Sharing

So at the end of this project, I have been able to complete a week's worth of recipes, with some ideas for some additional ones that might work in the future. Overall I would say I have been able to re-create healthier versions of my stay-at-home recipes, without a ton to clean up. The true test will be re-creating these once school is back into full swing. During this process, as I have progressed through the recipes, I have discovered easier ways of substituting ingredients and also making everything fit into 1 or 2 pans. I have learned alot from having to research nutrition information on each food. Most of these recipes are vegetarian, and contain some similar ingredients, but meat can be added very easily. Having similar ingredients made shopping a bit easier, and also provided me with flexibility for leftovers. I have included some of these suggestions in my recipe collection, let's call it.

I hope you have a chance to try at least one of the recipes I have collected. My family has been pretty pleased with the healthy, revised versions. How can I tell? They have eaten all of them with no complaints. If you do have a chance to try any of them, please leave me a comment or feedback; did you like it?, what do I need to change?, etc. I would love the feedback. 

I collected everything into a Healthy, Tasty, Less-Mess Recipes document that I have shared in this link. I hope you enjoy. 

Two of My Favorite Recipes: "Farro & Apple Salad" and "Almost Baked Penne Pasta"                           

We Are Learners

So this passion project has been interesting exploring new ways to create quick, healthy meals without a ton of mess. I am proud of myself for what I have been able to create in terms of healthier options and now have at least three full meal options that I can use. I am hoping by the end of this week I will have four possibly five meals, giving me a full week of easy, healthy meals that won't require too much cleanup.

What have I noticed about my learning? I love cooking, eating, dining out and watching food shows, so this was an exciting project for me to start. I also love trying out new recipes. What I DON'T like is the cleanup part. I also hate feeling guilty when I eat a really good meal and then it stays with me for at least the next few days (middle age is NOT kind to those of us who like to eat). For the most part I was able to create some tasty meals that had healthy ingredients and knew pretty much what I was looking for. What was frustrating for me was researching all of the nutrition information and tracking it for all of the ingredients in my recipes. I discovered that there is a TON of information out there on ingredients, and sometimes it is misleading. And unless you are a nutritionist or watching specific dietary needs, most people are not going to know the exact nutrition information for their fruits and vegetables. To me the tracking was the most frustrating, and this is why I have not been able to follow food tracking very well. I discovered that it takes a LOT of time and you have to be very careful about hidden ingredients in foods that you THINK you are eating that are healthy (added caramel color in balsamic vinegar for example).

In this process I have been most efficient when I have been able to organize my information. I have found Google Docs and Google Sheets VERY helpful in being able to organize my nutrition information for foods, and write out recipes. I can pull these up whenever I need and it stores automatically. Thank you Google! I also found some helpful websites for fruit and veggie nutrition information and a nutrition calculator:

USDA Veggie nutrition information

Nutrition calculator

Even though I AM a visual learner, I have found that I don't really need to take pictures of the recipes to see what I want to create; however, I did realize that it might be helpful for other people to see pictures of the foods if they are going to use my recipes. So it was a bit of an adjustment for me remembering to take pictures as I went along. I usually don't need pictures of foods to help me decide on a recipe if I have a specific food in mind. I mostly just look at the nutrition information. So this was something that I had to deliberately think about.

Overall the biggest challenge in this process has been TIME. Even though it is summer, there are so many obligations and projects at home that have needed my attention that if I didn't deliberately set aside time to plan and cook these recipes I probably would not be on my way to finishing this project (like many of the other open-ended projects I still have around the house). I do think I will be able to finish a whole week of recipes by the end of my journey though (YAY!) Below is a copy of my learning journey throughout this project. Thanks for the inspiration everyone!

Expect the Mutiny

OK, so I will admit that this week I regressed a little in that I didn't spend as much time on my recipes as I had planned. I started with my Hello Fresh meals but did not get to finish my revised meals. I did not finish my nutrition information for the farro apple salad, partly because I did not get a chance to revise the recipe. I got as far as finishing the meal (literally), and got caught up with other things this weekend so did not have time to spend re-creating as much of the recipe as I could. I did manage to take pictures of the ingredients and the nutrition information, which is more than I had done the previous week with the veggie pasta meal. So, this week I will be getting myself back on track by starting with a visit to the grocery store to make sure I pick up all of the ingredients to make the new, revised farro apple salad meal, as well as my third healthy pasta meal. 

