.

Make a meal list

This is different from your grocery list, but will help you tremendously in planning your meals for the week. Make a master list of easy to prepare, healthy meals. (To help you get started, fill out the form below to get three free recipes!) This list also keeps your meal rotation from getting too boring, as you can reference it for a meal you haven’t had in a while. Pinterest is a great place for finding easy meals for the slow cooker, or one pan oven meals. Keeping the recipes for these meals is handy when it comes time to make your shopping list so you can be sure you don’t forget any main ingredients. It also gives you the opportunity to be sure you have enough of a particular ingredient on hand rather than getting to the store and trying to remember if you have lentils at home or not and if you do, if you have enough to cover the amount the recipe calls for.

Don’t over complicate it

While your meal list can help you with keeping your menu fresh, don’t try to make it too complicated by trying to come up with too many different meals. It’s a great idea to have at least one go-to meal that is super simple each week. In our household, we alternate between chicken thighs and wings each week, but we have them every single week. (I’ve included this one in the recipes below) Also, try to keep most of the meals themselves relatively simple. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible to cook a healthy meal at home rather than going out to eat. The easier a meal is to prepare, the more likely you are to choose that option.

Plan ahead with the sales flyer

If you live near a supermarket, you likely get a flyer from them in the mail each week. You can also use this flyer to help you plan out your meals, especially if you are on a budget. Just cross-reference what’s on sale with the meals in your lineup, and then add those items to your grocery list.

Stick to the list

I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, but once you’ve consulted your meal index and the store flyer and created your shopping list, ONLY BUY WHAT’S ON THE LIST. For one, this will get you in and out of the grocery store faster. Also, if you avoid buying extras, then you won’t be tempted by having them in the house. Healthy eating starts in the grocery store. If you don’t put it in your cart, you won’t put it in your mouth.

For more tips on planning out your meals, including how to build a Meal Library, check out my Ultimate Guide to Meal Prep.

4 Reasons Why You Should Be Meal Prepping

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Why You Should Be Pre-Prepping Your Meals

Have you ever been stuck going nowhere fast on a busy freeway with lots of traffic and looked on with longing at people speeding by in the carpool lane? Or have you been one of the drivers in that express lane, exceedingly grateful that you weren’t one of those poor souls going nowhere in gridlock? On our journey toward our ideal selves, meal prepping is that +1 in your vehicle that lets you get into that carpool lane and really make progress. Let’s look at four reasons why meal prepping is so powerful in helping you reach your goals.

1. Makes it easier to eat healthy

We humans are lazy efficient. We are always looking for the easiest way to accomplish our tasks. By prepping some healthy meals ahead of time, you take the dread away from having to cook when you get hungry. Simply heat up some food you’d made previously, and dinner is served. Slow cooker recipes allow you to dump a bunch of ingredients into a pot, set a timer, and go off to work. Come home, and dinner is done! And the recipes usually yield big portions, so you are likely to have some leftovers for lunch the next day or dinner later in the week. Prepping can also help with snacking. When I buy grapes, as soon as I get home from the store, I wash the grapes, then stand there and pick each one off the vine and into a bowl. The bowl then goes in the fridge. Whenever I feel the need for a snack, it’s super easy to just open the fridge and grab and handful and start popping them right into my mouth. If at the time I wanted to eat them I’d have to pick them, I’d likely pass for something else. Prepping makes the easy choice the healthy choice.

 

2. Built-in portion control

Another way that prepping can help you reach your goals quicker is with some pre-built portion control. Each week on Sunday, I prep my lunches for the week. Currently I’m doing salads, but in the past I’ve also done tuna with chickpeas and tomatoes, baked chicken thighs, and ground turkey with oats. Whatever the meal, I cook up a big batch, then divide it up into containers and put them in the fridge. In the morning before work, I just need to grab a container to take with me for lunch. By doling it all out beforehand, I know exactly how much I’m eating each day.

 

3. Saves time

Meal prepping sounds like a lot of work, but believe me, it saves so much time.  Take 10-15 minutes to plan out what your meals for the week will be, and write out your grocery list. If you tend to be a bit particular, like I am, you can even put the list in order based on the route you take through the store. It makes shopping trips so much faster. Also, while it does take some time to prep my lunches for the week, it would take longer in total to make a salad each morning than to make all of them at once. Plus, I get to sleep in an extra five minutes. Slow cooker meals are the ultimate in time savers. The prep work for the recipes is usually fairly minimal; mostly it’s just dumping all the ingredients into a pot and setting the timer.

 

4. Saves money

Planning and prepping your meals in advance saves money. You will waste less food when you only buy what you’re going to cook. And since you only bought enough for the one week, you avoid the issue of having too many options and having food go bad because you never got around to cooking it. Using my grapes example again, I eat them all up because they’re easy to eat, so they don’t go bad, and I haven’t wasted my money.

 

Just like any other trip, our journey toward our best selves requires planning to get us to our destination. And meal planning is a tactic that will help get you into the fast lane.

 

What’s your favorite slow-cooker recipe? Let me know in the comments!