Do you recommend anything in terms of where to find recipes for nutritious meals that I could cook? Something that would taste good if I stuck it in the fridge on sunday and ate for lunch on Friday. I don't want it to be too elaborate, because I know myself too well. I want this to turn into a habit, so it would help if it were an easy to follow recipe that doesn't take too much prep.
Chillis, pasta-sauces, curries (to some extent) and stir-fries are all pretty good candidates for this approach, if you have even basic kitchen facilities (kettle, hob, microwave, fridge/freezer) at work.
What I did while I was at college, was to make a large saucepan of chilli (or curry, or pasta sauce), eat one portion that evening, then once it had cooled off, I'd bag up the rest into individual portions, and freeze (not fridge) them. Then when I fancied chilli (or curry, or pasta sauce), I'd pull out one portion, strip the bag off, drop the solid lump of iced chilli into a heat-proof (glass) jug, and then defrost/cook it in the microwave, while boiling up a portion of rice (or pasta) on the stove. With hindsight, using the baggies wasn't very environmentally friendly, but as a poor student living in digs I didn't have the spare cash or the storage space to go the cupboard-full-o-Tupperware route.
My (veggie) chilli recipe consisted/s of a couple of medium sized onions, a red (or green) bell pepper, a couple of cans of chopped tomatoes (student laziness: I use 3-4 fresh toms now), 2 cans of red kidney beans (or 1 can kidney beans, 1 can baked beans), 1 can of sweetcorn, and about 1 cup (100-150 g?) of freezedried soya mince, presoaked in 1.5–2 cups of boiling water + 1 teaspoon of vegetable-stock powder. Plus tomato-paste (if you're not using baked beans), salt, pepper, chilli powder (fresh chillis would be better, though!) and a little sugar to taste (drinking chocolate powder works well too!).
Making it's real easy:
- Set some (sunflower) oil to heat in the (sauce)pan* (at a low setting!) while you chop the onions relatively small (if I'm putting the chilli in tortilla-wraps, I cut the onions in half and then in strips)
- Put the chopped onions to sautee with some crushed garlic (saucepan lid on to keep the steam in), while you dice the pepper
- Stir the pepper into the onions and leave the pan heating gently while you chop and add the tomatoes — you may need to turn the heat up a bit now there's more to cook
- Drain and rinse the kidney beans and sweetcorn in a colander (you might have to drain and rinse each can separately) and add them (and the soaked soya mince) to the saucepan
- Add the tomato-paste, spices, maybe some more water if it looks a little dry, stir well, and turn the heat up further to bring it (back) to a bubble (canned beans + corn are precooked, so they just need heating through)
(*You could pretty much use the above recipe/approach for a meat-based chilli as well, except you'd start by browning your beef-mince in a large frying pan rather than a saucepan, before adding the rest of the ingredients; obviously you wouldn't need the soya mince either, and you'd probably only need 1 can of beans)
I use(d) pretty much the same approach for preparing pasta-sauces too, only the ingredients vary: pasta sauces got carrots and/or zuchini and/or aubergine instead of beans+corn, and (dried) basil/oregano/thyme instead of the chilli-powder.
Indian-style curries can also be prepared like this, and are easy to do in the sense that what you get is usually edible, and might even be quite palatable, but they generally won't ever be as good as what you'd get in even a half-decent Indian restaurant; a good curry (sauce) really needs a long simmer (like, an hour or two) to blend the flavours properly, rather than a quick blast. Thai-style curries made with coconut milk-based sauces don't take as long, though and are really nice too.
I think a strifry might be good for such a purpose (generally tastes good, easy to prep, easy to put into containers for lunch, easy to change ingredients, etc.), but I've never been able to make amazing stirfry. I figure I should try following a recipe, but there's just way too many sites out there, so I just never try. My 2 goals are to eat healthier food on a more regular basis, and to save money by not eating out for lunch all the time.
Stir-fries are fantastic, because you can put just about anything into them. The only real tricks are to shred all the ingredients to roughly similar sized pieces (the prep usually takes longer than the actual cooking), and add the ingredients in the 'right' order, so that everything comes out cooked but not over-cooked. Stir-fry sauces aren't really an issue: soy sauce is the standard go-to, but a lump of peanut butter plus (the oil/gravy that everything was fried in, plus) some hot water works well too. You really need a wok to make stir-fries 'properly', though, but you can get these pretty cheaply these days (IIRC, ours came from IKEA, and we've had it for >10 years now)
For a meat stir-fry I'd
guess you'd want to start with the meat strips, but our stir-fries are fully veggie, so don't quote me on that. I usually start by frying up some sliced tofu, then add the veggies in order of decreasing crispness (apart from onions, which always go in before the other veggies to mellow their flavour); so e.g. the sliced carrots/ bamboo-shoots/ aubergine goes in before the cabbage/ leeks/ spring onions/ sugar peas, which goes in before the zuchini/ mushrooms/ baby-corn/ beansprouts. At some point I'll usually crush in some garlic and/or ginger. After the last ingredients go in, I add any sauce, and then pour some boiling water over the top of everything to flash-steam it, and thin down the gravy so that everything gets a good coating, and/or I boil up some stir-fry noodles while the veggies are cooking, and then drain them and stir them into the mix, which has much the same effect.
I just had some leftover stir-fry for lunch: made it on Thursday evening, Tupperware'd the leftovers, ate the first leftover-portion for lunch on Friday, froze the rest over the weekend, moved it from the freezer back to the fridge yesterday to thaw out overnight, nuked it today
And now I see I'm going to cross-post this with
@Synsensa...
