Healthy Helpings TV

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Planning your meals in advance is a great way to be able to keep healthy and have dinner on the table with minimum hassle. Every Friday afternoon I sit down with my recipe books and pick out some ideas for the week so that over the weekend I can grab meat from the butcher, produce from the farmers markets and the other bits and bobs from the supermarket and Asian grocer. It also stops reduces the number of visits I make to the shop during the week, which means less impulse buying.

To feed the 2 of us for a week this is what we bought and what we’ll be eating.

• 1kg lean beef scotch fillet
• 3 chicken breast fillets
• 3 large can tuna in springwater
• 300g pork fillet
• 600g lean (topside) mince (ground beef)
• 6 slices proscuitto
• 1 packet marinated tofu
• 400g kangaroo meat
• 250g porterhouse steak
• 2 dozen eggs
• 1 bunch each: coriander(cilantro), parsley & watercress (some substituted from our herb garden)
• 2 heads of brocolli
• 1/2 kg button squash
• 1/2kg baby spinach and salad mix
• 1 punnet cherry tomatoes
• 5 roma tomatoes
• 1/2kg green beans
• 1 red, 1 green capsicum/bell pepper
• onions
• garlic
• 2 large punnets of strawberries
• 3 avocadoes (for $1.50 if you know where to shop!)
• lemons and limes
• eggplant
• Skim Gersey Milk
• Low-fat yoghurt
• Cottage Cheese
• Low-fat Ricotta cheese
• 1% quark
• Canned beans: red kidney, bean mix, refried, garbonza
• Volkornbrot (German Rye bread for me)
• High-fiber white bread (for less discerning taste buds!)

For my breakfast I’ll have oats or high fibre cereal with milk, quark/cottage cheese and strawberries. S is happy with the less gourmet; vegemite on toast and coffee.

Most of the chicken breast and the kangaroo meat is grilled at the beginning of the week to make up the remainder of the salads and sandwhich fillings for our lunches and afternoon snacks.

All the salad greens are soaked, spun and stored on the vegie crisper. Some of the brocolli will be steamed and the eggplant “wet fried” to make the salads more interesting. Salad fillings are divided amongst tupperwear lunchboxes to make them easy to grab in the mornings along with foil wrapped packets of pre-cooked meat. I also hard-boil half the eggs, they make for great snacks and it’s easy to separate the yolks out if your want to keep the fat low.
I’ll use the low-fat ricotta and yogurt as desert options during the week, either mixed with peanut butter, protein powder or leftover strawberries.

Dinners:

Saturday night: The beef was roasted wrapped in half the proscuitto, to keep it moist, and served with grated beetroot (leftover from last weeks produce markets) mixed with lemon and yoghurt served on a bed of rocket/arugula. The remaining meat will make sandwiches and salads for lunch for the week for Stephen to take to work.

Sunday Night: We filmed the next episode of healthy helpings TV. We made a chilli con carne with goji berries. 2 serves for dinner, 2 for the freezer.
Monday night: Thai pork salad using the herbs and pork fillet (should have bought extra for leftover gourmet lunches!)

Tuesday Night: Homemade pasta from the pasta maker is S’s little indulgence. We’ll eat it simply with some grilled chicken, herbs and avocado no need for rich sauces with such nice pasta.

Wednesday: Herb stuffed chicken breasts wrapped in proscuitto with a tomato salad

Thursday: Steak and salad. This is our default summer meal, we’ll cook outside and have everything on the table in 10 minutes. We’ll switch steak for chicken or fish too. I’ll probably blanch the green beans to go in the salad along with any other vegies that haven’t been eaten yet.

Friday is normally our one night dining out. We have plenty of time to enjoy our meals and relax. If we’re low energy we’ll just do a repeat of Thursday’s meal, it’s faster than ordering a pizza!

All that meat may look expensive, but before we started making our own salads my partner, Stephen, was spending up to $10 a day on food at his work and it wasn’t nearly as nutritious. In winter instead of salad you could make a big stew or soup, freeze it in ziplock bags or Tupperware and grab them as you head for the front door. Our list is based on seasonal regional produce (South Australian Summer). What’s on yours?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under Healthy Food, dinner, Healthy Eating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.