Help! Need recipe and meal planning tips

[akh]

I'm a SAHM and am sooo tired of bland convenience foods! What are your favorite healthy and quick meals? :

[Alyantavid]

Right now, we're eating tons from out of the garden.

This is our plan for the week:
baked trout, chicken rice, roasted zucchini & onions
salads with fresh veggies from the garden topped with leftover steak
tacos/quesadillas with more fresh veggies
ham and potato soup with fresh bread (not real quick or healthy)
fried eggs, toast and fruit

The meal planning forum usually has a thread or two with meal plans for the month. You might get some ideas there.

[EnviroBecca]

I'm a big fan of spaghetti. You can sneak odds and ends of vegetables into the sauce, and use whole-wheat pasta, to improve the nutrition.

We also eat a lot of pasta with assorted vegetables, olive oil, nutritional yeast flakes, and sunflower seeds. Full recipe here.

Scrambled eggs are quick and easy! Make a burrito with cheese and salsa, or just eat eggs with whole-wheat toast and fruit.

Canned beans are great all kinds of ways! You can get baked beans and just heat and eat. Plain beans (black, kidney, pinto, etc.) drained and cooked with onions and chili powder and maybe a little tomato, are good in burritos or with rice. Lately I've been making a bean sandwich that tastes kind of like a cheeseburger:
Brown diced onion in oil.
Add beans, ketchup, mustard, and black pepper. Stir until heated.
Serve on bread or bun with cheese, lettuce, and/or tomato, as desired.

Another great burrito filling is sweet potato. Mash up canned ones (syrup drained off) or baked ones (peeled) and mix with browned diced onions and chili powder. Add grated cheese.

I like to squeeze the water out of a pound of tofu, cut it into bite-sized pieces, and submerge it in a tasty sauce in a container that seals tightly. Then it's ready to cook quickly, whatever amount you want, and eat with rice or salad or whatever you have handy. It's good for 4-5 days, more if you use vinegar in your sauce.

Whenever we cook rice, we make a big batch and put away the extra to re-heat for future meals, as a side dish or to make into fried rice.

I buy kale, use some of it fresh, and freeze the rest. Here are freezing instructions and ways to use kale.

We eat oatmeal for breakfast and snacks quite often. Quick oats are almost as nutritious as slow-cooking ones and as convenient as "instant": you can cook them right in your bowl by pouring boiling water on them and stirring. Add all kinds of tasty, healthy stuff--I like almond or cashew butter, raisins or cut-up dried apricots, ground flax seeds, sorghum syrup, cinnamon, and ginger.

Honey Baked Lentils bake for over an hour, but they're so quick to put together that I consider them a convenience food.

[Magelet]

This week, we've had:

(fast, easy and healthy)stir fry with fried rice (rice cooked normally, then fried in some fat, soy sauce, and an egg)
----(fast, easy and healthy!)pasta puttanesca (super easy and fast. its canned whole tomatoes, anchovies (you can't taste them if you only use a few. but they add depth of flavor), capers, nicoise olives, and olive oil. more tomatoes and anchovies, less capers and olives=cheaper. I use the silver palate recipe with 1/2 the anchovies yummy!)
---- (healthy, easy and little in the kitchen time!!) lentil salad (it "takes a long time" but you don't have to do anything to it for all that time pretty much. the lentils soak themselves for 12 hours once you put them in the bowl with water. they cook themselves when you put them in a pot on the stove for a while, and then you chop veggies, cheese, chicken if you want (good veggies are carrots, celery, tomatoes, bell peppers, parseley, avocado, cucumber, onions. whatever is fresh and seasonal and good raw),throw in two handfuls of raisins, make a really acidic and salty dressing, let it sit for as long as you can, and eat it. (its best the next day.))

roast chicken with roast veggies and bread and gravy (pan drippings with flour and broth)

fry bread salads with leftover chicken-I'm inventing these tonight. its vaguely like tostada salads, but not. shredded leftover chicken, avocado, onions, tomatoes, and some sort of sauce (maybe gravy or salsa?) (and maybe other veggies) are placed on top of fry breads. the fry breads are sourdough corn bread which instead of being baked, will be fried in coconut oil, chicken fat or butter. hopefully tasty and easy, we'll see.

aloo paratha with raita (following the recipe on asian grandmother's cookbook blog. I hope its easy, it should be delicious).

other summer dishes we love: pita with tsatziki (greek yogurt, cucumber, dill, salt.), big salads with sprouted mung beans and fresh veggies, pasta with squash and other fresh veggies, cheese or chicken sandwhiches, hamburgers and corn, stir frys, fresh fruit and cream (well thats breakfast or dessert).