Transitional Meals
Your first thought might be… “What the heck is a transitional meal"?”
Well you know when you have a rotisserie chicken that you bought Monday night for dinner? You paired that chicken with some green beans and quinoa and called it a day? But looking in your fridge there’s still half a chicken left. This is where a transitional meal would come into place and you make something else out of that chicken.
Transitional Meals with Chicken:
Chicken salad sandwiches are a perfect way to make that other half of that chicken disappear
Creating a chicken noodle or chicken dumpling soup is a healthy and easy way to save yourself money and time
The easiest one yet… shred that chicken up and throw it on top of a walnut, cranberry, and cucumber summer salad
See this isn’t that scary…
Transitional Meals can also look like a little bit of meal prepping at the beginning of the week. If you’re unsure what to make yourself or your family during the week while you’re at the grocery store just get some health food staples that you can mix and match. These items include various vegetables such as broccoli, red potato, carrots, corn, red onion, green beans, and spinach to name a few. Then load up on fruits, anything from berries, melons, apples, oranges, and pears. Be mindful of seasonal choices when it comes to grocery shopping to get the best produce available. Once you’ve got your essentials in the produce department, grab your favorite proteins. Protein doesn’t necessarily always have to mean “meat”. Sure you can grab that rotisserie chicken, some ground turkey, and fresh fish. Don’t forget about the more plant based proteins like beans, tofu, and edamame. Lastly is the grains, these can be things like quinoa, cous-cous, and different rices.
Now that you’ve the basic necessities you’ve got a multitude of different food combinations that you can create.
Time to Cook
Meal 1 Asian Inspired:
Take your broccoli, carrots, red onion and a protein. Cook veggies and meat or other protein such as tofu or edamame separately, combine, add soy sauce, or coconut aminos as a healthier substitute, salt, pepper and boom you’re ready to go with an Asian inspired meal.
Meal 2 Cajun Inspired:
Grab your red potato and green beans, saute those up in some onion powder, garlic powder, oregano, thyme, and some chili flakes. Cook the chicken as desired while adding in those same spices. Cook brown rice then combine all vegetables, protein and rice. Wham you’ve got a Cajun inspired dinner.
Meal 3 Chipotle in Your Chicken Inspired:
Chances are you have some sort of canned black beans or kidney beans in your pantry. Grab those, rinse and put into a bowl. Whether you have canned corn or fresh it’ll work the same, add that into the bowl with the beans. Chop up some left over red onion and add that to your mix. Cook either white or brown rice, or for an extra kick of protein- quinoa for the base of your bowl. After all of that is done, lay the rice or quinoa down as the base, and add your mixture of beans, corn, and red onion then some spinach for some extra leafy greens. Top it off with some salsa or guacamole (which is much cheaper if you make it at home than buying it at Chipotle) and what do ya know you’ve got a healthy and sodium reduced Chipotle inspired meal.
Transitional meals aren’t meant to be complicated and cause you stress over creating a 5 course dinner (unless you want to). These meals are meant to use up the staple items you purchase on a weekly basis and create a multitude of different types of meals. Before your next grocery store trip create some meal ideas that have items that can easily be used in other meals.