Healthy Cooking Tips For Busy Moms

Are you a super woman? Are you a multi-tasking mom?

If you are time challenged, how to you ensure your family gets proper meals. Proper meals as in tasty food that is very nutritious, not pre packed, heavy in additives, high in fat, low in nourishment types of food?

Nothing beats a good home cooked meal. Your kids would benefit from meals cooked from fresh ingredients. Sure, they can subsist on fast food, but in the long run, are all the health problems related to junk food worth the modern convenience? Wouldn't it be better to feed your family, yourself included, food cooked from nutritious fresh food and vegetables?

That's an ideal many moms strive for in this busy world. So much to do, so little time to do it all. Our careers take out a lot from us. Even stay-at-home moms don't have it easy. In fact, it is easier to go to work than to face screaming, demanding children twenty-four hours a day. By the way, are they screaming demanding children because of their body's reaction to all those food additives. Something to think about, isn't it?

How do you do it? Serve home cooked meals for dinner every night, when you have to work all day?

My mom's a super woman. Every time, she cooks anything, she quadruples the portion and freezes the excess into single meal portions. Think about those instant meals you'd buy at the supermarket. Get home, take them from the freezer, dump them in the oven and serve them to the family. Now what if you could do the same with real home cooked meal?

Invest in freezer bags. On a weekend or during the holidays, go on a cooking spree and cook all the meals your family would love for dinner over the next week (or weeks depending on your schedule). Let the food cool completely before you put them into the bags, taking care to put enough for one family meal in each bag. Deep freeze them so each morning, you can take one bag out from the deep freezer to defrost slowly in the fridge. When you get home, you can microwave the food and serve your home cooked meal to the family. We do that with chicken in gravy. You can do that with virtually any meal, just make sure you put the date you prepared the meal on the bag so you won't end up eating food that was cooked several years ago.

Okay, so precooked, home made meals still isn't as good as food you cook the day itself. So what's a busy woman going to do?

Get a crock pot. Serious. that's what my colleague advised me when I got married and wanted to have home cooked meals for my husband and myself. The beauty about crock pot cooking is its convenience. Before leaving for work, dump the meat and veggie's into the pot, add water, switch on the pot and leave for work. It doesn't matter if the meat is frozen or not. Over the course of the day, the meat will thaw and cook with the veggie's in the pot. By the time you get home, you'll have dinner waiting for you. All you need to do is cook the rice. Here are some crock pot recipes to get you started.

Soups and stews can get boring very quickly. How about meals like stuffed chicken breasts? Or Quiche Lorraine?
Before you groan at all the work, not to mention the time you'd have to spend slaving at the stove to prepare these meals, the cooking time for this quiche lorraine is 17 minutes while the cooking time for the chicken breasts is 15 minutes.

by Janice Wee - 23 May 2009

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