Tips for Healthy Summer Eating
Making healthy eating a priority during the busy summer gardening and harvesting season can be a challenge. Here are my Top Tips to help you continue feeding your family healthy and nutritious meals even during the busyness of summer.
Tip 1 – Have Veggies Prepped
… and I’m not just talking about for cooking!
Keep a container of ready to eat veggies available for easy and quick access. Don’t have a vegetable cooked for dinner? Just grab your container and enjoy some raw veggies straight from the garden instead. Here at PGH, we believe having a carb, veggie and protein is a meal! Doesn’t matter if it’s an elaborate recipe, or even cooked!
This is also helpful as you’re preparing dinner. For example, if you’re putting together a roast for dinner, you can simply grab your container of precut carrots and throw them in quickly. This is a tip that can be done all year long and is always helpful.
We love these large containers to store all the veggies together
Tip 2 – Cook Extra Meat
During the winter months, or whenever you have a little extra time, cook extra meat as you are making lunch or dinner. Instead of cooking just 1 lb of ground beef to use in a recipe, cook 3 or 4 lbs. Then, take those extra pounds of cooked beef and place them in a zippered bag to be put in the freezer for easy access later. If you want to go a step further, you could even go ahead a prep a pound with taco seasoning to make it even easier. Then, when the summer craziness sets in, you can just pop some meat into the pan to be heated up in no time.
Tip 3 – Mix It Up
Keeping meals simple yet versatile is a great way to mix things up without having to be too complicated. What does this look like? Well, it might look something like this:
- Meal 1 – Pork Shoulder Roast with a Vegetable Side Dish
- Meal 2 – Use some of the leftover roast and make Stir Fry
- Meal 3 – Roast sandwiches with raw veggies
Using leftovers to make a whole new meal can help to keep your family from growing tired of eating the same things all week. It can also help save you time, because the meat is already prepped for you.
Tip 4- Prep any meal you can
Getting yourself one meal ahead is a game changer! You can follow our hashtag #onemealahead on Instagram to see how we do it, but basically if you know tomorrow is crazy, get some lunch in the crockpot while you are making supper! We’ve got three crockpots at our place, and generally two of them are being used. Being able to get lunch on the table quickly as a stay at home mom that runs a garden operation has been a game changer.
We love these crockpots because they will switch over to “warm” if you are late to supper!
Tip 5 – Let It Go
It can be easy to get stressed and worried about making sure that our families are eating a well balanced diet. However, sometimes we just have to trust that everyone in our family is going to get the nutrients they need. When you provide your family with a basic wholesome diet full of home-raised meat, homegrown vegetable and maybe even some raw dairy, then you can still have piece of mind even if they aren’t eating all the components with every meal.
While it is ideal for your family to be eating vegetables for every meal, if it doesn’t happen then you can be assured in knowing that they will make up for it another time. If you simply focus on eating good, wholesome food for the majority of time then we can feel good about fueling our bodies.
