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Good foods (cooking and reheating)
Rhino
TheRhinLOLRegistered User regular
TheRhinLOLRegistered User regular
Myself and my girlfriend have been getting in the habit of cooking. What we are planning on doing is cooking all our meals on the weekend, that way we have good healthily meals ready to eat during the busy week.
We are looking for suggestions... are criteria are:
1) Must be healthily.
2) We eat meat, but like to limit our intake of it.
3) It must been good to eat cold and/or reheated in microwaves without loosing to much taste/texture
Any ideas? We can google search for recipes if you just want to drop the name of the meal.
We are looking for suggestions... are criteria are:
1) Must be healthily.
2) We eat meat, but like to limit our intake of it.
3) It must been good to eat cold and/or reheated in microwaves without loosing to much taste/texture
Any ideas? We can google search for recipes if you just want to drop the name of the meal.
Rhino on
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2 15oz cans of spaghettiOs
1/2 lb of cooked hamburger
8oz can of peas, drained
1/3 cup fat free sour cream
1 tsp of onion powder.
bake at 400 degrees for 20 mins
Since I rarely use just a 1/2 lb of burger, I typically double the recipe and it will last a long time. I also tend to neglect putting in the sour cream. It just doesn't do much for me. I'll usually throw on some other spices too, crushed red pepper and/or cayenne. garlic powder. I'm sure you could throw in some other veggies too.
Hrm....I'll have to replace the hamburger with chicken sometime and see how that tastes.
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Hardly Cooking for one or two people is a waste of time if you don't do it in batches. My freezer often has all kinds of stuff, a giant batch of fried rice, pre-mixed and flavoured mince for meatballs just to name a few. You lose a small amount of taste but compared to the time save I personally believe it is a decent tradeoff.
It's half an hour a night to freshly cook a meal or 45 for a big batch of food that will last four days plus.
Personally I find stir fry food to be good for reheating as are most pasta based meals (my mother infact swears her lasanga tastes better reheated but I personally like it fresh).
Satans..... hints.....
Or try some ground turkey.
I've replaced the ground beef in my favorite Chili recipe with turkey, never looked back. I've also converted to turkey Bacon, and kielbasa.
Give it a shot, much healthier.
Just saute some chicken, onions, carrot, and mushrooms. Add water and bring to a boil. Then dump in the curry cubes and mix well.
Reheats nicely and goes well with bread, rice, or udon noodles.
The ingredients seem pretty good for you, and it's delicious hot or cold, or even lukewarm. It keeps well due to not having any meat or dairy-related products within it, and it tastes absolutely delicious.
It's especially good on rice (white or brown, doesn't matter), but you can even eat it alone if you can't cook up some rice beforehand.
Mmm. Now I'm hungry.
It is not hard to make a quick pasta, to grill some chicken breasts, or whip up a pizza with deli ingredients. A decent meal can be had within an hour or half-hour. I'm all for home-cooked pre-prepared food, but there's no need to go all out and bulk cook every weekend. Make a lasagne, freeze it down and defrost it later in the week, sure - but the time you spend making stews and casseroles for every day of the week on the weekend will end up longer than the time it'd take to make a few quick mid-week meals.
Do you drive home past a supermarket? Pick up some fresh veg and/or meat and combine with some pantry staples from home, and you'll have a respectable plate in no time.
that is possibly the worst thing I have ever seen. This is not only not good food, this is not food.
In my experience, it is rather rare to find something that meets all 3 of those conditions without being extremely simple or extremely unhealthy, but I can think of a few things that might be close.
Macaroni & Cheese - not the boxed kind....1/2 block 2% milk Velveeta (cubed), 1/2 block monterey jack(grated), 1/4 block of cheddar(grated), melted in with 1 lb cooked elbow noodles and maybe 1/2-1 cup of milk. Not exactly health food, but as long as you use the 2% Velveeta, 1% milk, multigrain pasta, don't eat half the batch by yourself, etc., could be worse. I guess you could mix in some veggies or cooked burger/chicken if you wanted also.
Garlic Chicken & Spaghetti - exactly what it sounds like. Dice up 3-4 cloves of garlic, toss them and a small amount of olive/peanut oil in a wok or other large pan suitable for stir-frying, let it sizzle for a few minutes. Then add 3-4 chicken breasts cut into small pieces, stir-fry until the chicken is cooked, serve over multigrain spaghetti with parmesan cheese.
Peanut chicken & veggies - Cook chicken as above, minus the garlic. Stir in a jar of satay (peanut) sauce. Warm up a bag of frozen veggies in the microwave, mix with some butter and sambar curry powder, and serve next to the chicken over rice.
