If I thought I was busy before my mom moved in with us and then had her stroke, I had no clue what that really meant. I barely have time to shop for groceries these days, much less fix meals. But I want us to still eat healthy and eat well, so I’ve learned to keep certain essentials on hand to make that easy.
Minced Garlic
My mom and I are garlic fanatics. Wayne says he’s not as crazy about it as us, but he’s the first to gobble up garlic-loaded anything we put in front of him.
Not that it’s a lot of work to mince fresh garlic with the garlic press I have, but some nights I just don’t feel like doing it. That’s when I turn to my jar of minced garlic. I just scoop it out and plop it into whatever and voila –we have our garlic!
Baby Carrots
Whoever decided to put baby carrots into bags, bless you. (Heck, even shredded carrots and carrot chips for that matter. Sometimes I use them too.)
However, baby carrots are worth the little bit extra they cost. No peeling, chopping, fussing or mussing –I love it!
If I need a quick snack for myself or my mom, I take out a handful, wash them off, and serve them. I can chop them up (or not) and add them to salads. For slow cooker creations, I can just toss them in the mix. My favorite is to steam them and serve them as one of our veggie sides. Yum!
Black Olives
These days my pantry seems bare without at least one can of black olives on hand. They go great on salads. (My mom loves them on her salad and feels her salad’s naked without them.)
But they also make for a great quick snack (usually served with the carrots) or as an appetizer. (Sometimes we have celery, carrots, and cauliflower with dip as a pre-dinner appetizer in place of salad.)
Bagged Salad
Both my mom and Wayne are salad fanatics, so we have a salad with dinner almost every night. However, once upon a time I could not eat bagged salad because of a preservative in it. (It upset my stomach.) But a couple years back I found an organic brand of bagged salad that was preservative-free and which my tummy could tolerate. It’s more expensive than some of the cheaper brands, but it’s the price we’re willing to pay to have salad fixings always on hand.
Bagged Spinach
Bagged spinach serves dual purposes. I can sauté it in olive oil and garlic as a quick, flavorful veg to accompany a meat. Or I can stir fry it with tofu and garlic for a healthy Asian-inspired dish. (See? Garlic goes into lots of stuff we make!) Or we can have it as our salad.
Courtney Mroch writes about animals great and small in Pets and the harmony and strife that encompasses married life in Marriage. For a full listing of her articles click here.