898: Time-Saving Tips for Eating Healthy (Affordably!) with Liz Marino

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And in this episode, I’m so excited to get super practical and actionable and delve into some time and money-saving tips for eating healthy. I know I’ve written and talked a lot about what the specifics of a really healthy nourishing diet are. And I also know that often this can be more expensive, especially when you have a big family.

And so today’s guest, Liz Marino, I wanted to go deep on some really practical things we can all do to accomplish this without breaking the bank or spending all of our time in the kitchen. And Liz is the co-founder of The Clean Eating Couple, which is a website that focuses on easy, healthy recipes with simple ingredients. And I’ll make sure I link to this as well. There’s some free resources they have that I feel like are really helpful for family bulk cooking as well. But in this episode, Liz shares some of her top strategies and tips for consuming enough really nourishing nutrient-dense food without spending all of your time in the kitchen and without breaking the bank. So without further ado, let’s jump in and learn from Liz. Liz, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Liz: Thanks so much for having me, Katie. I’m excited to chat with you.

Katie: I am really excited for our episodes together because when you, you and I connected via Instagram and I realized that you would be an amazing podcast guest because so much of the things you talk about are extremely actionable and practical and relevant to moms, especially I feel like. Since the majority of people listening are moms, I’m really excited to get some actionable kind of key takeaways that people can implement to start like really changing some of these things we’re going to dive into for the better, literally instantly.

And the first topic I want to go deep on with you today is the topic of saving sort of time and money, basically making healthy eating affordable and not a complete full-time job. And from browsing your content, I know you have so many amazing resources related to this. So I know it’s a broad topic. I know we’ll get to go in a lot of different directions, but maybe kind of just starting at a higher level. I know there was a journey for you on this topic and that also that you kind of found some foundational things that make a big difference. So if you can like sort of broadly walk us into this topic.

Liz: Yeah, absolutely. It is a pretty broad topic, but I have a lot to say on it. So I just a little background on me. I have been cooking healthy food for the past 11 years. So I’m kind of an expert in it. And over the past year, my daughter is now one and a half. So over the past year and a half, I have also become a mom. So I am totally your audience. I listened to all of your episodes.

But I know what it’s like to want to eat healthy, know we should be eating healthy, have a general idea of what we should be eating. We all kind of know, let’s stay away from the processed foods, maybe eat more vegetables. But I also know that it can feel really overwhelming when you are doing 1 million things all the time and you have a lot on your plate. And I think that a lot of moms, usually put themselves last because we’re too busy putting our kids first or families first or work first or whatever you have going on. And then healthy eating kind of goes to the bottom of the list.

But I’m here to say that it doesn’t have to be like that. And there are three big things that I think can really help people if you are trying to start eating healthier. The first one would be focusing on basics. So we’ve all kind of heard shop the perimeter of the store, but it really is the easiest way to kind of, put good foods on your plate. Shopping the produce section. If you could do dairy, shopping the dairy section. If you can do meat and that’s part of your diet, eating the meat. It’s all around the edges of the grocery store. It’s also going to make it a lot easier for you to get in and out. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with canned items or even precooked items. Those things can be amazing and save you a ton of time. But if you really focus on the basics and stop trying to make these hyper complicated things or look for specific ingredients, that alone is going to take a lot of stress away from mealtime.

The second thing that I focus on when I’m trying to build recipes or even just trying to eat healthier is this kind of formula. And it’s protein, vegetables, and healthy carbs. So for protein, I’m looking for lean things like chicken, ground beef is great, ground turkey, pork, seafood. Really any kind of protein that you like and that your family likes is a great place to start with your plate and filling it up with a lot of protein because it’s going to help keep you full.

The second component is vegetables. There are a ton of different vegetables out there. Whatever ones you like, go for it. If you’re into a salad, go for it. If you like roasted veggies, that’s great. If you prefer them blended up in a soup, that’s awesome too. Whatever way you prefer to get them in and whatever is going to be easiest for you, add those veggies on your plate.

And then the last thing is carbs, which I know some people prefer to eat lower carbs. Some people prefer to eat higher carb. I think that a lot of people have kind of demonized carbs really for no reason. There are a lot of healthy ways that you can enjoy carbs, and some of them are vegetables. So there are some higher carb veggies out there like butternut squash or beets that are really great options for filling your plate and fueling your body. I love roasted potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes or roasted russet potatoes are delicious. Or even something as simple as brown rice or white rice can be a great way to kind of build that plate. But those three main things are what I’m always looking for when I’m trying to build my plate.

And then the last thing that I think is worth noting is don’t make complicated recipes. I know that we all scroll social media and we see these fancy recipes or these beautiful images on Pinterest, or maybe your friend sent you something. But if you look at it and it has 30 ingredients and 50 steps, just walk away from it. There are other options out there. And I feel like while it’s amazing that people have come up with ways to make dairy-free sauces and your own ketchup and all kinds of stuff, if looking at that makes you really overwhelmed, you can still make really delicious, healthy food without having complicated recipes.

