The Spokesman-Review: Creating quick, healthy meals is essential for busy families

Kathy Martin McClatchy
September 1, 2010 in Food

Moms like me, whose children have moved on to college and beyond, might get misty-eyed about morning cuddles and bedtime stories, but you won’t find us waxing nostalgic about the back-to-school drill. It’s a huge relief not to have that Mack truck of added obligations barreling our way as summer ends.

Getting the family back on an unforgiving school-year schedule is tough, and capping the day with a sit-down meal can seem impossible. If you care about your kids’ well-being, though, it’s not optional.

The research is clear: Children who eat dinner with their families most nights are much more likely to do well in school and less likely to become overweight, develop eating disorders, smoke cigarettes or abuse drugs. The combination of structure, nutrition and communication that family meals represent is a powerful, positive force in a child’s life.

That said, I’m not going to pretend that getting school-night meals on the table is easy, or that they have to be homemade. The best most parents can do is a patchwork of make-ahead, quick-fix, heat-and-serve and takeout dinners – and that’s good enough.

A casserole or other one-dish dinner in the refrigerator, ready for the oven, is pure gold on a school night. If you can make time on the weekend to assemble one, you’ll be patting yourself on the back the rest of the week.

Lasagna is a can’t-miss dish in most families, and one of my favorite cookbook authors, Pam Anderson, has a terrific lasagna recipe in her forthcoming “Perfect One-Dish Dinners: All You Need for Easy Get-Togethers” (Houghton Mifflin, Sept. 20). The book is geared toward entertaining, but Anderson’s Quick, Creamy Lasagna, with its filling options and simple assembly, is sure to become a family favorite.

Quick-fix

This is the time of year to freshen your lineup of go-to recipes for busy weeknights, and America’s publishers are here to help.

Just out from Chronicle Books is “Time For Dinner: Strategies, Inspiration and Recipes for Family Meals Every Night of the Week” by the editors of Cookie, a stylish mommy magazine that Conde Nast axed along with Gourmet last fall.

The book is chock-full of gorgeous photos, clever recipes (sweet and sour chicken with plums, whole-wheat spaghetti with fried onions and bread crumbs, individual potato-chip frittatas made in muffin tins) and refreshing candor. (You’ve got to love a book with a chapter titled “I Want Something Simple, Fast and Hard to Screw Up.”)

In “High Flavor, Low Labor: Reinventing Weeknight Cooking” (Random House, $27) the theme is “blunt force cooking, a brash approach … that cranks the flavor and rolls its eyes at bashful ingredients,” writes author J.M. Hirsch. “It balances my desire for real and satisfying food with the demands of my real and overscheduled life.”

In a story last fall, Hirsch, the Associated Press food editor, wrote about getting his picky son, Parker, to eat more vegetables. The now-6-year-old has a pretty sophisticated palate, which shows in this book in recipes like red curry beef, anchovy butter chicken, chili balsamic-marinated sirloin and wasabi miso-glazed salmon.

Those wouldn’t have flown with my picky eater, but if your kids are more adventurous (or grown), you’ll find a lot to like in this book, which goes on sale on Tuesday.

Magazines, of course, are another source of quick meal ideas. The low-fat, whole-grain Pizza Pepperoni Pasta recipe below from Taste of Home Healthy Cooking has loads of kid- and parent-appeal.

Heat-and-serve

If you value your sanity, don’t begin a school week without at least one heat-and-serve entree in your freezer or refrigerator. For the supermoms out there, that may mean a stash of lovingly cooked and carefully labeled entrees. For the rest of us, it’s the best our supermarkets or warehouse stores have to offer.

My biggest frustration in searching for recommendable products was the insane sodium content – 1,000-plus milligrams per serving! – that so many of them have.

These are the best of the dozen products we sampled. Our criteria: good flavor and no more than 10 or 12 fat grams and 500 or so milligrams sodium per serving.

Stouffer’s Easy Express Rigatoni with Chicken : Requiring just 10 minutes in the microwave, this creamy pasta dish has nice roast-chicken flavor along with 260 calories, 10 fat grams and 430 milligrams sodium per serving. The meatball rotini also is reasonably nutritious, but many other Easy Express varieties – especially Asian flavors – have way too much sodium.

Simply Potatoes Country Style Mashed Potatoes : With 100 calories, 3.5 fat grams and 190 milligrams sodium per serving, these could almost pass for homemade. Watch for sales and coupons; they freeze well, and make for a real comfort meal alongside our favorite heat-and-serve roast beef (see below).

Mama Mancini’s Sunday Sauce and Meatballs: These fat, tender meatballs are absolutely delicious – better than many restaurant versions I’ve had. Each serving has 160 calories (you’ll want to add pasta, of course), 10 fat grams and 550 milligrams sodium. Not available at local stores but can be purchased online for $14.99 plus shipping per 4-pound package at mamamancinis.com.

Morton’s of Omaha Beef Pot Roast with Gravy : We tried three supermarket varieties, but they weren’t nearly as tasty as this warehouse-store brand with an impressively short ingredient list (no artificial anything). It has 230 calories, 450 milligrams sodium and 12 fat grams per serving – easy to improve on if you remove the hardened fat from the gravy before heating. Available at many Costco stores.

Green Chili Kabobs : These pleasantly zingy chicken-breast skewers require cooking, but they take only about 10 minutes on the grill or 20 minutes in the oven, and are delicious on a bed of rice or couscous. Available at many Costco stores.

Schwan’s Chicken Bites : Minnesota-based Schwan’s offers doorstep delivery of more than 350 frozen items – some ready-to-cook, some heat-and-serve – including entrees, side dishes, desserts and beverages. They’re quite pricey, but the quality is high, and you can’t beat the convenience.

I especially liked the Chicken Bites – moist, tasty chunks of roasted breast meat with 90 calories, 1 fat gram and 450 milligrams sodium per serving that are far healthier than breaded chicken nuggets ($14.99 per 8-serving bag at www.schwans.com or 888-724-9267).