Meat sauce - brown however much 80/20 or 90/10 hamburger you want in olive oil, drain, then mix with 1 jar of your store-bought spaghetti sauce of choice + 1 can tomato paste + a decent amount of red wine + parmesan cheese to taste & to thicken the sauce back up if you thinned it too much with the wine. Serve over whatever kind of multigrain pasta you like. Would probably freeze fairly well, but i've never had enough leftovers to try
Chili - any number of recipes. Premade store-bought spice mixes work fine. Use 90/10 burger or ground turkey, don't mound on the sour cream or cheese, use multigrain tortilla chips, and it's not horribly unhealthy.
Oh so delicious, but healthy they are not, especially when you're dumping in 30 oz of them
Lentil Soup
Make a big pot of this in one go and then serve it out into lunch-sized microwaveable tupperware tubs. Instant stock of lunches. Keeps good for around 3 days in the fridge, so you can make a batch Sunday night and it will keep you in microwaveable lunches until wednesday. It's also healthy, tasty and filling. I usually fire this together Sunday night and once it is simmering, go and play games, checking it every 15 minutes and giving it a bit of a stir.
Ingredients
Around 500g - 1kg of Carrots
One large onion
Two Leeks
Around six handfulls of lentils
Two vegetable or chicken stock cubes
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil
Chop up all the vegetables into 'soup sized' pieces (I like it chuncky but you can go crazy and dice them up real small if you prefer).
Heat a good amount of olive oil in a large pot over a stove.
Turn down the heat to medium and throw in all your vegetable.
'Sweat' the vegetables (that is, cook them slowly for around ten minutes until they go limp and soggy).
Sprinkle the stock cubes over the vegetables.
Add the lentils and cook over a low heat for around 5-10 minutes.
Pour in enough water to cover the mixture plus a bit extra and add a good amount of salt (I use sea salt).
Turn up the heat and cover until boiling. Allow to boil for around 15 minutes then turn down the heat to a strong simmer for around 40-50 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Once done, the lentils should have popped, making the soup thicker (although there'll probably be a thinner layer of water over the top).
Serve and season to taste. Can be eaten immediately or chilled. To reheat, either empty a portion into a smaller pan and heat over medium until it just starts to simmer (don't over boil) or place in a microwaveable container, cover and microwave on full power for 2 minutes, stir, recover and microwave for a further 1 minute.
Tuna Past
Dead easy to make in a hurry or if you can't be bothered going full-on gastro. Tastes great fresh and hot or chilled. If you want to chill it, decant it into an airtight container, leave to cool and then stick in the fridge. I would probably recommend eating it within 24 hours because tuna and mayonnaise get stinky pretty quick.
Ingredients
1 Tin of tuna in Sunflower oil
Mayonnaise
300g-400g of Penne pasta (I'm guessing weight here, I just go by handfulls, so about one or two handfulls per person depending on hunger)
A handful of Chives
Salt and Olive oil
Cook the pasta in boiling water with a sprinkle of salt and a good dash of olive oil.
Chop the chives, drain the tuna.
Mix the chives, tuna and around four tablespoons of mayonnaise in a bowl.
When the paste is cooked, drain, return to the pan and the stir in the tuna mayonnaise. Add more mayonnaise if necessary to mix the sauce throughout the pasta.
After about 3 days in the fridge, prepared food gets kinda manky.
If you really want to do this you should invest in a vacuum sealer (e.g. foodsaver, available at walmart). A continuing expense is the rolls of bagging material (but if you take time to initially size the bags properly you can get a few uses of each bag). On Saturday you cook up your huge pot of one-pot-meal stuff, dig in, and then put the remainder in single and double portions in vacuum sealed bags and refrigerate. then when you need a quick meal, drop one of those bags into a pot of boiling/simmering water and open and eat when ready.
For liquid stuff (more liquidy than say pudding) you'll need to buy vacuum jars. Though i've done stew by bagging it with rice, probably could do the same with lentils.
you can also freeze the vacuum sealed contents and it can last quite awhile (like if you wanted to stock up when a good deal on meat/fish comes up).
One thing I've found useful is pre-chopping stuff. My grandmother turned me onto it. Even if you only need half an onion now, chop the whole thing up and put the rest in a ziploc bag or tupperware. This doesn't work for certain things (apples, say) but it's good for most, even meats. You can also pre-measure herbs and spices and stick them in plastic bags; this is especially good if you're mixing a bunch together, because you can shake them all up in the bag and then just dump them on the food when the time comes, or you can drop the food in the bag for even coating.
I'm a fan of meals that are of the "set it and forget it" variety, i.e. stuff that you assemble and then bake for a while. Even if it takes an hour to bake, you don't have to sit there and watch it, so that hardly counts as cooking time.
Depending on how you make it, it can reheat well and last about a week in the fridge without turning unappetizing.
