Today we have a guest post from Laura Watson. Laura is a Registered Dietitian, who not only attends our boot camps but also helps our clients create meal plans. She has a very helpful post on creating your own healthy, frozen meals.
Can you imagine coming home and literally bringing out a supper from the freezer that isn’t high in sodium and full of preservatives, is truly quick, easy and convenient and the big plus, is healthy? Imagine this meal….Tilipia with Mango Strawberry Salsa, a cold bean/rice salad and for dessert, yogurt covered fruit and granola.
Nutritionally you are getting a lean meat, a fruit serving, a milk serving and a starch. Since this meal could have more non-starchy veggies the only work or preparation cut be cut tomatoes, a side salad or in hindsight, broccoli added to the bean/rice salad.
Instead of planning, grocery shopping and preparing meals every day you could do those tasks once a week or once a month and freeze the meals. To understand what I am talking about check out the web site www.onceamonthmom.com.
If you are a Mom or not a Mom this web site is for you. When getting home from work you simply take the food from the freezer and allow it to thaw. You might have to quickly cook some of the recipes, but all in all, much less time and waste in wondering what to cook, less costly than “take-out” or eat out and again, easy and healthy!
Let’s take the food examples above. The recipes are featured in May’s 2013 Traditional recipe list on the once a month meal web site. After clicking on the May 2013 list scroll down to the following recipe: Talipia with Mango Strawberry Salsa. Use fresh or frozen tilapia. If fish is fresh, you’ll need to freeze it. Combine the fruit to make the salsa and freeze. When ready to eat remove the tilapia and frozen salsa and thaw in fridge. Follow directions in thawing and cook the tilapia (only 6 minutes to cook). Place thawed salsa atop the cooked tilapia.
Next let’s glance at the Cool Bean Salad, a very easy salad. This recipe makes 6 servings. You’ll divide it into 6 freezer bag servings. This one doesn’t have a nutritional analysis. You can use the following to do a quick nutritional analysis: http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php.
For dessert consider the Yogurt covered Fruit and Granola recipe (featured as a breakfast recipe). Notice after making the granola you can freeze it. The cut fruit and yogurt is frozen in ice cube trays and later removed from the ice cubes and stores in freezer bags.