And I mean, this is a shameless plug, but you will find a lot of them on my website. I have tons of easy, healthy recipes. I don’t have time to be fooling around with 30 ingredients. I know that you don’t either. So, there’s really no need for it, and it can be really overwhelming. So just skip those complicated recipes.

Katie: Yeah, I feel like that’s such a great foundation for this conversation. And especially like that focus on simplicity, because I have certainly gone down that path for a while, especially when early on, there were not some of the things we have now that we can actually buy pre-made that are good quality. So I was having to make so much from scratch. And I felt like all I did was make homemade condiments and beauty products and laundry detergent. That was my entire life.

And to your point, I love having that sort of framework of kind of the basic building blocks you’re trying to put in each meal. And then being able to sort of like loosely follow that and or not have to even follow necessarily recipes. I feel like as we learn kind of that system, we can sort of intuitively do that or something I’ve learned from my workout group, they call it jokingly boy food, but it’s like. Kind of all things mixed together in one pan or Instapot. It’s like meat plus rice plus vegetables Instapot on.

Liz: Exactly.

Katie: And it’s not fancy and it doesn’t look fancy, but it kind of checks all the boxes. It tastes good. You can add spices to make it taste different. And it’s simple. And time savings. I feel like guys maybe figured this out ahead of time a little bit.

Liz: Yeah, I agree with you. And that’s another tip that I would add is that like it really doesn’t have to be fancy. I mean, yes, there obviously is like a visual element to food and sometimes we wanna make a beautiful dish or sometimes we wanna make something that’s really colorful and has, you know, four different vegetables in it. But there’s also nothing wrong with just cooking something that is nourishing, that’s gonna get the job done and that after you eat it, you could say, this wasn’t the best meal that I’ve ever eaten, but it wasn’t bad by any means. And that can just check off the box too. It doesn’t always have to be something fancy. It could just be simple and nourishing and good enough.

Katie: Yeah. And to your point, not letting perfect be the enemy of the good, because yes, we could try to do the Pinterest beautiful, complicated recipes every night, but what are we trading as far as time that we could be doing other things with our family with that same time? And it’s like, can you get 80% of the way there with 20% of the time, choose that option, and then get to sort of vary it from there.

I also love how you talked about rotating easy meals because I’ve had this theory for a long time that for moms, especially, it’s not actually all the stuff that we have to do that’s what kind of leads to overwhelm. It’s all the mental loops that we’re kind of carrying internally all the time. So to any, anytime we can put in a system or kind of a repeating easy system to follow, it at least takes the mental load out of that while allows us to still be effective and efficient and accomplish all the things we’re trying to accomplish.

And for me, I found when it comes to meal planning, especially, this is really helpful to have sort of like two weeks of repeating meals that I know at least most of my kids like each meal and I can sort of do a two week repeat. And then I have my shopping list already ready to go. The recipes are already ready to go and the kids can help be involved in cooking that as well. And it sounds like your system and you have recipes as well and kind of built around this as well, sort of like picking family favorites and repeating rather than reinventing the wheel every single day.

Liz: Yes, I totally agree with you. That’s kind of how we do things in our house too. We probably have, I would say there’s probably 20 recipes that we have at least once a month. And then we’re obviously always testing new things. Just my job is a little different from the average person that we’re cooking a lot more because we’re testing recipes from our site. But even though we’re testing new stuff, we always go back to our old favorites.

And there are a couple of them that come to mind that are super easy that anyone can make. We do chili in our house all the time and I make a huge batch of it. I load it up with tons of veggies. I put bell peppers in there, carrots, onions, garlic, all the good stuff. And then I make, I usually make it with like three or four pounds of meat. And we’re only two and a half people in our house. I know you have a lot bigger of a family, but we freeze it for the future. So we take a big batch of it, we put half of it in the freezer. And then in a couple of weeks, whether we’re tired or we just don’t feel like cooking, then we can pull it out and we know it’s something that we all love. So that’s one that we constantly have on repeat in our house.

Soups are another thing that we eat soup at least once a week. And I think a lot of people can feel like soup isn’t very filling or it’s not a real meal, but it totally is. You just have to kind of make it the right way, double up the amount of chicken or whatever meat it calls for and add extra veggies in there. And it can be really hearty and really filling. We make that all the time.

And then another one that we do is pulled pork or pulled chicken. So either getting a pork shoulder or cooking a whole chicken and shredding it. And then I like to serve that with roasted potatoes. Like I said earlier, love roasted russet or sweet potatoes. And then any vegetable, including frozen green beans. We love frozen veggies and they’re super easy. I know a lot of people don’t like the microwave, but again, going back to that 80/20 rule, don’t let perfect be the enemy. If the difference of eating a vegetable is we’re not having vegetables or I’m popping this in the microwave and we’re having frozen veggies that I thawed for me, that’s a better option than no vegetables at all.

