real food for busy women - ginger, turmeric, juice & a fast nourishing meal each day

by Jackie Patti

I have lots of topics to cover and it may wind up a bit convoluted, but they're all related in my real life.

hot, sweet ginger

(sounds vaguely naughty)

I love fresh ginger, and it's got one of the highest antioxidant levels of any vegetable, so well worth eating.

I also discovered early in my marriage that my husband will eat almost any big pile of vegetables if ginger, garlic and tamari are involved (similarly, my daughter would eat nearly any vegetable under a cheese sauce).

So ginger is on the menu here. However, if you buy just enough ginger for the next meal or two, you run out. If you buy a bigger hand and don't use it in time, it goes green and moldy before you get to it.

I want fresh ginger and I want it available all the time and I don't want it green.

posts for Pat: Flexible Meal Planning

by Jackie Patti

I can't know today if I will be able to make risotto next week. Risotto involves standing at the stove stirring constantly for 30-40 minutes or so. And it's not good as leftovers, you have to make it when you are going to eat it to get that decadent creaminess.

So... I never plan for risotto. I have broth made, always. I usually have rice, Parmesan and butter on hand. I often have precooked beans and sometimes have precooked meat in my freezer. So... if it's the end of the day and I feel pretty energetic, I might make a risotto.

But I can't ever count on it, which is why I don't like the whole idea of a specific meal plan. Around here, risotto just happens... or it doesn't!

if you really can't make broth

by Jackie Patti

I recently posted about why I can't live without my homemade broth. For me, broth is second only to real pastured butter on my must-have's for both health and lusciousness.

However, in the spirit of my posts for Pat series, I admit everyone can't make homemade broth all the time.

I still encourage you to make broth when you can. Simmering a turkey carcass is easier than cleaning the roasting pan. A chicken carcass is small enough to be brothed in a crockpot, which means you won't have to babysit a stockpot.

But if you can't make enough to eat stock REGULARLY, which is crucial to good health, I have two possible solutions for you.

real food for busy women: when you really can't cook

by Jackie Patti

This series, "posts for Pat" is inspired by my friend Pat, who lives a life where frugality is better applied to time than to finances; hence it's sub-title: "real food for busy women".

We've covered several topics thus far: why you need a crockpot with the world's easiest crockpot recipe, how keeping a fruit bowl improves your nutrition just by spending a few minutes in the produce section when you grocery shop, a roundup of crockpot recipes that can cook all day unattended, and a bizarre post in which I timed a vegetarian recipe to see if I could make it in 15 minutes.

Today we're going to cover how to eat well when you really, truly have NO time to spend in the grocery store let alone the kitchen.

You know the week, we've all had them. The big project is due next week, and there's no telling how much overtime there'll be. An 8-10 hour window on a crockpot meal won't work; you'll be working 12-14 hour days. You REALLY, REALLY can't do anything about food this week...

stir fry vegetables with eggs

by Jackie Patti

This stir fry vegetables and eggs recipe was created by serendipity. I'm going to give you the back story of how it came about to show you the weird and wonderful way a blogger's mind works. I think the story is entertaining, but if you want, you can just scroll to the end of the page and grab the recipe.

• While researching and thinking about starting the Pats for posts: real food for busy women series, I ran across Jamie Olivier's 15-Minute Meals. Though I don't watch his show, I'd seen his Ted talk, and knew he was a proponent of better nutrition. So I watched a few of his videos thinking they might be helpful for my series, but they really weren't. Each video begins with mise en place, which is French for "I have someone to cut and measure everything for me before the camera is turned on." Jamie himself is a young and healthy guy who pretty much bops around the kitchen with more energy than I ever had after a long day at work. And finally, he finishes up with so many pots and pans dirtied that it's going to take some serious time to repair that kitchen if you don't have staff. So while the concept of preparing a meal in 15 minutes was attractive, my understanding of what it would take to translate those videos in my own kitchen was more like an hour.

real food for busy women - crockpot roundup

by Jackie Patti

In the first post of my series posts for Pat: real food for busy women, I suggested the necessity of a crockpot to make meals fast. And I gave you the easiest possible slowcooker pot roast recipe, just using frozen stew vegetables and a chuck roast.

Today, I am posting a crockpot roundup, a bunch of yummy recipes from my favorite bloggers. It turns out that my "cheap & good" blogging friends are enthusiastic about helping out those of you who need to be "fast & good"!

My criteria for including recipes in this roundup are that it must take less than 15 minutes to prepare in the morning and the recipe must be able to cook for 8-10 hours unattended. So all these recipes are ideal for busy working women, even if not as simple as the crockpot recipe I gave you to start with.

real food for busy women: the fruit bowl

by Jackie Patti

Sometimes, it seems that there are so many food blogs out there, that it's hard to find anything unique to say. Today, I think I do have something uncommon to add to the blogosphere: this is about the fruit bowl as the most basic possible thing anyone can do to improve their own or their family's health.

This is part of the series: posts for Pat (real food for busy women); a fruit bowl is a very easy way to improve your diet and it literally takes 5-10 minutes while doing your normal grocery shopping, As a rough estimate, multiply the number of people who live in your home by 5 or 6; buy that many pieces of fruit; come home and stick in a bowl. That's pretty much all there is to it!

The fruit bowl is not just for still life paintings!

real food for busy women

by Jackie Patti

I am starting a new series on here, inspired my friend Pat who I recently reconnected with on Facebook; thus this series is tagged "posts for Pat". Pat and I hadn't spoken in decades and in catching up, of course, I spent much time ranting about real food, because I am me. I sent links to find local farmer's markets and CSAs, to find local grass-fed meat, to find local raw milk. And when we next spoke and she told me she couldn't do this, I misheard her and answered the wrong question.

Coming from where I've been lately, due to disability and the resultant lack of income, I must stretch the heck out of my food budget in order for us to eat real food. I explained to Pat why it didn't cost more, which really wasn't her issue. Pat is in a different place in life than I am. She lives in the city and works a corporate salaried job, then spends weekends on her farm with her beloved horse Coco. While she's not rich by any means, where she is poor is not finances, but time.

When I realized how I misaddressed her concerns, I also realized I had been there. I've had the deadline that keeps you working 50-60 hours weeks, where all the grocery shopping I could do was hitting a drive-through going to and from work. Where the emergency that happened at 4 PM kept you at work hours past when the salad you brought for lunch was long gone and you could barely WAIT for a pizza or sub to be assembled on your way home. There were way too many days where even THINKING about cooking when I got home was just entirely out of the question.

The thing is women living lives like that are guilty because they feed their families out of boxes too often. Worse than living with that guilt is that the high-stress busy life REQUIRES a nutrient-dense diet to fuel it, to maintain your own health. Eating all that crap destroys health, leaving you susceptible to winding up ill.

This new series is about what one can do with EXTREMELY limited time to improve your own nutrition and better provide for your family even when life has little time for the kitchen.