Healthy eating doesn’t have to be difficult. I’m the laziest “chef” in the world; I don’t like to cook, but I do like to eat healthy food, so I look for the easiest ways to obtain and prepare healthy food. Here are tips to make 10 minute healthy meals, with my favorite example at the end.
Pressure Cooking with the Instant Pot: The Instant Pot is amazing in large part because of its pressure cooking feature, which drastically reduces cooking time. I use the instant pot for quinoa mostly these days. Add in 1.25 cups of water for every cup of dry quinoa, put the lid on, and pressure cook it for one minute. It takes time for it to build up the pressure, so the total cook time is about 8 minutes. It’s very fast and easy to cook rice, too, if you prefer that.
Frozen Fruits and Vegetables: I generally don’t like buying fresh produce because it often goes bad before I eat it. Frozen produce has no such issues! Better yet, you can buy frozen produce that’s already cut and prepared. Steam-in-bag vegetables are my go-to dinner side. For example, throw a bag of broccoli in the microwave for 6 minutes and it’s ready to eat!
I was concerned about cooking vegetables in the plastic steam bags, but from my research, these bags are made with safe plastics (without BPA) and they apparently do not leach chemicals into the food. Awesome! As for fruit, I always have Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries on hand. Canned vegetables are fine, too. I stock kidney and black beans as high protein beans work as a meat replacement.
Salad: Salads are very easy to make. You can buy all kinds of already prepared salads and toppings, such as carrots, onions, cherry tomatoes, and throw them all in a bowl in a couple minutes. Use olive oil (California Olive Ranch is the brand I like) and balsamic vinegar for a healthy dressing.
Meat: I often buy precooked organic chicken strips that just need to be heated up. If you don’t mind the extra prep time and shorter fridge life, you can also buy a cooked rotisserie chicken and use it in a variety of meals. I want to move to a more fish-heavy diet, so I have some frozen wild-caught salmon that I believe can be cooked in the Instant Pot, and that will likely be my go-to meat choice in the future. Otherwise, it’s not too difficult to cook salmon on the stove.
Sweet potatoes: This is a delicious and very healthy food. Thankfully, sweet potatoes are very fast to cook in the microwave, too. I add cinnamon to mine, which gives it a great flavor without any sugar.
10 Minute Healthy Dinner Example
Using just an instant pot and a microwave, I can prepare a dinner of quinoa, chicken, and broccoli in about 10 minutes with very little effort. It’s remarkable because it’s just a little bit more effort than a frozen microwave dinner, but much, much healthier!
- The quinoa cooks for 8 minutes in the Instant Pot (pressure cooked).
- While that cooks, the broccoli cooks for 6 minutes in the microwave.
- After the broccoli finishes, the pre-cooked chicken needs about 1 minute in the microwave to warm it.
- Then I put seasonings on everything (Mrs. Dash is great), and add cheese or mustard to the chicken. It’s delicious!