So what worked this week? Taking pictures, which I had forgotten to do with my other meal. I did manage to make a healthy penne pasta meal with mozzarella and veggies, AND take pictures of it (you will see my picture posted at the end of this post). I DID also manage to take pictures of the ingredients for the FIRST farro apple salad version, which I did not like (you can see those in my last post).

What failed? The recipes! AAH! So I need to revise the ingredients in the farro apple salad. I did not like the combination of olive oil and mustard that I used for the dressing. While the picture looked pretty, the taste was not what I wanted. I also think I need to cook the farro in vegetable stock instead of water, to give it a better taste. So this week my goal is to revise the farro apple salad recipe to reflect the better ingredients (then maybe the taste will match the picture). 

Farro apple salad ingredients:

Mustard and olive oil dressing 

Chopped apples

Cooked farro

The third recipe I also need to revise is the penne pasta bake. I explored this recipe after being inspired by an upcoming Hello Fresh pasta meal, so I tried to recreate it in a quick, healthy way. You will see the picture below and it looks yummy, but again, not so tasty as I had hoped. Instead of sauce I used chopped tomatoes, peppers and garlic salt to try to save time, which is one of my goals; however, not being in a full sauce left the pasta pretty dry. In order to keep this recipe I will need to figure out a way to add homemade, quick sauce to keep it moist and still be healthy.

Why do I want to keep doing this? Because I know that if I can develop some simple, healthy recipes that don't take much time and don't have much mess then I know it will be completely worth it when those busy school nights start again and I don't feel like cooking ANYTHING! Hoping these two recipes will come out this week, which will give me three good weeknight recipes!

Veggie Pasta Bake Before:

Cooked Veggie Pasta Bake:

Elevator Pitch

So here is my elevator pitch on my WHY? and WHAT IS WORKING SO FAR? This week I am working to tweak some of the ingredients in some of my recipes. I also keep forgetting to add pictures of my recipes, so I will try to do a better job of that here. 

Here is the Veggie Farro Salad that I created this week. I am still working out some of the flavors, so I will have the updated recipe posted soon (I hope). I bought another pasta so am going to try a healthy penne pasta with roasted tomatoes (if I am able). Feedback is always welcome if anyone tries any of these recipes! Thanks!

    

Farro and Apple Salad with Power Greens 

*Still tweaking some of the flavors...

Routines

So, I have decided to work on my healthy-ingredient, tasty, no-mess meals as my passion project. In doing this, so far my routines have been more centered around the evening when I am exploring dinner recipes. I have found some time during the day to research the recipes I am thinking of creating, which is usually on Thursdays when I am updating my Hello Fresh selections. As for finding a set time every day, this has been difficult. My goal with this project is to develop mostly dinner recipes to make the weeknight dinners easier, so naturally this makes sense for me to cook these in the evening. As for developing the recipes and ingredient lists which include calories and nutrition information, I spent a few hours on the weekend with this process, which seemed to be when I could dedicate the most of my time to researching, writing, and entering in the information. So I am going to focus on dedicating more time during these days, Thursday through Sunday. 

I am starting to build a routine for my process of putting together these recipes: 1) cook the Hello Fresh meal with the suggested ingredients, 2) re-create the meal with healthier options, 3) research the nutrition information for the replacement meal, 4) enter in the nutrition information into my spreadsheet (I found a good resource on-line for calculating nutrition per serving),  and 5) add the meal to my Passion project recipes Google document. So far I was able to complete this whole process with my first meal, "Tasty Veggie Spaghetti." I am hoping that each week I can try at least one new recipe, so that I have a collection of about a week's worth of meals that I could use by the end of the project. From there, who knows where this will take me?

Overall I am finding most of this routine working. It took quite a bit of time to research how to calculate the nutrition information by serving, and keep track of the nutrition labels. Originally I forgot to track the nutrition labels when I was cooking with the healthier ingredients, so I had to go back and look up the labels (I would NOT recommend this!) Now that I know to track the nutrition information as I am cooking, I am hoping this will be quicker with my next meal. Writing down the recipe took a little time, as I really had to think through each step, but was sort of fun because I could add my own ideas to it! The challenge for me this week has been finding time to actually blog about my experience, so hopefully that will become easier with this routine in place. I am including a copy of this week's meal, "Tasty Veggie Spaghetti," so if you try it, please let me know what you think! I also am including a few websites that I found helpful in researching the nutrition information. Enjoy!

Nutrition calculator for homemade meals

USDA produce nutrition information