Yeah, I think that's something a lot of people who don't cook meals from scratch don't realise. Sure, there are some recipes that take three to five hours to make from scratch but there's a wealth of tasty and healthy meals that can be prepared, from scratch in fifteen minutes. Most meals I eat during the week don't take any longer than 30 minutes to prepare. I like my lunch to be convenient because I'm eating it at work, so home made soup is healthier than a sandwich from a local deli. It would be great to have, say, some frozen, pre-made stew in the freezer for evenings when you really can't be arsed lifting a finger though. We usually have some store bought pizzas or chicken pies for that situation but my sister usually has some frozen stew, chilli etc. as her husband often gets home late from work plus they have two preschool kids so I guess not having the time or energy to cook occurs a lot more often.
Honestly. This website has helped me throw together meals so quickly. There is even a healthy food section.
I usually go on there, type in an ingredient, or meal I want to have, and find a great, quick recipe in minutes of searching.
I have a recipe book that I write down interesting recipes in. The site gives you a rough idea for how long each meal will take to prepare, and cook. It takes some work getting a good recipe base, but having a book of quick to make recipes, that utilize a variety of common pantry ingredients helps cut down cooking time, especially if they're great and you get good at cooking them.
Cooking and then reheating in a microwave is a poor idea for several reasons. While there aren't any solid facts that have been gathered from studies on microwaving food, it has been noticed that those who eat microwaved food have a tendency of developing a higher number of cancerous cells (this could also be effected by the type of food being eaten, such as 'microwave dinners' which are higher in bad cholesterol and fats). It is commonly thought, though, that microwaves DO destroy important nutrients and vitamins.
This is why, say, if you make a stew, or anything it would be better (and a whole lot more tasty) to reheat in a pot. Someone mentioned the 'foodsaver' system, and I can get behind this device. You can freeze items for a substantially longer time, and not lose much flavor, like traditional storage methods (tupperware, ziploc). Also, if you make a stew, or anything like that, you can put a single serving in a bag, drop it in a pot of boiling water, and cut open and serve. Reducing clean up (time), allowing you to save food for a longer period, and allowing you to reheat food in a much better/healthier manner than a microwave.
If you want to eat healthy, you are going to have to take time to make food, sorry. You may be busy, but eating health is much more work than throwing pre-cooked meals in the freezer and reheating at a later date. Eating plenty of fresh fruits, veggies and lowering your intake of red meat are good ways to start (not to mention properly PORTIONING your intake). Replacing red meats with poultry, and fish is a good place to start. Also, replacing butters and other fats with healthier things, like Extra Virgin Olive Oil, or vegetable shortening (if you CANT use olive oil).
Also, personally, I find grilling to be a healthier way of preparing meat than anything else (pan frying hamburgers, for example), as it removes much of the fat that the meat will be cooking in (this is based in no fact, from what I know, but it just seems logical).
e.g. - in the morning: put quartered, skinned chicken and chopped veggies (onion, potatoes, carrot, celery, etc.) in pot, fill pot to 1/2"-1" from the brim with chicken stock/broth, add some salt and pepper and a little olive oil (and other spices as you like). turn the crockpot on and cover. return in the evening and eat with bread or rice.
repeat above, but replace chicken with chunked beef, and chicken stock/broth with beef or vegetable broth.
the crock pot will come with recipes, use as a base and experiment. some of the slow-cook and stew recipes on epicurious.com can be adapted for crock pots. one thing with experimenting with new spices in crock pot cooking (maybe in any cooking) is if you're introducing a new spice that's not specified in the recipe, err on putting in too little, you can always add a little more when it's done, but you can't really remove spice you've already added.
You need:
1 onion, diced
1 lb bag of lentils
olive oil
about 5 cups of water, but it varies
lemon juice
1/2 tsp. allspice
1 tsp. cinnamon
either 4-6 cloves or 1/2 tbsp. garlic (fresh is best, powdered is okay.)
1 tsp. cumin
salt and pepper to taste
any leftover veggies you might want to toss in. Leftover cauliflower is excellent!
a largeish pot
First, you pour enough olive oil into the pot to lightly coat the bottom; next, sautee the onions in that until they're a little soft and brown on the edges. Pour the lentils in and stir them around so the oil coats them, and then add the water and bring the whole thing to a boil. Once it boils, turn it down and simmer for about 20 minutes (don't forget to stir every now and then), then add in the spices, lemon juice, and leftover veggies and stir. Let the whole thing cook until the lentils are soft and most of the liquid has evaporated (add more water if the lentils are still hard). It's really good served with a soft bread (like naan bread or pita) and red peppers.
Rice + Beans are great for you. They contain many amino acids that complement each other.