Great job choosing to eat healthier in 2026! To help you get started, shop our top picks of essentials that make healthy eating easy and fun. Here's to your healthiest year yet! Escali Primo Digital Scale A kitchen scale can really help you eat healthier. This Escali digital scale is great for weighing ingredients, portioning meals, or even measuring coffee beans.
I'm a personal trainer and mom of four, and I love using my air fryer to make meals and snacks. Homemade tortilla chips and stuffed peppers are some of my favorite things to make in an air fryer. I also use my air fryer to make baked apples, breakfast bowls, and kale chips. My health-centered, active family focuses on nutrient-dense foods that provide us with energy.
The great thing is that a lot of the following additions can be mixed and matched to achieve unique and fun flavor profiles. Salads don't just have to feature bland, limp, and waterlogged pieces of lettuce; there are so many ways to approach them and make them scrumptious and satiating. After trying some of them, you may never look at salad the same way again.
Want the best roasted vegetables ever? I've been making roasted vegetables for years, and I've found that that high heat in the oven caramelizes the vegetables and gives them a lightly crisp exterior which pleases even the most veggie wary eaters! This is my master recipe for how to roast vegetables: make it for a crowd as a side dish, or meal prep them to eat in grain bowls all week long. They're healthy, plant based, vegetarian and gluten-free, and even better: colorful and delicious!
Pickle fans know the joy of nabbing a fresh jar of any of the best pickle brands and enjoying the tasty snacking and sandwich-stacking possibilities. But there's a way to feel even better about your pickle purchase: reusing those jars. When you can repurpose a product's packaging, the benefits are plentiful. You're participating in an eco-friendly mission to reduce waste, and you're also putting the packaging to use for where you might have otherwise had to spend money to buy new.
A carefully calibrated amount of rice and water ensures everything cooks at exactly the same rate, so don't eyeball it. Making your own sofrito on a weeknight is a commitment that's well worth the effort; it provides a deeply savory foundation that perfumes both the rice and chicken. Serve it with a dollop of sour cream, some pickled onions, or warm tortillas for a stick-to-your-ribs dinner that tastes like it took at least two, if not three, pots to make.
There are exactly three meal-prep foods that I have on rotation: shredded beef, shredded pork, and, you guessed it, shredded chicken. All of these involve exactly two steps: Putting spices on a meat, and putting that meat into a crockpot. Every other dinner is leftovers or sandwich meat. Author Don't say I haven't tried. During the pandemic, I went through a jerky phase. I've sampled most of the meal prep boxes.
Note: As many redditors have pointed out in the original thread, these examples are not to discredit how useful pre-prepared foods are to those who are disabled or have a super packed schedule. There's nothing wrong with buying these from the store - we all do (I say, with a jar of pasta sauce literally sitting on my counter right now). There's no shame in it!
At 4:30 a.m., before her husband and two kids are up, Morgan Walker is typically just starting her workout. "I'm kind of a first-thing-in-the-morning type of person when it comes to exercise," Walker, a 32-year-old registered sports dietitian at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, told Business Insider. Walker focuses her own workouts on a mix of cardio and strength training. Each week, she spends three to four days building muscle mass by gradually increasing the weights and rep counts of exercises like bench presses, deadlifts, and squats. She also runs twice a week, for up to an hour at a time.
After boiling eggs to perfection, the cooked pieces will be mixed into a seasoned sauce that can be customized to your liking. Lean into spicy, savory flavors with minced garlic, Old Bay seasoning, onion powder, and red chili flakes, or embrace a tangier treat with a sauce made from lemon pepper seasoning, brown sugar, and paprika. When stirred with melted butter, bone broth, and served warm, this flavorful recipe will transform boiled eggs as you know them.
Don't try too hard Rather than trying to impress people, it is actually the opposite that ultimately does impress, says Rosie Kellett, who hosts supper clubs in London and is the author of In for Dinner. My advice is keep it really simple. Cook something that you know you're going to nail and feeds the right amount of people. Go for the heavy-hitters that are solid gold in your repertoire.
It may sound weird, and it's definitely unconventional, but Ree Drummond's method for boiling an omelet in a bag is actually genius. You need to try this if you're among those of us who try to flip an omelet and quickly change the meal plan to scrambled eggs every time. On her Food Network show, " The Pioneer Woman," Drummond demonstrated how she makes an omelet by adding all the ingredients for the previously complicated egg dish to a boil-safe bag and cooking a tasty dish in minutes. After enjoying this dish, there are no messy pans to scrub because you can simply toss the bag in the trash.
I love cooking, I write about kitchen gadgets for a living after all, but cooking in bulk when you live alone can feel like a chore. And eating the same thing four days in a row can even get downright depressing. The way I've figured out how to enjoy it is by starting with basics-grains, roasted veggies, versatile proteins-and then jazzing them up with sauces, marinades, and dressings so they don't feel repetitive. That's where the Smart Stick comes in.
I love this recipe because it's so versatile. If you're missing artichokes or olives, try sun-dried tomato or capers. No chickpeas? White beans work or double the lentils. You really can't go wrong. The dressing is quick, easy and versatile and you can use it to create your own Mediterranean variations of this salad. Here are a few more reasons to love it:
There are different versions of whipped coffees around the world, and Dalgona is one of the easiest to create. However, it can be time-consuming; if you don't have an electric mixer, you could end up beating the mixture for 15 minutes. But if you make a big batch at the start of the week, you can freeze it and simply scoop the mixture on top of the milk or water when ready to serve.
As a food writer (and, you know, loving mother), I probably shouldn't admit this, but until I started using PackIt's modular lunch containers, I really hated packing my kids' lunches. Each box comes with two dividers that can be popped into any of the eleven grooves, so you can make your lunchbox work for your lunch, versus trying to cram food into fixed-size containers. They're super durable, completely dishwasher safe, and the lid is leakproof.
From a nutritional standpoint, both canned and frozen vegetables can be every bit as good for you as fresh. That's because preserved produce is often packaged straight from the field at the height of its freshness, which protects its vitamins and minerals at their peak. So you aren't doing your body a disservice in any way by making a side of frozen spinach.
The back-to-school grind is a juggling act, but one that can be made a little bit easier when you're not tirelessly pitting cherries for a toddler's lunch like a footman at Versailles, or scrambling to make dinner from scratch. It's hard enough to get your kids dressed and out the door by 7:15 AM, and often that means scrambling to slap together a PB&J (no shame, we love a PB&J) when we might have preferred a more diversified meal.
