It is easy for you because you love cooking!!!

I hear this sentence quite often. But let me tell you the kind of cooking I do at home is actually extremely irritating for me. I call this cooking a FUNCTIONAL COOKING and is soooo far away from the cooking I would choose if I had all the time in the world and didn’t have to compromise on the ingredients and way of preparation.

Functional cooking is a kind of cooking  that has to take

  • maximum 20 min,
  • has to include the ingredients
  • has a high probability to be accepted by my child and the cooking
  •  needs to freezable and a
  • needs to usable next day for  Emilia’s lunch box.

Sounds like recipe for a hobby doesn’t it?:)

So no I object it is not easy at all for me and I certainly don’t love it….I have to learn every single day how to make my cooking effective otherwise either I burn out or we all eat rubbish at home.

Here are few tips how to make sure my family gets fed on time with reasonably healthy food every day.

efffective-cooking1. Plan ahead!!!

This is perhaps the most important point. 80% of your healthy eating success is a planning ahead your meals. Just think about how much easier the shopping becomes when you actually know what to shop for. If planning 5 weeks ahead is too hard then start with planning your upcoming 2 days. It is all about small steps forward.

2. Cook ones – eat three times

For example prepare big pot of Quinoa which takes about 15 min and use it for 3 diffferent meals. Quinoa as a breakfast (mix up with yogurt or make a quinoa pudding using coconut milk), quinoa as a side dish quinoa as a salad addition.

3. Freeze

I can’t praise freezing enough. Freezing save my life. I freeze so many meals. Meets, soups, casseroles even cooked rice or barley. It comes so handy when I do my own lunches or lunch boxes for Emilia.

4. Make your own meal plans

I don’t believe in expansive meal plan you can down load from websites or somebody prepares for you…They simply are only short term solutions. Tried myself and tried it with my client- they don’t work. But I tell you what seems to work. The meal plans that you prepare your self! Meaning if you plan your bug meals ahead do 4-8 weeks like this and you have 2 months of super personalized meal plans that you know work for you.

5. Build a library of your own healthy recipes

I find having my own library of recipes so useful. There are loads of recipes out there which promise how nice they are and how quickly it is to prepare them. Honestly I found so many recipes a disappointment and actually that they don’t take 20 min but 1 hour! Those ones though that I know works for me I put into my special library of recipes and when I am out of ideas this is whereI go for a quick inspiration

 6. Prepare something new regularly 

Functional cooking makes me tired. To awake the chef in me every now and then I try  to cook something new every “Thursday“(but not more often then ones a week otherwise I would burn out).  Something that I find as an interesting recipe or ingredient I have never tried before. This I try to make cooking fun and I constantly work enlarging the variety of our meals.