Nutritious choices made simple ®
We’re pleased to once again support our partners at the University of North Dakota Dining Services with their annual student cooking competition, Chopped. The goal of the event is to encourage students to engage with nutritious, flavorful eating while bringing fresh ideas for nutritious meals into the dining options.
Meal prepping is on trend right now, with good reason. We all want to nourish our bodies with tasty, nutritious, affordable food within the constraints of our busy schedules. Whether your meal prepping game is strongest in pantry stocking, freezer meals, or batch meals, these recipes will help you feed yourself and your family with full flavor and minimal fuss.
Prepping big batches of breakfast at the beginning of the week isn’t the only way to set yourself up for success in how you start your day. If you stock oatmeal and applesauce, this delicious, microwave-in-the-bowl recipe will never be more than a couple minutes away.
Meal-prepping is all about getting decent meals on the table with the minimal amount of time in. Sometimes, all that means is cooking a big batch of one great dish and enjoying it two or three more times throughout the week. This pasta is the perfect pick for prepping.
Want to really get kids excited about cooking? Invite them to participate in a junior chef competition! On March 15, 2018 the Bethel Public School district in Connecticut held their annual Future Chefs All-Star Edition cooking competition sponsored by Sodexho.
We all seek a kitchen with a good pantry. A large space where we can store our collection of canned goods and pastas of all shapes. We picture a highly organized space–our own personalized mini market. Then we live, we rush, we scramble to get meals on the table, and over time that perfect pantry is anything but. We don’t need a time of year or a date on the calendar to tell us it’s time make the best of our pantry: with simple strategies, we can do it today.
If you’re on social media or the internet much at all, you’ve likely seen the photos of multiple, matching meals in little boxes all lined up on the counter. These images are examples of “meal prepping,” a cooking and eating style that has made the jump from being a trend among fitness fanatics to a popular time-saving tool for us average Joes and Janes. I see the appeal of these photos—such order, symmetry and colorful, considered composition! What I don’t see is the appeal of this style of eating as a weekly practice year-round. Let’s explore this trend and see if we can pull any useful tips from it that might benefit those who cook and eat in a more typical fashion.
If you want a timesaving meal, chili is generally brilliant, and this vegetarian version is no exception. You can either make it a freezer meal by combining all of the ingredients except the liquids in a bag and freezing flat to be thrown in the slow cooker at a later date, or you can cook a big batch and freeze it in single-meal portions for easy lunches.