Katie: I fully agree. And this time of year, I’m leaning heavy on the soups. I love how easy they are. And especially like any slow cooker option that I can just sort of set it and forget it in the morning. But you brought up two other things that I would love to kind of delve into, which are sort of the ideas of bulk cooking and bulk purchasing. Because one thing I realized years ago was that it’s usually the protein that takes the longest to cook in any given meal and/or defrost. So that’s where the most planning comes in. And so sometimes I’ll do a bulk cooking day once a week where I’ll pre-make, like you said, a bunch of shredded chicken in the slow cooker with minimal seasoning so it can go sort of any direction in meals later in the week.

Same thing with like just brown a ton of ground beef, freeze some, refrigerate some, have it ready to go for meals. Because then, like you talked about, a chili can be made in 10 minutes or a stir fry can be made in 10 minutes. It makes that like weeknight time so much shorter. So I would love to hear any strategies you have for bulk cooking and/or from a budget perspective, maybe bulk purchasing or places that you find or how you get really good deals on different foods that you use a lot of.

Liz: Yeah. So in terms of bulk cooking, I do exactly what you do. I agree. The protein is definitely the hardest part of cooking and the most time intensive. So pretty much anytime I am making any sort of protein, I always double or triple it. And at the time you might be looking at this big bag of chicken or all these pounds of ground beef and think, where is this going to go? But it goes quick. Especially if you are someone that is eating your lunches at home or meal prepping your lunches, eating dinner at home, you can go through a couple pounds of meat very quickly. And especially if you’re someone that’s prioritizing eating enough protein, which you should be, which we’re going to talk about, I know, later.

But in terms of bulking cooking, the two things that you mentioned, browning and the crock pot is seriously my friend. I do exactly what you do with a shredded chicken. I leave it pretty bland. I just put a little salt and pepper on it and then it can be chicken salad. It can go in a wrap. It can go in a quesadilla. It can go over a salad. It can go into a soup. So kind of keeping it, it sounds counterintuitive, but kind of keeping it bland so that it could really just be like a palette that you could do anything with is what I like to do.

In terms of bulk purchasing, I have found that this really varies depending on the region that you liveIn terms of being able to buy certain things, I feel like some places have, you know, much better prices on things than others. I buy a lot of stuff at Costco though. I buy a lot of vegetables at Costco. Our Costco, we buy pretty much all organic at this point. We’re privileged to be able to do that. But our Costco has a huge selection of organic and non-organic produce, meat. It’s really impressive. And I think that they’ve come a long way. So check out your local Costco or bulk shopper like that.

There are some things that I buy on Thrive Market. There are some things that I buy at Whole Foods. I do find though that you really kind of have to pay attention to prices at places because it can seem like things are cheaper. So I like to do things online. I will pull up Thrive Market. I will pull up Whole Foods and then I’ll pull up Instacart and I kind of build my shopping list that way, which I know is might seem a little bit of labor intensive. But for me, once I do it, I can kind of remember, oh, oats are always cheaper here. Olive oil is always the best price there. And it just kind of sticks in my brain. So I think it’s a little bit of work up front.

But if you pay attention once or twice, then it should stick with you. And you’ll know kind of like, okay, this is what we get here. This is what we get there. So that’s kind of how I do that in an affordable way. Because if you just go to, you know, we have like some local grocery chains on the East Coast, like Big Y or Stop and Shop, and their prices are honestly outrageous if you go in there and try to buy organic produce or organic meat. I mean, like it truly is not affordable in my opinion. And while I would love to be able to support them, it just doesn’t make sense economically for our family with the amount of food that we’re eating to be able to do that. So I do feel like we have to kind of shop smart in order to be able to buy the quality of food that we want.

Katie: I agree. I do something similar where once a week shopping, I’ll try to pull up everything and compare side by side, look at sales. I also find that just shopping once a week and trying to really build a meal plan versus just ordering every time I need something saves a lot of money and also really encourages me to use up things I have in the house. I feel like this also ties into the meal planning that we talked about in the beginning.

I know you mentioned your child’s younger, but, another tip I found with older ones especially is that they’re now able to, for the most part, make their own breakfast and lunches. And like you said, we’re going to talk about protein for each meal in a couple minutes. But I found it really also saves time and lets the kids kind of be in charge of their own nutrition when you have those bulk cooked proteins always ready to go.

And they know there are always access to certain foods that are like eat anytime that you’re hungry and they’re always ready to go. So whether that is like protein sources like eggs and meat, whether that’s having carrots always in the vegetable drawer or fruit in the fruit drawer. So my kids don’t have to ask me for a snack. They know they can always go cook one of those things or just reheat something if they’re hungry. So with older kids, I feel like that’s been a huge time saver for me.

