If you've decided to try and eat fast food less often, you'll obviously need to eat something else! Up until last year, my family ate a lot of fast food. Without proper planning around meals, we would go out for errands before my husband's work start time and get hungry. If he had a limited amount of time before work, it seemed to make sense to get food in him before he had to go in. Without taking the time to consider what kinds of meals we could have for lunch, we deferred to fast food as a crutch. It doesn't have to be like that.
When we decided to improve our diets, I was tasked with most of the work in figuring out how we were going to eat instead. Since we were focusing on the nourishing foods that we could afford, there wound up being a lot of repeats. There are some non-negotiables if you’re pressed for time or low on funds. There’s simply no way around the possibility that you may be eating a lot of the same things regularly, especially if you’re just starting. My original lunches when I was first starting were 5-6 unrelated items, usually eggs the only thing requiring cooking. These were exciting and interesting to me, not to mention good for taking pictures.
These plates with avocados, tomatoes, eggs, dried fruit, and canned seafood were very comforting in a way. They helped make the transition away from so much fast food look and feel like more than just a begrudgingly made “health decision”. No sad plates of dried chicken breast and egg whites with no salt like you see on those sit-coms where the middle aged couple starts arguing about the husband’s diet. They took time to prepare, even without needing cooking, but another part of the puzzle was simply being more conscientious about when food needed to be made. I ensured we ate before we did errands, for example. This took some adjustment period since it was not a regular habit of mine, so sometimes we would leave quite later than intended because I had to throw together a lunch.
These plates became troublesome when I was finding myself strapped for time now and then. Just a few days ago, I had to come home, make lunch, get ready, and drive out by myself for an appointment. This is not a usual occurrence for me in particular. That day, I had ground sirloin fried in butter and salt and two over easy eggs. My husband and the kids also had ground sirloin and eggs. This incredibly simple lunch was very delicious, and sometimes it’s all you need to do.
With all the experience I have now, I can pinpoint the most important things to focus on when transitioning away from fast food. My focus was on lunch because that’s when we most often had fast food, but I know other people may struggle with dinner or, most difficult to overcome, breakfast. Each of these meals has unique struggles to face when fighting against fast food’s tempting convenience. The first post in this series will cover things you can do no matter what time of day you find yourself most often using fast food as a quick and easy meal substitute.
Planning Ahead
More important than having the food on hand and the will to prepare it into an edible meal is having the time. Time is not malleable, nor can you force it into existence. You can't squeeze out more time if you try hard enough and you can't save up time to use later. This is the trickiest part of cutting fast food from your diet because of the insidious convenience of it, especially if you can afford the mark up for delivery from any of your favorite places. Doing things like preparing ingredients, shopping mindfully, and even having full meals in the fridge or freezer are only part of the puzzle. Our repeated error of going out to do errands without eating first is a failure of planning. If planning or thinking ahead is not your strong suit, don't fret as it is also not mine. An unavoidable fact is that making these changes is going to require the will and desire to change.
The siren call of the drive-thru won't magically go away when you start trying to cut it out. You have to put measures into place ahead of time to make it less attractive of an option. One of the ways you can do this is by thinking ahead. Whatever tool you need to remember, if it's writing things down, making a phone alarm, putting a note on the door at eye level, there is no trick here beyond ensuring that you nourish yourself before you wind up in that situation where your stomach grumbles and you're not in a position to eat.
If you're leaving before you're hungry, you simply have to consider the possibility that you'll be out long enough to get hungry. Either eat a snack before you go or prepare something that you can eat as soon as you get home. You can also “pack a lunch” no matter where you're going, it doesn't have to be to a job to warrant it. You have several hours of errands to run? Pack a lunchbox! One of the changes I made to make sure we didn't stop for fast food was packing a bag of fruit for the road. It had to be enough for everyone of course, so we had anywhere from two to four bananas and four to six apples at a time. Unnecessarily dirtying dishes or packing things that would expire if not eaten was another thing I, personally, wanted to avoid, which is why it wound up just being whole fruit. Mandarin oranges are a great choice, but not something I personally had a lot of to pack as they are a bit pricey. Every time I did, of course, the children ate them all each time.
It's very difficult to prepare for some things, however. It's hard to know when you'll be sick or unforeseen circumstances keep you out longer than you wanted to be. You can still plan for these things without going out of your way. It can be easy to grab an apple like you grab a water bottle every time you leave, even if it's for a 15 minute trip. If you don't need it, you just bring it back into your house. Meals in the freezer can be saved for when you're having a bad day, which is doubly helpful as stews and soups are especially good when you're unwell. If you have to cook something in a pinch and don’t have anything prepared, having ingredients on hand can help.
Meal Prep, or Close Enough
You’ve heard of meal prep, surely. I actually have never meal prepped in the fashionable style as it is understood, though I’ve eaten leftovers before. If you’ve tried or considered it before and failed, you may be excited to find out that you can pull off a similar trick without needing to make five little tupperware dishes of the same meal every day for a week. Instead of prepping entire meals, you can in fact prep ingredients. The only thing you require for this is a freezer. If you have the money, a food processor will make the whole process a breeze, but I’ve done this for many years before being gifted one recently. The following ingredients can all be prepped and frozen to make quick additions to meals with little effort.
Onions
You can buy already diced, frozen onions, so this is probably not surprising. Those bags are pretty cost effective as well, but if you want a specific kind of onion, you may have to do it yourself. The pre-diced frozen onions are usually not the sweet variety, so I do this task on my own. Freezing does affect the texture, so they can no longer be used as a raw ingredient if you’re expecting a crunch.
