On Monday, I wasn't feeling very well so I stayed home from work. I'm very lucky in that my office provides lunch for employees each day. However, today I needed to come up with lunch all on my own. Luckily, my husband and I cooked a lot of food this weekend. That has been a huge success for me in learning to eat healthy. It can be hard to work all day, come home, walk the dog, start cooking, eat, clean up, etc. By the time you're done, it's 9pm! It can be exhausting. Making healthy meals that have a lot of leftovers is an easy way to guarantee that you won't be heating up a frozen dinner or making a box of mac and cheese on busy nights (although trust me, there is nothing wrong with boxed mac and cheese every once and while!). It just requires that you plan ahead and think about what you're evenings look like the coming week. Do you have to work late on Tuesday? Are you meeting up with friends for dinner on Wednesday? Or do you have time to cook on Thursday? Asking these questions on Saturday or Sunday seriously help you plan ahead so you aren't making dinner choices while you're starving and tired from the day. And they can help with lunches too!
For lunch, I had leftover spicy sweet potato soup. This soup is soooo easy to make and is so healthy (Plus it made leftovers - huge win). It's a recipe from Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook. It's a creamy soup there is no heavy cream or butter or any of the typical ingredients that make a bisque-like soup get their texture. The creaminess of this soup comes from the actual sweet potatoes. You simmer sweet potatoes in vegetable broth (or you can use chicken broth if you prefer that) and then once they are soft, about 30 minutes, you use an immersion blender to puree the sweet potatoes. There is also red onion, garlic, and chipotle in adobo sauce in the soup. I always top it with cilantro and a few croutons, but if I don't have any, I just eat it with crackers. Since I knew soup wasn't going to completely fill me, I also made a vegetarian chicken patty with avocado and tomato. I'm not currently vegetarian but I did give up meat for 7 months about a year ago. I found a lot of great meatless recipes in that time and I still like to incorporate them here and there.
For dinner, we ate leftover cabbage rolls (I had already eaten one before I remembered to take a picture - oops!), roasted carrots and parsnips, and a side salad. The cabbage roll recipe that we used made 12 cabbage rolls so we can eat them for left overs for dinner or my husband can take them for work. Also, when we roasted the carrots and parsnips, I made a TON! This way I knew we'd have a bunch in the fridge to use all week.
This is an example of how having leftovers can seriously make your life SO MUCH EASIER! I didn't have to worry about what I was going to eat. I already knew that I had plenty of healthy and satisfying food ready to go. Plus, I didn't have to slave in the kitchen when I didn't feel good. And we still have more leftovers which we are going to eat tonight because we both have a busy evening ahead of us!
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