With a little bit of planning and preparation ahead of time, you can create a weekly stock of healthy meal “add-ins”. This stock helps you make some very quick meals during the busy weekdays that will be extremely healthy and to your own individual taste preferences. This flexibility in the kitchen also helps to cater to everyone else's individual taste preferences in your household.

Prepare Your Ingredients

You can start your week's worth of menu add-ins by steaming a variety of frozen vegetables. Most frozen vegetables have no salt added and can be lightly steamed to retain their textures. Its a great idea to steam at lease half, if not all of, the the bag of veggies at a time so you won't have to keep cooking over and over during the week for each individual meal.

Simply steam one batch after the other of basic frozen veggies (organic if available), changing the water in the pan for each different veggie. Good choices for maximum variety of taste and nutrition would be corn, peas, shelled edamme (soy beans), spinach, carrots, green beans and broccoli plus any of your other favorites such as mixed veggies or black eyed peas. Cool each variety quickly and store in their own air-tight containers in the refrigerator. They'll easily last up to a week.

Keep on Hand...

The next stock item to keep on hand would be a variety of canned beans (no salt added and organic if available). Kidney, black, soy, pinto, garbanzo, navy, refried (choose the low fat vegetarian style of refried's so you get the ones without lard) — there are so many beans available in cans now a days there's no excuse not to use beans.

If you wish to add meat to your weekly stock choices, choose cans of low sodium chunk-white tuna in water, and low fat and low sodium lunch meats such as turkey and chicken.

Finally, keep on hand different types of low-fat cheeses in a variety of styles such as cheese sticks, slices, chunks and shredded. Mozzarella is naturally low-fat, so its always a good choice. You can now also get soy cheeses and organic cheeses!

Prepare Your Favorite Basic Dish

With a kitchen stocked with all of the ready to use items above you can easily enhance any basic quick to prepare dish and make it a delicious and nutritious meal.

Go ahead and be creative with your favorite basic dishes such as brown rice, macaroni and cheese, tacos, salads, pizzas and pastas or baked potatoes, then add any one of or combination of the above ingredients.

Season to taste with garlic, onion, black or red pepper or your other favorite herbs and spices such as cumin, dill or parsely.

Serving Suggestions

Serve with toasted 100% whole wheat bread slices or crackers and 100% fruit jams (no sugar added) and you'll be amazed at the satisfaction everyone gets from these quick, healthy and tasty meals.

Serve avocados, jalapenos, olives, diced red or yellow bell peppers, or diced tomatoes on top or on the side. Sunflower seeds, or shelled nuts such as walnuts or almonds make a great healthy addition to any meal also.

Remember, there are no "real" rules in the kitchen and the more variety of ingredients you add to your meals, the more variety of nutrition you are adding to them too.