Easy ways to eat better

[SamanthaVimes]

Since having DC2 a few weeks ago we’ve mostly been eating ready meals and I’m keen to get back to some less processed options.

Does anyone have ideas to make cooking easier with a newborn and a toddler in the house?

Eg one thing I’ve found helpful is buying frozen chopped onions so I a) don’t have to chop them myself and b) can just grab what I need with no waste

Any ideas are welcome!

Meal plan and have the same meal on set days, so Monday is always xxxx, Tuesday is Xxx. You can do it over a 14 day plan if eating the same every week feels too much.

Much cooking stress is around the what, not the how.

Replace a lot of the cooked veg with fresh salads. Instead of boiling and cooking in 3/4 pans at a time, prepare one main thing. Then have lettuce on the side. Bags of spinach or salad leaves. Tomato and cucumber salad. Sweetcorn, olives. Carrot sticks instead of cooking the carrots. Pepper sticks with hummus instead of cooking the peppers. And so on. Fresher, more nutritious, less work.

Instead of boiling and cooking in 3/4 pans at a time, prepare one main thing.
or buy a steamer. Spuds/carrots etc in the bottom with water, then greens, beans etc in higher tiers.

Use a slow cooker or pressure cooker to batch cook, you can start it off at a quiet moment/nap time. Or do easy stuff like jacket potatoes. Don't make life hard on yourself. You can stick with some processed things for ease (sausages, fish fingers etc) but have more veg on the side. Frozen peas and sweetcorn are cheap and easy, quick-cooking stuff like mange tout.

Find ways to get your toddler involved - mine used to love washing/scrubbing carrots or potatoes in a bowl of water (even if we weren't having them that day, no harm in washing them!) or playing with veg peelings, helping tip things into pans etc. I also used to have high chairs in my kitchen so DC could watch what I was doing, try bits of food and bang wooden spoons etc while I cooked.

Assuming you have a partner, don't make cooking solely your responsibility unless that's what you want. It's easy to start taking on this stuff on mat leave then you never escape because you're more clued up on it all.

Agree with meal planning, I don't do a regular week but think of a few things we can have and only buy ingredients for that. Leaving it til the last minute to decide what to have is much more likely to result in having junk food!

Our regular meals include chicken or pork souvlaki, halloumi kebabs, chicken korma, pasta with bolognaise or pesto or tomato sauce, stir fry, sausage and mash.

I always cook more and have the same meal two days in a row (perhaps with a slight alteration, so curry with rice on day 1 and with naan on day 2). It saves a day of planning and preparation.

I found the slow cooker a big help during the baby/toddler days. I could do all the prep at nap time then throw it in the pot and forget about it.

I still relied on frozen/ready prepared veg and packs of microwave rice for sides.

Also delegated a lot of cooking to DH

@GrandSlamFinalee I find salads more work than chopping a couple of carrots and broccoli and shoving on top of my potatoes that are already cooking. More expensive too if using salad bags and you need so much to get near enough.

Quick tip to keep salad leaves fresh. Put them in a bowl of water in the fridge, change water daily. They will last for days.

I can go one better than prepared onions 😄

I've found Asian supermarkets and even my local morrisons now sell pre-cooked, basically confit onions in tins. I divide them up in a big ice-cube tray (the only home-cooked thing apart from stock I bother freezing).

You would not believe how much of cooking is waiting for onions to soften. This makes everything else pretty instant.