Liz: Yeah, I love that. And I love that you give them the they have the independence to be able to make those choices on their own. And it must be nice to not have someone totally dependent on you. We’re not there yet. But I am looking forward to that.

But I just wanted to go back to what you said before about shopping once a week. That is something that is huge. I think it boggles my mind when that people have time to be going to the grocery store every day, and to that they just want to be there. I mean, I love to cook and I love to eat and I don’t want to be at the grocery store every day. So I do what you mentioned.

Before I even think about what we’re going to be eating for the week ahead, I open up my fridge, and I look through the whole thing. And I say, okay, what needs to be eaten first that gets pulled to the front of the fridge so that it doesn’t go bad. We don’t forget about it doesn’t get hidden in that dark corner for a week, and then it’s old. So everything that needs to get eaten gets pulled forward. So we can actually see it’s right in front of our faces and doesn’t get missed. Anything that’s got to go, that’s got to go. Sometimes, you know, we miss things. Unfortunately, I’m usually pretty good about food waste, but we all make mistakes. And if you don’t want to eat something, most of the time it also could be frozen as long as it’s been recently cooked. So that’s kind of the option that I make.

And then I take an inventory of our fridge and I say, okay, we have bell peppers, we have mushrooms, we have some carrots, we have whatever, half a container of cottage cheese. And I look at that and I say, okay, what can we make that has bell peppers? Chili. Perfect. We’ll add that to the list. What has mushrooms? Oh, okay. Chicken marsala. Let’s make a chicken marsala so that these mushrooms don’t go to waste. And I build my meals around what we already have. And usually I’m pretty good where we don’t have a ton of stuff lying around in the fridge by the end of the week. But you can save a ton of money just by doing that rather than just like blank canvas what are we making?

And I also feel like it makes it a little easier because if you have to pick a recipe that is specific to an ingredient, it kind of silos you to like, okay, we have to use these mushrooms. What uses mushrooms? So that’s a great way also to cut back on spending because you’re not going to be wasting food. And it’s also going to cut back on time. Because you won’t have to think about it as much because you already know what you have to kind of build around.

Katie: That’s such a good point. And another fun thing, I haven’t done that often, but every time we’ve done this, it’s been so fun with the older kids is when you get to that point where there are certain ingredients that need to be used up and they don’t fit any of your common meal plan recipes is we’ll do like a, like a chopped night, like a top chef kitchen competition night and like let them try to figure out recipes using some obscure ingredients.

And not always does the food end up being the tastiest thing we’ve ever eaten, but it’s never been inedible. And I find that kids will try something that they helped make much more willingly, even if it’s a little bit odd or obscure. So I think to the degree that we can get our kids involved, that also really, really helps, especially when they’re older. I love those tips for using ingredients.

Liz: That’s so fun.

Katie: Well, I know you have so many resources available and recipes and tools on your site. Are there any other key takeaways specific to saving time and money when it comes to meal prep that you want to include in today’s episode? I’ll, of course, link to your site. And then I know we’re going to also get to go deep in another episode about protein consumption, which I’m really excited about.

Liz: Yes. I just have two quick other things that I feel like are worth noting. Not enough people are using their freezer. It is a tool that almost every single person that is listening to this has in their house and you should totally be using it. So like I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of things that are freezer friendly, chili, soups, stews, even like dishes that you make with rice or sometimes even pasta can freeze really, really well. So I highly recommend if you are short on time, if you only want to dirty your kitchen once, double or triple the batch with the intention of freezing it. Super cubes are amazing. They freeze things in single serve portions. I love those. I always freeze food in that. And it’s nice because on days where you’re feeling a little lazy, you don’t want to cook, you don’t want to make a mess, or you’re just tired, you could just pop that out of the freezer and heat it and you’ve got a really delicious, healthy meal.

And then the other thing that I feel like is worth noting is to rely on shortcuts. We kind of touched on this a little bit with that 80/20, but you know, a rotisserie chicken, buying a salad kit, opting for pre-cooked vegies. Obviously, they all cost a little bit more, so it’s kind of counterintuitive to the saving money. But if they can help you get a healthy meal on the table quickly, I do think that sometimes it’s worth trading your time for a little bit of money if the end goal is really building healthy meals.

Katie: That’s such a good point. Well, I will make sure all those links are in the show notes at wellnessmama.com for any of you guys listening on the go, as well as links to your website, to your social media. Like I said, you have so many really practical, actionable things, and I’ve loved getting to learn from you on that. So for this episode, thank you so much for your time and everybody stay tuned. Our next episode together, we’re going to go deep on ways to incorporate more protein from clean, real food sources. Liz, thanks so much for being here today.

Liz: Thanks, Katie.

Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.