Garlic
This one may be more surprising, but garlic can be frozen just like onions. It retains its taste and functions quite the same as fresh. You can, if you’d like, be fancy and freeze cubes of butter and herbs with minced garlic inside, but a baggie of a whole bulb worth of minced garlic is just fine.
Ginger
There is definitely a vibe with this list currently, but ginger does quite well in the freezer as well. I typically pulverize it in the nutribullet with just enough water to allow it to blend, then freeze it on a tray in 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon pucks. If you don’t have any sort of blender, mincing it very finely will do as well.
Carrots
Mincing carrots with the food processor, or by hand, and freezing them allows them to cook quickly in whatever they're added to. They can add texture in this way to some dishes, or you can make carrot puree in a blender for an easy way to add color and flavor to a saucey dish or soup. The blended carrots also make good additions to marinades, but you need to let them thaw a bit of course.
Ground Beef
Obviously you can freeze ground beef. Why would I put this here? It all comes down to the method of freezing. I freeze ground beef into flat, 20-30 gram pucks on a baking sheet. The resulting ground beef pucks can be utilized much easier in small amounts without needing to find a use for a thawing, bleeding two pound pack all at once. While I freeze them raw, you could also fully cook a batch of ground beef and freeze it on a tray to cut down on steps even further when adding this to your meals.
Sweet Potatoes
This was my favorite discovery. Sweet potatoes are an amazing ingredient to add to almost anything, adding respectable nutritional value while also adding sweetness. To get the most sweetness possible, you want to cut them into chunks, coat them in extra virgin olive oil, and roast them on a lower temperature for 30-40 minutes to let the bottoms caramelize. The dark orange to dark brown spots on the bottoms of the chunks will be extra sweet and add noticeable flavor to whatever the sweet potatoes are added to. After roasting, I mash them all up and freeze them into, again, pucks. These ones are usually 20-30 grams as well.
Rice
It’s easy it is to prepare rice a day or two ahead of time, but you can prepare rice for a particularly busy, stressful, or sick day well before you know it’s coming. There are frozen meals with rice in them, so why not freeze your own? Simply make rice (I will cover making rice some time in the future for sure), spread onto a baking sheet, and stash in the freezer. You can easily get it broken into small enough pieces to get into a freezer bag, and then you can just whack it against the counter a few times to break it up.
Quinoa
Much like rice, quinoa can also be frozen and used in the future. As a grain that is best consumed after the lengthy soaking process, making it in advance and putting it into the freezer is a highly convenient way to make sure you have some on hand for whenever it seems like a good idea to have it. It can also be easily added to smoothies and soups after you’ve gotten this far with it. Prepare the same way as rice, explained above.
Tomato Paste
I’m often annoyed by recipes that require much less than a full 6oz can of tomato paste. An easy way to fix this problem is to simply plop the remaining paste into an ice cube tray, then pop those tomatoey cubes into a bag for whenever you need 1 tablespoon in the future. While this one may not seem like that amazing of a trick, since tomato paste comes in ready to use cans, consider how often a dish could be spiced up with just a tiny hint of tomato, but you don’t feel like storing the rest of that little can in the fridge, not using it, and then having to throw it out in a few days.
Cooked Bacon
While this is certainly a great idea, it’s not usually possible for me most of the time because the bacon simply doesn’t last long enough to warrant it. If you have amazing self control or perhaps simply enough bacon at a time to make it worthwhile, bacon can be cooked and then frozen to add their coveted flavor to dishes without needing to cook up a pouch first. On the same note, the rendered fat can be frozen without issues as well, though it also keeps nicely in the fridge for months, as long as you’ve filtered out any little remaining bacon pieces.
Any Cooked Meat, Really
Whether pot roast, steak, or chicken, you can prepare cooked meat into whatever form seems like it will be most applicable, then freeze it for later. Meat like this usually winds up in soups for my family, but a bag of chopped up and already cooked beef could quite easily wind up in a last minute stroganoff or spicy rice dish.
Mushrooms
This one might seem like a prank, but it’s one I only recently discovered and I wish I had known sooner. Yes, mushrooms can be frozen, but only after cooking them. The texture and taste are minorly affected, unlike most of these other ingredients, but they beat canned by a mile. With mushrooms’ incredibly picky shelf life under even the most ideal of conditions, being able to freeze them works wonder for being able to make a mushroom based dish whenever the need strikes.
This list is of course just things you can freeze yourself that you may not be able to find frozen at the store. Bags of frozen fruit and vegetables serve the same purpose as any of these homemade prepped ingredients. While there is great convenience to be found in freezing individual ingredients that you can then use to make a wider variety of meals, there are some really good food options for freezer batches. Any time you do make a meal that's easy to scale up, make extra and freeze it. Things like meatloaf, mashed potatoes, soups and stews can all go into the freezer. Use straight mason jars for freezing liquidy foods. These have an efficient shape for storage as well as being safe to thaw under running water in the sink. Frozen meals serve a different purpose from meal prepping in that they're mostly there for when you've had enough cooking for the foreseeable future and need quick food before you wind up ordering take out.
These two things, consciously thinking ahead about meals and having ready made meals or ingredients for emergencies, will do a lot for helping you eat fast food less often. Replacing Fast Food, pt. 2 details how to approach replacing fast food dependent meals with homemade depending on what time of day or circumstance these meals usually happen, whether it’s breakfast, lunch at work, or midnight cravings.