Saturday, September 6, 2008

Healthy Meal planning

Let’s face it, we all have days when we really are just too busy or too stressed to cook. But often the hard part is deciding what to cook, with the ingredients in the cupboard, in the time we have available.

This is where a little bit of meal planning can help. Planning your meals for the week removes almost all the stress.

With a little bit of planning, you will have chosen meals that fit how much time you have available to cook and you'll have the ingredients at hand - so the cooking becomes enjoyable (especially with a small glass of wine in hand!).

As an average household is likely to operate on a selection of around only 11 recipes, meal planning can give you a chance to try out some new and exciting recipes.

Every so often we unconsciously revise our repertoire, taking out the dated or over-used dishes and replacing them with newer or more exotic meal choices.

During this process, we will be influenced by advertising on TV, radio, in magazines and in store, to introduce more semi-prepared ingredients and convenience foods to our diet. But this comes at a cost. It’s expensive to eat ready-prepared meals on a regular basis and nutritionally they can be problematic.

We often read that most people are only willing to spend around 30 minutes in the kitchen preparing dinner. It’s true, spending less on food that is healthy and tasty does involve more cooking and less convenience foods. But it doesn’t automatically follow that it is time-consuming, difficult or boring to eat this way.

A little bit of planning enables you to have healthy, tasty meals that are quick to prepare and that fit within your available budget.

These handy tools have been designed to help you on your way.


To find more about healthy food just visit http://www.healthyfood.co.nz/

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