The Busy Couple's Guide to Healthy Eating During the Workweek
How finicky is the most finicky member of your family? The answer usually dictates how easy it is for a busy couple to eat healthy during the workweek. You have it made if the family is full of folks who will eat anything you put in front of them. The cookbook is wideopen, which also makes it easier to find groceries on sale.
As for my family, the list of food allergies was long and food they'd eat was short. It was a nightmare. So I'm all too familiar with the frustrations of pareparing healthy meals when both of us work and our kids have jam packed schedules.
7 Tips For Busy Families to Eat Healthy Each Week
When all our kids lived with us, we didn't have time to prepare each meal from scratch every day. I had to think outside the box, and these were the strategies that worked for us. I needed to plan and schedule meals based on everyone's schedule. What follows are the strategies I leaned on.
1. Build Your Week Around Batch Cooking
I often spent Sunday evenings with sports or a movie on in the background while I batch cooked.
What is batch cooking?
Batch cooking is the practice of cooking large quantities of food at one time so you can store portions in the fridge or freezer for quick meals later.
What food works well when you batch cook?
Any food that can be a building block for many different recipes works well. Here are a handful of examples:
Grilled chicken, turkey, or tofu
Brown rice or quinoa
Roasted vegetables
Washed salad greens
Chopped vegetables for snacks
Homemade taco meat
Pasta for quick lunches
Take grilled chicken, for instance. I can use it for salads on Monday, tacos for Taco Tuesday, grilled chicken wraps on Wednesday, and chicken tortilla soup on Thursday.
2. Fill Your Freezer With Future You in Mind
I didn't make freezer meals from scratch. I didn't have the freezer space to keep them in there for long. But others do. I have friends who have burritos and lasagna in the freezer at all times. What I did do was put any fruit that was close to going bad in the freezer to use for smoothies later.
3. Don't Fear Healthy Convenience Foods
I felt guilty for a long time when I bought convenience food. I eventually learned that the rotisserie chicken you could pick up at the grocery store, already warm and ready, was always a hit. I served it with prepackaged salads. I would buy more than I needed and used the leftovers to make chicken wraps for lunch or dinner the next night.
4. Create Breakfasts That Practically Make Themselves
I didn't have time to make breakfast for the family, so I relied on batch cooking earlier in the week or convenience foods. My wife eats some sort of special health bars for breakfast and lunch. She took care of ordering those, leaving the rest to me.
Cottage cheese is my go-to when I don't want to put any work into breakfast; however, when I have time, I love to batch-cook egg white wraps. Wrap them in foil, and they're good to go each morning.
Our oldest and youngest child loved Greek yogurt with berries and granola. Our middle child loved protein smoothies using frozen fruit. And there's always cereal.
Pro Tip: Just before unused fruit goes bad, throw it in the fridge. They make for great smoothie ingredients.
5. Simplify Your Workday Lunches
Here are five quick ideas for simple and healthy workday (or schoolday) lunches.
Mason jar salads
Grain bowls
Turkey wraps
Leftovers from dinner
Adult lunch boxes with cheese, fruit, nuts, vegetables, crackers, and hummus
5. Develop a Weekly Meal Planning System
I wrote out our weekly meal plan based on the kids' after-school activities, my wife's work schedule, and my work schedule. I handled everything cooking-related in our family, from start to finish. But that's not the case in other families. If you and your partner take turns, you need to pull your weekly meal plans together.
Related: Click here for scores of ready-made weekly meal plans.
6. Use Technology to Make Planning Easier
My favorite tech tool for meal planning is ChatGPT. Write a list of all the leftovers in your fridge and pantry, then ask ChatGPT to make a list of recipes for the week using a variety of the items on the list. Here are some other apps:
Mealime: Personalized meal plans with automatic grocery lists
Paprika Recipe Manager: Saving recipes, organizing meal plans, and creating shopping lists
AnyList: Shared grocery lists that update in real time for both partners
Cozi Family Organizer: Shared calendar, meal planning, and grocery lists in one app
7. Remember That "Good Enough" Is Good Enough
As I said earlier, I used to feel guilty if I didn't make every meal from scratch, and the meal needed to look like what I saw on social media. As much as I love to cook and see my family enjoy the fruits of my labor, notice the pun there :0), it was impossible to do. I simply lacked the time. And that's okay, because good enough is good enough.
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