Momma Struggling with What’s for Dinner? Using Pantry Staples for SIMPLE Healthy Meals
Do the evenings come around and you find yourself struggling to decide what’s for dinner?
Or
Has eating become such a pastime since your family is spending so much time at home, that it’s hard to keep food in the house?
These are just a few reasons why stocking pantry staples to prepare healthy, balanced meals are important.
In this episode I discuss why it’s important; what to look for when making pantry meals and some specific examples of healthy meals using only a few pantry staples.
Transcript of the Episode
Andrea Heyman 00:00 Good morning friends. It's Andrea coming with another episode of Adventures In Feeding My Fam. Before we get going, I want to give a shout out to my sweet niece, who, on the way to daycare, often in the morning she requests to listen to Andrea's podcast. So hi, Mina. All right. So I really love today's topic, we're talking about using pantry staples to make simple, quick, healthy meals. Why this is necessary, and why you definitely need to have some meals that use those pantry staples ready to go kind of in your back pocket as reserve ideas. But first real quick, I want to remind you that I am setting up one on one discovery calls. If you are stuck with your meal planning challenges, whether you've got picky kids, whether you've got time management issues, or difficulty finding the right amount of time to do your meal planning, I can help you set that up. Also, if you've got a specific medical issue that you're working on, and you need additional guidance, or you're trying to manage allergies that one of your family members have, but not all your family members have. How do you manage these challenges? When you're meal planning, I can help you through one on one meal planning coaching. But first, you can set up a discovery call. I only have a couple spots left remaining in 2020. Just think about it if you get started now that sets you up for 2021 as opposed to waiting for another month. Until we have the new year's resolution booms why not get started on it now. I'll put the link to sign up in the show notes so you can access it there. Otherwise you can find it at adventures and feeding my fam comm backslash work hyphen with hyphen mi
Adventures In Feeding My Fam is a weekly podcast discussing the challenges and fun around feeding your family healthy meals. I'm Andrea Heyman and I've been a registered dietician for over 25 years. So I know the importance of good nutrition. But I'm also a mom of three so I understand the challenges and tumor that comes along with trying to make this happen. In this podcast, I'll share my tips, tricks and menus, but also share the stories and food prep failures that come along the way to interview guests. We'll discuss family food traditions, how to strengthen bonds around the family table, as well as their favorite family recipes. There isn't one right way to feed your family. But there are countless stories, you can take bits and pieces and learn from all of them. A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of cool individuals. My friend Jill invited me to speak to her team at work. And if you want to hear more about Jill's story and how she feeds her family, she was actually my guest in episode one. So you can go back and listen to that one. During our session with that group, we talked about using pantry staples, we shared some ideas. But I can give you a summary today of what we talked about. So first of all, the first question is, are you a regular meal planner. So I'm a regular meal planner. And then there are people who are in a different bundle who never meal plan kind of fly by the seat of their pants, decide what they're going to eat for dinner, kind of at some point in the day each day of the week. But most people fall somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum. And even if you are a regular meal planner, there are life situations that derail your plans and making it necessary that you really have some backup options for meals. And that's where using pantry staples comes in handy for sure. So during COVID this really became very evident to me. So since everybody was eating at home, they were eating at home for lunch and dinner. What I found was that we were flying through foods so quickly, and it was almost as if I needed to make an entire meal for lunch and an entire meal for dinner. And that was so exhausting. I was just completely overwhelmed and the dishes I felt like Oh my gosh, I was doing three loads of dishwasher dishes every single day, and it was just non stop. So I really needed to simplify some of these options because I was getting sick of cooking. And that is why I became motivated to really find some easy pantry meals. So we're going to go into that a little bit more. So when I say pantry meals, I'm talking about using pantry staples, so things that are non perishable, and shelf stable. And we can also extend this into frozen foods as well as frozen foods. Even though they're not pantry, we don't store them in the pantry, we store them in the freezer, they are really stored for a long time and ingredients can be available for a long period of time. So for our purposes, we're going to define pantry meals as using foods, at least that come from three different food groups. So in most cases, that's going to include a protein food, a green food, and a vegetable. And that's so that we can have a better profile of nutrients and a little bit more variety in our meal. So three food groups is what we're shooting for. So definitely we want to include a protein food. And the reason why is that protein is really responsible for building cells, all the cells in the body, it can help reduce appetite and hunger by reducing the amount of ghrelin which is ghrelin is the hormone that signals to the brain to tell us that we are hungry. So protein consumption can reduce the amount of grillon helped maintain muscle mass, which is particularly important for us aging moms, 019 Final Copy AIFMF Page 2 of 5 Transcribed by https://otter.ai not that we're old by any stretch of the imagination, but as we age and it's really important to include sources of protein to decrease that muscle mass loss, including protein can reduce late night cravings for snacking and can help boost metabolism and increased fat burning and also having protein regular sources of protein in the diet aids in weight loss. Alright, so what are good easy protein shelf stable protein options. So first of all nuts and nut butters. So peanut butter, almond butter, if you have nut allergies, son nut butter are great options. And then regular nuts whether it be trail mix, or almonds, pistachios, walnuts, any of those are great sources of protein. You can always add that to oatmeal for cereal for breakfast, toss them into salads, or chop them and add them into a roasted vegetable dish to add some texture. Beans beans are a dieticians dream food, they're so chock full of nutrients, and including some nutrients that are hard to come by. And they are inexpensive, so can beans are inexpensive, but dried beans are even more and a bag of beans that might cost a buck Can you can get a lot of mileage out of so like I said dieticians probably if you were going to ask a dietitian, what do you think the healthiest food is? Many of them would say beans. So a half a cup of beans