Making healthy meals when you’re busy

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it’s just challenging for me to make time to prepare a nice home-cooked meal! If you, too, face this dilemma, hopefully this post will give you at least two weeknights of deliciousness without an excessive amount of prep time. 

Several days ago when I knew we would be late getting home I put a beef roast in the crockpot with some herbs and spices, potatoes, and carrots. The veggies were a little more done than I’d have liked after 12 hours, but hey, it was ready to eat! We had a few leftovers which I intended to use sometime for another meal, though I hadn’t decided what it would be yet. Today I made up my mind to make some veggie soup. I cut up the remaining potato, carrot and little bit of beef, and along with the leftover broth I also added more carrots, celery, potatoes, leftover peas, a tiny bit of spinach that wasn’t far from becoming chicken food if I didn’t use it, some tomato juice, and salt and pepper to the crockpot. It may need some additional seasonings but I had to prepare it down at the cheese barn since our under-construction house currently has no kitchen (and I forgot to bring the spices down!).

So now it’s cooking away while I’ve been taking care of livestock and carrying firewood and spackling holes in the ceiling and walls in the house this afternoon. 

The small beef roast fed four adults in the first meal, and the leftover beef and broth with veggies added will likely have four more servings with the amount of veggies and tomato juice I added. You can obviously stretch it farther with more water for the broth first time around and adding more veggies and juice the second. It’s always nice to make those food dollars stretch while creating healthy meals at the same time, isn’t it?