Top 3 Healthy Family Meal Hacks

In this episode there are top three healthy, family meal hacks to help you stay fully nourished and away from the takeaway shop, whilst balancing ambition and family life.

Links discussed in the podcast:

Gooding Funeral Services: https://goodingfuneralservices.co.uk/
Mother of Abundance Facebook Group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/motherofabundance
The National Funeral Exhibition:  https://www.nationalfuneralexhibition.co.uk/

Transcript

[9 Minutes Read]

Hello, and welcome to Mother of Abundance.

The place where ambitious, caring mothers find information on how to live your best life. So whether you’re a motorist who’s growing a business, climbing the corporate ladder, studying for a qualification or an at home mother, while striving to be the best you can be, you’re in the right place. I’m your host, Xina Gooding Broderick.

Hello, and welcome to Season 2, Episode 5. It’s great to have you back. Welcome, welcome back. If you’ve been here before, I am so glad to have you here. If this is your first time, I’m so glad to have you here too. My name is Xina Gooding Broderick. I am a business owner and an executive coach for ambitious mothers.

And in today’s episode I have got for you top three healthy family meal hacks for winter. The reason this has come up is because we’re switching now to heavier weather. Well, I say heavier, I kind of mean, horrible weather. It’s getting cold. Well, it is cold here in the UK, certainly very cold. Not as cold as it gets. But we know what’s coming. And it’s quite miserable. Sometimes it’s just rainy. Sometimes it’s sunny, and then we get periods of rain. And I don’t know, it just seems to be kind of all over the place. But however we look at it, it’s not very pleasant.

So our eating tends to change. And we might go for stodgier, heavier, warming, more filling foods. And they can seem like they take forever to prepare and that can be quite off-putting. So in order for you not to be put off of creating a healthy meal, I highly recommend that you think of a few meals that you can prepare in advance or at least prepare components of those meals in advance.

Anyway, you know what? I’m getting far too, far too ahead of myself. Let’s go to top hack number one; prepare your meals on your off day, or at least prep them. When I say prepare I kind of mean prep. Same thing? Same difference? I don’t know. But we’re getting into semantics really. And we prep your meals on your off day.

In my home, my off days are Saturday and Sunday. And just to give you an example of the kind of base meals you can prepare on your off day, these are the things that I prepare. I will cook a big pot of soup. I will prepare a big pot of rice. And I think that’s kind of it, mainly. When it, when we’re getting into the colder months. I will also roast one or two trays of root vegetables. And I’ll tell you what I’ll do with those. So the soup kinda, that’s self-explanatory. Throughout the week, we’ll ladle out some soup, warm it up. And there we are. We’ve got an all-in-one meal. With the rice, we will add that to a vegetable curry, which I might also have prepared at the weekend. Or I’ll fry it with some vegetables because we like vegetable fried rice. Or I might also prepare some sticky tofu, which we really quite like here as well. Elijah likes, Elijah, my nine-year-old, he likes the tofu without the sticky sauce, but it’s all good. He just has it fried with salt and pepper. And that’s him sorted.

So that’s just an example of some basic things that I cook at the weekend. It might be a big pots of soup, a large pot of rice, a tray of roasted vegetables and maybe a big pot of vegetable curry. So either the curry will be part of the main. I’ll just top the rice, put on top of the rice or it might be something that I serve on the side.

Number two; buy peeled, chopped, frozen vegetables. A lot of time spent on cooking is in preparing the main ingredients. And I don’t know about you but I don’t necessarily want to spend half of my cooking time, peeling and chopping vegetables. I could just be doing something way more productive than that. So I save time and money, by buying my vegetables peeled and ready chopped. We get our onions peeled and chopped. Our garlic peeled and chopped. Our carrots peeled and chopped. I think you get the idea.

We also get larger vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower. We like asparagus spears, all sorts. I quite like to rotate vegetables to keep things interesting. So you know I’ve mentioned that at the weekend we might cook soup, so I might throw in some of the frozen vegetables. Or, I might be rotating some vegetables from my fridge. We get Caribbean ingredients as well. So I quite like yam, sweet potato, green banana, things like that. We might have those fresh to throw into the soup at the weekend or during the week, or I might just throw in my frozen vegetables. And I quite like chopped sweet potato. I like chopped squash, things like that. I’ll put in my carrots and squash sweet potatoes, the orange ones, the orange vegetables go quite well together. I know that sounds really odd. But apparently it’s healthy to rotate the colours of your vegetables too.

