James D. Carnes Blog: 5 Real Food Meals for Real Busy People

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

5 Real Food Meals for Real Busy People

Italian Vegetable and Gnocchi Soup | A Couple Cooks

Real Food Meals for Real Busy People is part of our Healthy & Whole series, where we strive to provide resources and inspiration for home cooking and healthy living.

We say it often, but it bears repeating: contrary to what you might think, we don’t eat perfectly prepared meals from a recipe every night. We’re real people with real jobs, and weeknight eating can be rough. Many times, you’ll find us what we call “scrounging” (making up our own meals from what we have on hand). But we’ve also found that it’s not so hard to make real food meals on the reg if we just do one little thing: think ahead.

Eating real food takes some sacrifice. To eat real food on a regular basis, you’ll have to give up a few things, including:

Spontaneity — just a little bit. You’ll have to plan in advance to have the right ingredients on hand when you want to cook. But you can still be spontaneous, on scrounging nights (!).
Procrastination — it’s easy to get busy with the week and use the excuse that we were “just too busy to plan our meals. (We do it all the time.) In these cases, it’s easy to fall back on less clean quick meals instead of real food options.
30 to 60 minutes. With a 30-minute cook time, eating, and cleanup, cooking a real food weeknight meal takes about 60 minutes of your day.

But what you’ll gain from these sacrifices is so much more: nourishing food, physical health, and time spend with loved ones.

Ready to start making real food? As noted above, the biggest challenges for us are weeknights. It’s hard for us to want to spend more than 30 minutes on actual cooking time. Below are 5 Real Food Meals for Real Busy People: relatively recipes that are tasty and can be made in around 30 minutes. Timing does depend on your savvy-ness in the kitchen, of course, but the recipes below are straightforward and use fairly typical ingredients that should be easy to find.

And remember, there’s no need to cook every night. Plan to make recipes a few nights a week, and then go for leftovers or “scrounge” the remainder of the nights. Try to have cooked grains, tortillas or bread, eggs, and/or fresh greens on hand, which result in a myriad of combinations with your leftovers. Rice bowls, tacos, main dish salads, frittatas, sandwiches, and other creative dishes can be dreamed up with a few of those staples on hand.

We’d love to know your thoughts! If you try one of the recipes below, do you find it suitable for weeknight cooking in a busy lifestyle? And, what are your go-to weeknight meals (we’d love to see links)?