Outsmart Your Kitchen

We're starting a new series called the Helpful Kitchen, for QUICK and EASY tips and tricks to help you manage your food and move away from your food managing you!

1.

FREEZE SAUCES/SOUPS/FOODS THIN

This week we're tapping into recognizing your barriers for a home prepped meal (typically more controlled and healthy) vs. grabbing fast food (less nutritious and generally more expensive).

For me a large barrier is TIME. Even if I meal prep and freeze my food, after a long day I do not want to wait for it to defrost. Find your barriers and make reasonable action plans to address them. Freezing your foods/proteins/sauces/soups so that they are thinner than 1/2" in thickness will have your food defrosted in less than 3 minutes once you place it in a bowl of warm water, or ...

For todays lunch:

1. Pull pre-made thin-frozen spaghetti sauce out of freezer and put in lunch bag

2. Bring some water to a boil while enjoying morning coffee

3. Boil whole-grain noodles of choice

4. Split noodles into 2 containers: 1 for todays lunch, the other for perhaps 2 days from now (store in fridge)

5. Grab a more-than-healthy serving of spinach and put in lunch bag

6. Go to work happy

7. AT WORK: Pour now defrosted sauce over pre-boiled noodles and heat. Put all spinach on a large plate. Serve the heated spaghetti with sauce over top of the spinach and enjoy your balanced meal that took you 5 minutes to prepare today!

Make it fancy: Sprinkle salt, pepper, parmesan cheese or parsley on top

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