Fast, easy, and good for you!

 

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fast and healthy dinner.

A friend asked for tips on making fast, easy, and good for you food. One trick is to cook up a whole bunch of a food and eat it all week. This is certainly not a new trick, but it works. Earlier this week, I made a big pot of Pinto beans. These are similar to my almost homemade black beans.

The girls had this for dinner a couple of nights this week and I had it for lunch a couple of days. It turned out we were a little burned out on pinto beans, but no worries, you can either use them to make a "bean burger" or freeze them. Since I'm a little out of time right now (we just moved!), I chose to freeze them. They'll microwave quickly in a couple of weeks for a VERY fast dinner. They are already spiced nicely.

I also made a bunch of quinoa to go with the beans. You can have the beans with rice, quinoa, veggies (my fav is brocolli) or tortilla. We eat a lot of salsa, too.   

A big batch of soup is also really handy. I made one this week, and we had soup for a few dinners / lunches, too. We almost ate it all, but I managed to put some in the freezer before we did. When I make a big batch of something, I like to freeze some of it. It's a great treat to find a frozen batch of soup in the freezer on a night when you are really busy. As we get ready to start school, my goal is to get a few more things in the freezer. A helpful tip is to label the items and date them when you freeze them. I haven't always labeled things and I managed to move a couple of "mystery" items. One has already been composted and one will be tossed in the compost bin soon.