My Secret to Making Homemade Meals Easier

I’ll admit, I don’t particularly like to cook. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE food but I don’t like all the time spent making a home cooked meal. I guess I’d just rather spent my time crafting or hanging with my family over cooking, and can you truly blame me? Some days it takes everything I have in me to get a hot fresh meal on the table but I do it because my family deserves it. To save myself a bit of sanity, I’ve found a way to make things much (much) easier when it comes to cooking. So today I am partnering with Cans Get You Cooking to share My Secret to Making Homemade Meals Easier. Promise, it will be something you will utilize too!

My Secret to Making Homemade Meals Easier

If I am going to cook you can bet I will make enough so we can have leftovers for lunches, the next day for dinner, etc. So I usually aim for soups, casseroles, chili, pastas, and that sort of thing. When you think of it, what do these usually all have in common?

If you said vegetables, you win! Okay, you don’t really win anything but it’s just fun to say. But that is the correct answer.

These dishes typically always have some sort of vegetables which means lots of washing, prepping, cutting, and preparing vegetables just to use in your recipe. That also means your dinner recipe just got a whole lot more complicated and time consuming. Who has time for that? I know I don’t!

So here’s what I do instead: I buy canned vegetables!

You see, cans seal in nutrition, freshness, and flavor naturally and since fruits and vegetables are harvested at their peak of ripeness and canned within hours, those flavors and nutrients are saved and ready when you are!

Plus, did I mention they totally make homemade meals easier? Oh, I missed that? Well, they totally do. Canned vegetables are already washed, cut, and ready for you to eat (if you chose to right from the can). It’s as easy as throwing them into your recipe to be heated or heating them in the microwave or on a stove top. So much faster than the wash/prepare/cut/cook method!

Now that you know my secret you might be thinking that canned vegetables aren’t all that healthy and that is where you are wrong. Canned produce is on par nutritionally with fresh and frozen varieties, and in some cases even better. In fact, studies conducted by researchers at Michigan State University, UC Davis and Oregon State University all concluded that canned foods have similar (or better) nutritional profiles as their fresh or frozen counterparts. Not to mention, that people who frequently eat canned foods may have healthier diets than people who don’t.

So you see, canned vegetables are great all around. You are getting the nutrition you need but getting back that time you want and in the end, everyone is getting that delicious home cooked meal. It’s a win-win.

Next time you are on a time crunch or have completely depleted any source of edible food in your fridge, head to the store and pick up some canned vegetables. They are ready-to-go and can be a great addition to any recipe.

You can learn more about canned foods by visiting the Cans Get You Cooking website. You can also connect with them socially on: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube.