Meal Prep for Families: A Guide to Healthy, Hassle-Free Family Meals
Building family traditions is an essential part of our lives. These traditions refer to your habits, and they can be applied to your family meals as well. Moreover, eating together creates strong bonds between family members, and with the help of this tradition, you can also develop the habit of eating healthy.
Probably, you consider the meal prep process to be quite difficult and thus, you do not know how to provide this tradition without a hassle. We have some ideas for you about that. Pick them up and enjoy the entire process.
Why Family Dinners and Lunches Are So Important?
Often, in a family, there are no traditions to eat together except some visits to a restaurant. That seems logical, as each family member has their daily schedule, and typically these schedules cannot overlap. Yet, if you create a tradition to eat together at least in the evening or during weekends, you can get lots of benefits including maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
- When a family eats together, this helps to communicate with each other. Food is the greatest way of communication, and while sharing meals, you can learn more about what happens in the lives of your kids and spouse.
- A tradition of eating at home together helps to eat consciously. You serve the table, prepare meals, you eat them with no hurry, and you eat healthy. That’s much better than eating on the go.
- When you eat separately, you cannot control whether your family eats healthy meals. Kids often prefer to get some snacks or fast food instead of full-fledged meals, and for adults, eating some comfort food or even cheat meals is always easier than cooking and eating healthy.
So, if you decide to create the tradition of common eating, it will bring you benefits both in family communication and maintenance of well-being.
Some Tips on How to Make Family Dining Simpler and Healthier
Of course, we do not want you to serve multiple courses of dishes for everyday eating. Yet, you can provide your family with delicious and healthy food with ease. What do you need for that? Just a couple of tips to follow!
- Engage your family to take part in the meal prep process. Your kids can help you serve the table, and your spouse can make some meal prep processes along with you. Even if you simply ask them to take some supplies from the fridge or storage, this eases the process and makes them more engaged and encouraged in further eating.
- Be a good example to your family. When you want them to eat healthy products they are not used to, show them an example. It is easier than you consider. Provide each of your meals with fresh vegetables and eat them too with dressings or as-is. That proves your family also can try it.
- Do not forget about freshwater and salads to accompany your meal. That helps you not to overeat and provides you with enough water and fiber for good digestion. By the way, salads can be made of almost every type of greenery you can find in your fridge with some seeds, nuts, proteins, and dressings.
- Develop a menu in advance and plan your supplies consciously. That is a cost-saving and time-saving idea. When you decide to cook a chicken, for example, you can cut it into pieces, and while cooking breasts and thighs for dinner, you can use the carcass and wings to cook a broth for the next day’s soup, for example. The same refers to other protein types, vegetables, and side dishes.
- Create some semis to ease the cooking process. For example, when you cook sauce for pasta, you can make a double portion and freeze some sauce to use it further. Meatballs, fish sticks, roast beef, broth, and even some kinds of pastry can be cooked in advance and frozen. The next time you decide to eat them, you will just need to defrost them, make a garnishing, and cook a bit.
- To eat healthy, try to avoid semis and ready-made sauces. Better cook them yourself and use more steamed or boiled vegetables, lentils, and legumes to accompany your dish. Diminish consumption of fries, roasted meat semis, and pizza.
As you can see, all of these tips are quite real to follow. Yet, we have one more which may ease your family meal prep even more. There is no need to cook all your everyday dinners and lunches for the whole family yourself!
Yet, that also doesn’t mean that you have to eat some lasagnas or ragùs from the nearest mall. Just remember that 95 Nutrition is here to provide you with freshly cooked, hot and healthy meals.
Just investigate our menu, decide on your family’s weekly dining and lunch preferences, and order your healthy meals instantly. We will prepare your meals, pick them up, and bring them to your door timely. All that you need is to provide us with information about your family’s tastes, health peculiarities (if you have one), and the meals you want to eat today. Then you can serve your table and enjoy the best healthy meals with your family members.