We've cut down on potatoes (too many carbs) in recent years, but you can't avoid them alltogether, because they're so versatile.
Here's a recipe suggestion for delicious boiled potatoes:-
- Wash them thoroughly, but don't peel them (all the good stuff is in the skin anyway),
- slightly overboil them so they start breaking up easily.
Tip them out in a bowl, add in one or two raw chopped onions (onions are full of very healthy vitamins and minerals, but chop them up into fairly small pieces.
- Add two or three very finely chopped bits of garlic,
- sprinkle a large pinch of oregano or taragon (OK to use the convenient dry stuff, unless you happen to have the fresh leaves and like chopping them)
- Add salt (I'm not shy with salt, makes it taste nice)
- Pour on lashings of olive oil.
- Mix the whole lot together. Serve hot, luke warm or cold, it's delicious.
Another timesaver with boiled potatoes is to overboil them, cut up into large chunks, add salt, taragon or oregano, pour over natural yoghurt and mix well. It's absolutely delicious.
You could also just bake the potatoes in the oven, and serve with a slab of cheese wedged into a cut through the potato, which then melts and is wonderful.
Final tip, I do this a lot: make your own "ready meals". In a very large saucepan, brown whatever meat you're cooking, then keep adding vegetables and stock (e.g. beef OXO or Chicken OXO). Must contain onions and carrots, but I add everything that is about to go past the sell by date, e.g. parsnips, garlic, ginger, peppers, potatoes, green leaves off the celery sticks that would otherwise go to waste, chopped cabbage, even left over spinach or chives, left over from salads. It needs to cook for quite a while, a couple of hours at least, but then you have delicious meat which falls off the bone. This delicious thick broth with chinks of meat lasts well, and gets better every day. But after eating that day's meal, I usually let it cool and then divide into tubs for freezing. Make sure that each tub has enough for a whole family meal, i.e. enough meat and vegetables and the liquid. If I've finished off the meat portions, but still have lots of vegetable stew left, I freeze that too, and on the day fry some good meaty sausages, plonk them into the defrosted veg stew, and simmer for 30 mins or so, to allow the flavours to merge together. You can also ring the changes with the frozen meals by adding in a tin of sweetcorn (great with chicken pieces), or red kidney beans, or add in some frozen peas, or left over vegetables, like brussells sprouts.
You can serve these delicious wholesome stews in soup bowls with a slice of toasted bread, spread over with lots of butter. Everybody will think you've spent 5 hours in the kitchen preparing it. In reality, although you had to do a lot of prep at the beginning, it's easy peasy whenever you take it out of the freezer in a few days time.
I usually have several different types of casserole / stew in the freezer, and we have lovely varied meals which can be prepared pretty quickly.