I’m a huge fan of that. I eat plant based. So I’m quite good at rotating my vegetables and keeping things interesting. So no two pots of soup are the same for me in our house. Try and keep things interesting throughout the winter as well so that you’re not resulting, to take away food because you’re tired and you’re bored of what you’re eating. Which brings me on to point number three.

Research three meals that are easy to make and your family loves. And cook that when you’re stuck. Cook it when you’re not stuck. If your family loves it, just cook it more often. Ask your family to help you with that. I think it’s good to have maybe five meals that you can snatch out of the air and your family really like, but three, even if you’ve got three, then you know if you’re stuck, you can rustle up something that’s really quick and easy to prepare.

So in our house, soup, we love soup. And we very rarely tire of soup because as I said we rotate things. I might have lentils in the soup as well as sweet potato and carrots or yum green banana. I did mention we rotate our vegetables, so our soup stays interesting. We like rice with tofu, which I mentioned. We love vegetable fried rice. I did also say, I mentioned that I’m plant based but there are a couple of things that I’ve had recently.

I think Linda McCartney’s got a shredded chicken. And there’s actually a brand called vegan egg, so I’ve made chicken fried rice without any chicken in and without any real eggs. Sounds weird. Sounds strange, but it actually tastes quite good. I do like to have garden peas in my fried rice. But I digress.

Porridge. Now, I know that must sound really, really boring. But we joke that we are a family of bears, with Daddy Bear and I’m Mummy Bear and then we’ve got Little Bear. He used to be Baby Bear but he is just far from a baby now, so he’s still little. We call him Little Bear. So we’re huge fans in keeping, in keeping with the fairy tale, we are huge porridge funds in this house. And our porridge will typically be an oat porridge. I add walnuts, flame raisins; they’re huge raisins. They are great. They taste really good. Nutmeg and maple syrup. And sometimes Elijah even has the late almonds on the top of his porridge. And we will eat porridge at any time of the day. It’s a family favourite very nutritious. So yeah, that’s a favourite for us. We do also like vegetable curry and rice.

So what do you like to eat? What are your favourite meals? Do you have top three healthy family meal hacks of your own that you would like to share? Remember, lots of ambitious mothers are juggling. They’re juggling their time between school runs, doing their careers, doing homework, doing housework, a lot of us are studying, myself included. And these hacks can be really helpful, especially if you’re trying to avoid turning to take away meals and you want to keep things healthy.

Just another thing that I wanted to add, please take into account the turn of the season and we’ve got this whole pandemic thing going on at the moment. We don’t know when or if that’s going to change. We know that there are going to be some permanent changes. I’m hoping that more of the positive things will become permanent, like flexible working, a lower carbon footprint and things like that. So I’m hoping that the positive effects we can keep from this particular situation you might know but I’m a huge fan of when life gives you lemons make lemonade.

Well, this is an opportunity, this, you know what with COVID-19 bringing to the fore the fact that flu season is fast approaching, take advantage of the fact that you are forewarned. Get yourself some vitamins. Get yourself things like Vitamin C, Zinc, eat vegetables and fruits that are going to help boost your immunity. The sunshine isn’t so bright any more. Seriously consider getting Vitamin D, Vitamin D3 in particular. I am not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist. I have no medical certification whatsoever. I’m just giving you some old school advice. You can take it or leave it. But don’t sue me if you get some Zinc and Vitamin C and then you catch cold, because I won’t really be taking that seriously. But what I’m saying is forewarned is forearmed. Do what you need to do to keep yourself and your family safe. And I hope you guys are well. And that’s it really.

If you want more advice like this, I do drop them from time to time in the Mother of Abundance Facebook Group, which is growing and you are more than welcome to join. On Mondays in the group, we set our goals for the week. On Wednesdays in the group, we share our business links, our wins for the week, anything that we are celebrating, we share that on Wonderful Winning Wednesday. And on Friday, we talk about self-care, what’s coming up for ourselves and our loved ones that we are looking forward to doing over the weekend. And then Monday it’s again, a catch up, see how everybody’s doing with the goals that they’ve set the week before, and the goals that they’ve got going forward. So that we find is really helpful for everybody in the group.

Please come and join us, especially if you’re nice. We’re a nice group of people. We want to keep it that way. And also recommend it to any of your friends who are ambitious mothers who could do with the accountability and the positive energy. And that is it from me for now. Have an abundant day and an abundant week.

Thank you for listening to the Mother of Abundance podcast. Your host, Xina Gooding Broderick. Sign up at motherofabundance.com, for your free copy of the “Planning Your Best Life and Living It Every Day” Workbook. See you on the next episode.