Catalyz Nutrition

Life is too short to cook three meals a day.   

So what is an omnivore focussed on healthy eating .... to do?  

On one hand, making healthy meals from scratch burns precious hours that could otherwise be spent on family, work, or personal pursuits.    On the other hand, succumbing to "traditional fast foods" generally means dishing up a host of unhealthy ingredients:   refined grains stripped of nutrients, sugar, chemical preservatives, flavor enhancers like MSG, trans fats, corn syrup, genetically modified wheat or soy, and unstable polyunsaturated fats which are chock full of free radicals due to industrial processing methods.   

I wish I could report that McDonalds was the only source of such ingredients.   Unfortunately, any convenience food made -- or mostly made -- beyond your kitchen is likely to include these undesireable ingredients.     Think canned soups, supermarket take-out, frozen dinners, spice mixes, prepared salad dressings, and mid-priced or inexpensive restaurant meals.

There is only one way out of this dilemma (unless you live in a commune).   You must make your own fast food.

Yes, that means that to eat truly healthy food without slaving in the kitchen 4 hours a day, you need to learn to develop a strategic approach to creating and using dishes which belong to that oft-maligned category:    "leftovers."   

Now since the word "leftover" carries significant negative baggage, I'd like to propose that we hereby rename leftovers "homemade fast food" or HFF, for short.   Just as I'd rather call my friend a flight attendant than a stewardess, I'd much rather eat homemade fast food.... than leftovers.

If you're going to become a strategic user of HFF, here are the 4 basic rules to follow:

1)   Double or triple your recipes on many occasions.   It takes about the same amount of time to make one lasagna as two lasagnas.   Or two meals' worth of chili, rather than one.  In either case, you've saved yourself a couple hours down the road.

2)   Use Healthy Fast Food storage containers that are CLEAR, not opaque.  It is a simple fact of life that what lurks unidentified and invisible in the bag of your fridge tends to go bad before you feel brave enough to lift the lid and explore what you've been ignoring all these weeks.    Glass or clear plastic both expose HFF for what it is, increasing the odds  you'll see it/ eat it while still fresh.

3)  In many cases, use single-serving size HFF containers.    This will enable you to easily grab an HFF container to pack in your bag lunch for the office, or will allow you to easily dish up two different HFF dinner items for Johnny and Susie, on occasion.

4)  Use glass HFF containers, not plastic, where possible.  The best glass storage containers can go straight from your freezer or fridge to the oven.   From a selfish perspective, this cuts down on dirty dishes AND removes a major impediment to using frozen HFF.   To get that frozen chicken soup out of its large plastic container,  you and the imposing block of soup (and miscellaneous kitchen implements) must wrestle for 5-10 minutes, and one (or all) of you may end up on the kitchen floor in the process.    Using Pyrex or another brand of glass container, you can calmly and gracefully pull your soup out of the freezer, peel off the lid, and place it in the oven to melt/heat.  

More importantly, use of glass storage prevents you and your family from ingesting plastic.   Consumer advocacy groups and researchers report that BPAs and phthalates and other components of plastic can leach into stored food, and can go on to wreak havoc with our reproductive systems and many other aspects of our health -- not to mention with the world's oceans, which now contain mountains of plastic trash.

So what are the best kinds of containers to employ in your new HFF strategy?   My favorite containers for homemade fast food are made by Pyrex in 1-cup, 2-cup, 4-cup, and 7-cup sizes.   Here is a typical set, at Amazon.com.   And another, at Target.com.    I especially like the 1-cup size Pyrex containers (perfect for kids' lunches or single serving meals) -- although they're not always easy to find and, oddly enough, can be pricier than the 2-cup versions.

Of course, there is one final rule in managing HFF.    You must USE all the food you lovingly store in the fridge or freezer.   Not the next day (the same dinner two nights in a row isn't cool!) but a couple days later.   

So next time your spouse or kids ask what's for dinner, shock them.   Tell them you picked up some fast food.    Then sit back, put your feet up, and savor the time you're NOT spending in the kitchen.

If time is your most precious resource, you've just bought yourself more of it.   Without sacrificing your health along the way.