John Myers
Healthy after-hours meals are quick and easy to prepare, it’s just a matter of prep. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, healthy nutrition often falls by the wayside, because cooking takes time, which many people don’t have. How you can still do it, we explain in the article.
Pre-cook and prepare healthy meals for the end of the day
When you come home hungry after a hard day at work, you want to eat something quickly. To avoid constant fast food consumption, you can prepare healthy meals so that everything goes very quickly in the evening.
- Do you have more time at the weekend to cook healthy? Then there is a simple trick for Monday evening: cook more on Sunday so that there is also a delicious evening meal ready for Monday that only needs to be warmed up.
- You can pre-cook basic ingredients such as rice, pasta, or potatoes in the morning for one or even two evenings. This works well on the side, for example during breakfast. A little vegetable oil or butter will keep the food from drying out or sticking together.
- Even a salad can be cut in the morning. If you don’t have time to cut up a whole colorful salad in the morning, it also helps to chop up at least some of the ingredients. Then less has to be done in the evening.
- However, the dressing should always be poured into the salad shortly before consumption.
- If you enjoy cooking and would like to spend one day off a week doing it, you can even pre-cook two to three different dishes for a whole week and divide them between the fridge and freezer – depending on when the dishes are to be eaten.
- Think in advance about which dishes you would like to eat, write a shopping list and buy everything you need the day before the cooking event.
- Most pre-cooked foods will keep in airtight containers for about three days in the refrigerator, with the exception of fish and spinach. Appropriate dishes should be eaten first.
Benefits of pre-cooking
Preparing and pre-cooking for several days has become a real trend that even has its own name: meal prep. The enthusiasm is understandable, as meal prep has several advantages.
- Ready meals, which are often too salty, too greasy, rarely made from high-quality food, and packed in too much plastic, are becoming completely unnecessary.
- The delivery service is also used less often when a delicious meal can be prepared very quickly in the evening. That saves money.
- Anyone who likes to buy fresh food but then doesn’t have time to eat it in time often has to throw it away.
- Food waste is a major social problem. By processing the food for later, they are spared the garbage can.
Meal prep classic: Chili sin Carne
Chili sin carne, the meatless version of chili con carne, is a popular meal prep dish. You will find many great recipe suggestions on various internet platforms and also in our kitchen tips.
- Because it doesn’t contain minced meat, it has a longer shelf life than its meat counterpart.
- It can even be prepared when there are just a few fresh ingredients in the house because it consists largely of long-life canned food that can very well be stored permanently at home.
- Chili sin carne is well suited as an accompaniment to rice, but can also be eaten simply with bread or on its own.
- There are numerous variations of the dish. For example, corn, potatoes, lentils, or meat substitutes such as soy mince are ingredients that some use and others prefer to leave out.
Think through the after-work kitchen
With the right planning, you will have your after-work kitchen under control so that you will enjoy preparing something healthy for yourself.
- Everyone knows the benefits of lettuce. Take leaf salads, they can be cut into small pieces quickly. Grating vegetables is quick and can be given on top.
- Get good sharp-cutting tools. This makes everything go faster and you don’t lose interest. Only buy kitchen appliances that make sense and don’t take up much space. Free work surfaces mean that food can be prepared and prepared more quickly.
- Make sure you have simple kitchen gadgets ready. This includes sharp knives, a practical kitchen slicer that does not have to be assembled in a complicated way, a good silicone scraper, and a powerful blender.
- Make your weekly schedule for the weekend. Determine what you want to cook during the week. Write everything you need on a shopping list. It’s best to do the bulk shopping on Tuesdays. Many supermarkets pass on the experience that very few people shop on this day.
