Nutritious choices made simple®
Soup is probably the food most people associate strongly with slow cookers. The long cooking time brings a special oomph to the flavor of even basic dishes. That being said, we’ve all had soups from a slow cooker that were maybe a bit overcooked or had a weird balance of textures. These tips will help you soup up your slow cooker soup game.
Meats that are high in saturated fat are also high on the list of foods to consume in moderation. They’re also delicious, in part because fat is helpful for improving tenderness and moisture during cooking. Lean cuts of meat are a better choice for nutrition, and good news! You can get to moist and tender without the saturated fat. Long cook times at a low temperature are ideal for getting lean meat to fall apart under your fork.
A crock full of bubbling goodness is a special delight as the cold weather edges in around us. It’s easy to get carried away with enthusiasm for the convenience that the slow cooker provides, but if you’re not an experienced slow cooker cook, it’s easy for modified recipes to go awry. Explore some of these tried and true slow cooker favorites with us this month as we consider what goes into making slow cooker recipes work.
Chilis, soups, and stews are classic methods for putting together a big family meal with a single pan. Chewing is valuable for satiety and varied textures provide interest that keep a bowl of stuff from getting boring from beginning to end. Use these tips to keep chilis, soups, and stews fresh and fun for your family.
More than a few of us have some not-so-fond food memories from our childhood of overcooked noodles in congealed soup, but casseroles are a classic way to make a family dish in a single pan…sort of. I cheated on this one. In point of fact, a lot of casseroles require you to precook ingredients and can be on the fussy side. The beautiful thing about them, though, is that you can make them in advance so you only have to slide that night’s dish into the oven when you come home. For meal preppers, mastering the casserole is a must.
Sheet pan dinners are one of the rock stars of the meal prep world. You may have visions of a chest freezer stacked full of zippered bags that you just up-end onto the pan and go. That’s close to the reality, but results will vary. Follow these tips for constructing a balanced sheet pan meal your family can love.
September is Family Meals Month, the celebration of sitting down to eat with our (literally) nearest and (more or less) dearest. No one with more than one person in a household is a stranger to the challenge of coordinating schedules and making time to break bread together. This month in Kitchen Smarts, we’ll look at some of the techniques for producing a big family meal from a single pan.
School lunch can be one of the earlier places where kids start to notice that some kids have more and some have less. One in six kids in the U.S. lives with hunger. If your family is doing well enough to have a little extra flexibility, talking with your kids about ways they can help their classmates get a decent lunch could be a wonderful learning opportunity. Here are a few ideas.