Cooking Forward

One of my main goals for this year (and for my life) is to eat healthy 99% of the time. A girl has to have decadent chocolate stuff once in a while!

I've never been good at menu planning, and that is a key part of the whole healthy eating thing. When you are on your way home from a hectic day at work and deal with an hour or more of bumper cars on the Beltway and you have a choice between an expired can of cream of mushroom soup or a hard boiled egg your car automatically gets in line at a drive through.  You end up hitting the jackpot for calories, fat, sodium. Not conducive to a healthy lifestyle.

So, I know that planning is key. I've scoured the internet for ideas on menu planning and have come up with the following:

1.  Keep a running inventory of what you have in your fridge / pantry / freezer.
Many bags of spoiled salad, cucumbers and other produce will attest to the fact that once I put something away it is out of my mind. Unless it is chocolate. I will always remember that there is chocolate lurking somewhere in my kitchen.

2.  Have a few rotating meals. Breakfast for instance. I could rotate oatmeal / yogurt & fruit / Kashi bar and fruit.  OK- that takes some of the pressure off.

3.  Ditto with rotating lunches and snacks.

Another thing that works really well for me is cooking ahead. I love to take a Sunday afternoon and roast a bunch of veggies for the week. Maybe make some soup and / or a Crock Pot meal.  Again, this takes planning. If all that's in my house is that questionable can of soup or a hard boiled egg - not a whole lot of cooking for the future can take place.

So this all boils down to two things: planning and cooking ahead when possible.

I often buy the frozen steel cut oatmeal at Trader Joe's. It's very good- but has a lot of sugar in it and is very expensive for 2 servings of oatmeal. It comes in a shrink wrapped plastic thing and is shaped somewhat like a muffin.

I love steel cut oatmeal and it is sooooo good for you. But it takes about 35 minutes to cook. No matter how much I plan, I will not be cooking anything for 35 minutes in the morning.

An idea popped into my head. Why not make up several servings of the oatmeal, put it in a muffin pan and freeze it?

It was a good plan, however,  the muffin tin wouldn't fit in my freezer. But after a night in the fridge they were formed enough to take out and put in a container and freeze.  I'll give a full report later on the success of this experiment.

More cooking ahead:

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Skinless chicken breasts baked in the oven for lunches and protein snacks this week.

Maybe meal planning and cooking ahead will become second nature to me.
Maybe I'll cut down my grocery bills.
Maybe I'll eat more fruits and veggies rather than letting them rot in the produce drawer.
Maybe there is one more square of Godiva dark chocolate left in my pantry.

An observation:  Oatmeal is NOT photogenic!