Practical Healthy Eating Tips - Kitchen Gadget Edition
I’ll start this by saying you do NOT need a ton of kitchen gadgets to eat healthy, and this is not meant to be a huge list of things you need to buy. Rather, these are some tools I have found helpful to have around to make fueling my body with nutritious foods a little easier.
This is by far the most used appliance in our kitchen and one of my favorite purchases ever. Even better, it’s relatively low cost, with great versions available from $50-$100. So what does it do? I primarily use it as a pressure cooker and rice cooker, but also a slow cooker. It can also do a bunch of other things, including saute, make yogurt, steam vegetables, and fancier version that can be used as a dehydrator, sous vide, air fryer, and more. We have the $100 version and use it almost every day. Some of our main uses include:
Rice and grains - easy way to quickly cook rice and other grains, like quinoa, groats, farro, wheat berries, barley, etc.
Beans - I love to make a big batch of beans from dried beans in the pressure cooker, with no soaking necessary (because, let’s face it, I never remember to soak my beans)
Chicken stock - easy to use to make a big batch of chicken stock (or even beef, lamb, pork, veggie, fish - whatever stock you need)
Pulled meats - it’s great for making pulled pork, chicken, beef, etc.
Soups and stews - the pressure cooker or slow cooker functions can be great for making a variety of soups and stews
Hominy - I love to make pozole using dried hominy, and the pressure cooker function is fantastic for quickly cooking hominy without having to soak it
Ok, this one is a bit more pricey, but you don’t have to have a Vitamix necessarily and there are a variety of blenders that could work. But smoothies are a staple in our house for breakfast and even lunch or dinner when we don’t feel like cooking. We tend to stick to the same smoothie recipe, which includes some yogurt (local if we can get it, otherwise typically full-fat greek yogurt with lots of protein and satiating fat), almond butter (no oils or sugar, just almonds), mixed berries (Wymans berries are the best I’ve tasted), and a combination of orange juice, milk, and water for liquid. You can throw in some greens to get additional nutrients, and change up the ingredients however you’d like, but the convenience of a smoothie can’t be beat. It’s something I can easily throw together as I’m running out the door to get to work and we try to keep the essentials on hand so we always have this option.
This goes back to when I was a kid and would go to grandma’s house for dinner and she’d make me popcorn on the stove and it was always just the best popcorn I’d ever had. There’s something so cozy about fresh popped popcorn off the stove. She bought me a popcorn popper for Christmas one year once I was grown and living on my own and I’ve cherished it since. My roommate loved when we’d make popcorn on the stove and Eric also loves it now. We like to buy local popcorn, pop it on the stove with a little butter, and top it with nutritional yeast and sichuan peppercorns (blend the nutritional yeast and peppercorns in a spice grinder to create a powder and it coats the popcorn perfectly). The extra few minutes it takes to make on the stove rather than buying microwave or pre-popped popcorn is worth it. It’s a great snack that’s full of fiber, and honestly, who doesn’t love popcorn? You don’t need this popper, and there are a variety of ways to make homemade popcorn, but this is what we have and it’s one of my favorite kitchen tools.
Since we all know that soda is not good for us (even diet, right?), I've developed a love of sparkling water. It gets really pricey to buy bottles of Pellegrino at the store, nevermind wasteful, so investing in a SodaStream was another life changing kitchen tool for Eric and I. It helps us drink a lot of water, and I can even “fancy it up” a bit by adding juice from a lemon or lime, or even a splash of grapefruit juice or pomegranate juice. It sometimes feels like I’m having a cocktail, without having to actually have a cocktail. It’s just a convenient way to have bubbly water, which can just make otherwise boring water feel elegant.
These are just a few things that we’ve found to help us eat healthy, and do so very conveniently. I honestly don’t know what I would do without each of these gadgets, particularly the InstantPot, as they make life so much easier.