can have up to seven to eight grams of protein. Like I said they're extremely shelf stable with versatile flavor profile. And canned or dried can make fantastic options. Although if you're using drive, then you have to soak them and they might take slightly more preparation time than the canned. They're good to use in soups, pastas, dips, or with grain options. Other shelf stable protein options are amaranth and quinoa. Things like canned fish, tuna, sardines, salmon. And then we also mentioned that we were going to include frozen foods as well. So certainly there are a lot of protein options that can be frozen, whether it's fish, chicken, pork, beef, any of those options as well. All right, we said we needed three food groups. So the second would be vegetables. So vegetables are really important because they provide us so many nutrients they can protect against certain types of cancers. They're very high in dietary fiber, which of course is important for bowel regularity. And when you're selecting vegetables, you want to select those that are more deeply pigmented because We know that our nutrients show up as color. And so darker pigmented or more vibrantly pigmented vegetables are richer in nutrients. So just a simple example would be a carrot versus a cucumber carrot has more color cucumber is a little pale, nothing against a cucumber, it's still a vegetable and an awesome choice, just that we have more nutrients packed into the carrot. Okay, so both frozen and canned vegetables can be very, very good options that are shelf stable. Now I know a lot of people wonder and have thought historically that fresh vegetables are always better than canned or frozen. If you're using canned, then you want to rinse off the excess fluid that is there to kind of get rid of that sodium that is added during the canning process. But remember, both canned and frozen vegetables are typically picked, blanched, processed, and harvested all of that within right around their peak peak ripeness time, which can help retain many of the nutrients frozen are typically superior. However, both are great options. Alright, the third food group that we need, typically we're going to shoot for a grain food group. Because this is much more easily available, we can think of tons of grain options that are available in our pantry. Some of the benefits, we definitely want to shoot for those whole grain options. Remember, the difference between a whole grain option and not is that if you imagine a full kernel of corn, or full kernel of grain, I should say, if it's whole grain, the entire grain is used in the product. If it's not, then that outer layer is stripped away. And that layer is called the brand layer. And what does the word brand trigger in your mind? It triggers Oh, yeah, that brand is healthy, that has a lot of nutrients, a lot of fiber. And it's true. When you strip that outer layer away, it's no longer considered the whole grain because you've taken that piece off. And you've taken away a lot of the nutrition that naturally exists there. So you want to search for whole grain options, that's typically going to be a brown rice versus a white rice, that type of thing. Otherwise, on the food label, it'll have the word whole included in that label. So it might say whole grain flour or something like that. So grains contain a lot of nutrients, including dietary fiber, B vitamins, antioxidants, and some trace minerals. A diet rich in whole grains has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease type two diabetes, obesity, and some forms of cancer. So now that we've talked about how we want to build a pantry meal, pantry staple meal, remember three food groups, typically that's going to be some sort of vegetable, definitely a protein option, and oftentimes, a whole grain. So let me paint this picture for you. I want you to imagine a pantry. This is a typical pantry. And some of the ingredients are actually I'm looking at a picture of someone I know their pantry. So there's some pasta, they've got some rice. It looks like they've got some key Noir, some soup, some vegetable soups, can a corn cannot black beans. They've got peanut butter, some nuts, almond butter, coconut milk, it looks like chocolate syrup in there. salsa, tomato sauce, more soup, black bean soup, tomato soup, and some crackers in the shelf as well. So just with those ingredients, I hope you got a good picture. Or maybe you can picture and visualize what's in your pantry right now. Let's think about how we can use those ingredients to make a really simple meal here. And I really like this pantry because I think there are a fair amount of options here. So one thing that I can pick out right away, certainly using a pasta dish. pasta, we've got some sauce, they could potentially add some frozen vegetables that are in the freezer, of course roast those up, add it to their pasta, and possibly Oh, they've got canned tuna in their pantry as well. So maybe they're having tuna somehow with that pasta dish. Another option is making some kind of grain bowls. So here in this case, I would use rice, maybe add some black beans for our protein, some corn, add some salsa, that would make a really nice meal. or certainly using one of these, maybe crackers with some tuna, and then one of these vegetables, soups, three food groups super easy. prep time takes probably about five minutes for many most of these options, except if you're making the rice or the pasta that would take a little bit longer, but very little hands on preparation time. So you get the idea of how to combine some of these super, super simple basic ingredients that most of us have in our pantry. and combine that to make a meal that can be pretty balanced, pretty nutrient dense, and great in a pinch when you're not sure what else to make. I'm going to be leaving you a bonus, I spoke before about beans and lentils being one of my favorite foods. And I've gathered some of my favorite dishes, beans and lentils can be used in a variety of ways. So I'm going to be leaving the link below so that you can tap into that and get my five ways to use beans and lentils. And I've got recipes listed there for all. And like I said since beans and lentils are so shelf stable, they're great options to pull out to use to make a healthy pantry meal. So as you can see, it doesn't have to be difficult to make a healthy meal like we can do this. As busy moms, we can do this in a fairly simple, easy way. And we don't have to make food preparations so difficult all the time for ourselves. We want to make it easy and still provide healthy nutrition for ourselves and for our kids. I hope this episode was helpful for you. If you liked it, please rate and review and share it with a friend who can get some benefit out of this too. We are over in a Facebook group. If you want to dive deeper. We are going there to discuss all kinds of ideas related to the topics that we hear during these podcasts. And that is adventures in feeding my fam. That's the name of the Facebook group so I made it real easy for you. And you can always find me on Instagram at adventures and feeding my fam or adventures and feeding my fam calm. And if you want to work with me, you can sign up for one of those discovery calls. Take care everyone and until next time. I hope you have a great day and have found some new easy meals that you can make for your family.