It’s 6:00 and you’re finished with work for the day.
Your children are whining and want dinner. (Well, my kids would be whining.) You’re tired and don’t feel like thinking about food, so you pull into the drive-through of the closest fast food place and fork over cash in exchange for your dinner. Or you pick up the phone and order a large pizza to be delivered to your front door.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Every day across America, thousands of people make the same choice. They opt for convenience over nutrition, flavor, and cost.
There is a better option — slow food.
Soup is good (and easy) food.
Slow food is good food. Slow food is real food. Slow food is healthy food. Slow food is less expensive than fast food.
The Slow Food movement began in Italy over 20 years ago as a reaction to the culinary horrors of fast food and has since spread to nearly all corners of the globe. The objectives of the Slow Food movement include, but are not limited to:
- educating consumers about the risks of fast food
- forming and sustaining seed banks to preserve heirloom varieties in cooperation with local food systems.
- preserving and promoting local and traditional food products, along with their lore and preparation
- educating citizens about the drawbacks of commercial agribusiness and factory farms
- educating citizens about the risks of monoculture and reliance on too few varieties
- developing various political programs to preserve family farms
- lobbying against government funding of genetic engineering
- lobbying against the use of pesticides
- teaching gardening skills to students and prisoners
Slow Food is about bringing back traditions that sustained humans for centuries but that are now being lost to the conveniences of fast food.
What can you do?
The most important thing is not to eat McCrap. Instead, prepare your own meals. I know, I know, easier said than done. However, even if you cook only a couple of nights a week, it’s better than nothing. And these don’t have to be lavish, multi-course affairs. A homemade pot of soup can take 30 minutes or less. Omelettes and frittatas take 20 minutes. A Greek salad can take 15 minutes.
To help get a jump on the coming week, during the weekends plan out your meals, then go to the store to buy the food supplies you’ll need. You could also cook larger quantities of food and then freeze everything into smaller portions that you can turn into quick meals.
During the week, use your slow cooker — just toss in the ingredients in the morning and by dinner your house will smell better than anything that you got at a drive-thru.
Here in my house, we usually have a nice dinner, like roasted chicken or pot roast, on Sundays. Afterward, we freeze the left over chicken or pot roast for a future meal. (Saves time and money!) In a week or two, it will make my life a lot easier if I can grab the chicken from the freezer and use it for a soup or chop up the pot roast for enchiladas (it’s even better if I marinate it in salsa first).
Of course, there are those crazy-busy week nights when we’re juggling soccer practice, an elementary school concert, and the usual overload of homework. One of my go-to meal for times like that is to make ravioli from Mona Lisa Pasta, which is ever-so-conveniently next door to Breadworks. Once I add steamed broccoli and some chopped fruit, I’ve made a healthy dinner in about 20 minutes.
Pasta is a fast and delicious dinner.
These are just some ideas to get you started. If you normally eat out three nights a week, cut back to just two, then see if you can get it down to one. Once you get used to planning meals and cooking, you’ll find out easy it can be.
Bon appetit!
Note: The author is not employed by the companies mentioned in this post, nor was she asked to mention them. Flickr photo credits, top to bottom: zobeiry, lilikoi1213.
