Shopping for healthier food. Need Help.

[Kenbushway]

I've heard many times from my family; "We'll start that healthy diet". I frankly don't feel like waiting any longer; so I am taking it upon myself to look for better, healthier home made recipes and shop for healthier foods. I have the recipes, I use the site Grandma's Kitchen (http://www.grandmaskitchen.com/). However, I have no experience shopping for healthier foods. I mainly shop at Kroger and trust me its the only option, closest whole food market is 40 miles away. Can anyone of you give me some tips and tricks on picking up deals or planning of any kind? Any response would be greatly appreciated thank you.

 

[Miss Chicken]

I am not really sure what you mean by needing help shopping for healthy foods. Do you need recipes?

We don't have Kroger here but I assume that are a supermarket chain and I think it is possible to find healthy food on most supermarket shelves. Does you store have a food range of fresh vegetables and fruit etc?

 

[Pingfah]

Hit the Farmers' markets if you have any, produce straight from the people that grow it is often better and cheaper than the stuff the supermarkets stock, where you are usually paying through the nose for it to be flawless looking but not necessarily any nicer.

 

[RoJoHen]

I am not really sure what you mean by needing help shopping for healthy foods. Do you need recipes?

I'm not sure what he's looking for, either, unless he needs help figuring what "healthy foods" are.

 

[Kenbushway]

I am simply asking for any shopping tricks - tips you have, any advice when it comes to meal planning or shopping planning. Usually my family just goes get this and that but its never anything really homemade, unless you include the water and milk you throw in according to the box. My family doesn't listen to "no don't touch that I am making a recipe", so I need help there to. Any suggestions how I can prevent people from taking my ingredients. Its really just I am novice when it comes to cooking healthy homemade meals and shopping in a way that doesn't cost a fortune. I need to be able to shop effectively and cost saving but I can still get all the ingredients I need.

 

[Kenbushway]

I am not really sure what you mean by needing help shopping for healthy foods. Do you need recipes?

We don't have Kroger here but I assume that are a supermarket chain and I think it is possible to find healthy food on most supermarket shelves. Does you store have a food range of fresh vegetables and fruit etc?

Its a medium sized grocery store that isn't anything like Walmart but it does have a decent size vegetable, fruit, organic section.

 

[RoJoHen]

I recommend cooking in bulk. Make recipes that you can get several meals out of.

And just because something is homemade doesn't mean it's healthy.

 

[Pingfah]

Any suggestions how I can prevent people from taking my ingredients.

Wire the cupboard door handle to the mains.

 

[Kenbushway]

I recommend cooking in bulk. Make recipes that you can get several meals out of.

And just because something is homemade doesn't mean it's healthy.

True. but the recipes that I got from the website above are actually pretty healthy, picked most out of their vegetarian recipes section.

 

[TheSeeker]

I would suggest doing your cooking as soon as you get your ingredients and then portioning up your meals and freezing them. This way your food doesn't get eaten by others and you will have ready-made meals when you are too busy to cook.

Unless they raid the freezer of course.

 

[sojourner]

Not sure how healthy the recipes are on a site where the main page has chicken and waffles, creamed chicken and biscuits, and peanut butter chocolate cake as the first things presented.

ETA: here, let me google that for you

 

[RoJoHen]

^I was going to suggest the same. Do your cooking as soon as you get home from the store. I know if I buy things with the intention of cooking them later, they usually just end up sitting in the fridge and going bad.

 

[TheSeeker]

If I didn't make my stuff ahead of time I would always be buying my lunch at work.

 

[J.T.B.]

I am simply asking for any shopping tricks - tips you have, any advice when it comes to meal planning or shopping planning. Usually my family just goes get this and that but its never anything really homemade, unless you include the water and milk you throw in according to the box. My family doesn't listen to "no don't touch that I am making a recipe", so I need help there to. Any suggestions how I can prevent people from taking my ingredients. Its really just I am novice when it comes to cooking healthy homemade meals and shopping in a way that doesn't cost a fortune. I need to be able to shop effectively and cost saving but I can still get all the ingredients I need.

Try this: Get some recipes that you are interested in, use them to plan a menu for the whole week and do all the shopping at once. If you need something really fresh, plan that meal for later in the week when you can stop in somewhere and pick it up. Use actual food as much as possible, rather than food-like commercial products. As Michael Pollan says, they shouldn't have a list of more than five ingredients, ingredients you can't pronounce, and should eventually rot.

Give yourself time to prepare the meal, get the ingredients organized and ready to go and don't get in a rush. Clean up as much as possible during "idle time" in the process so you don't have a big off-putting mess at the end.

As for people taking ingredients, you just have to make it clear that it's off-limits and there are consequences. Hopefully when people get used to having home-cooked dinners they won't pilfer.

If I could recommend one single cookbook to have it would be The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

 

[StolenThunder]

Soup. Easy to make, storable, and so long as you're sensible - healthy.

 

[sonak]

avoid the junk food in checkout lines and don't shop when hungry.

 

[Kenbushway]

Not sure how healthy the recipes are on a site where the main page has chicken and waffles, creamed chicken and biscuits, and peanut butter chocolate cake as the first things presented.

ETA: here, let me google that for you

I got most of my recipes from the sites vegetarian recipe section.

 

[Squiggy]

Avoid pretty much everything on that website you're going to. Just because you can cook it rather than microwave it, doesn't mean it's healthy. Grandma's generation is ridded with diabetes and the generation before that was riddled with gout.

Just because it's old doesn't mean it's healthy. Americans haven't had a healthy diet since the mid-late 1800s.

Read the ingredients. Avoid anything with high-fructose corn syrup. Keep meals simple. Meat is fine. Veggies are fine. Combining foods into combinations that takes a degree in chemistry isn't fine.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Not sure how healthy the recipes are on a site where the main page has chicken and waffles, creamed chicken and biscuits, and peanut butter chocolate cake as the first things presented.

That doesn't look like what my grandma cooked at all.

Also, as soon as I saw some abomination called "spaghetti lasagna", I stopped reading.

 

[Ashu]

I Honestly skip most of the middle sections unless there is something specific i want. I usually just do the dairy/freezer section, produce, and meat and i'm good to go.