Sick of eating cereal and Ramen for lunch and dinner? Want to spend less money eating out and finally start cooking for yourself? Put down that frozen pizza, because HC’s Health Editor, Sammie Levin, is here to share her daily eats so you can get ideas for healthy, satisfying meals that are easy enough for any time-strapped collegiette to make. After you read Collegiette Eats, your taste buds, wallet and waistline will thank you.
Breakfast
Somehow, my Mondays always seem to be busier than they should be. Maybe I get used to the three days of no class that precede it, but whatever the reason, Monday tends to feel like a slap in the face. When I’m scrambling to finish the things I couldn’t get done on Sunday, cooking falls down a few notches on my list of priorities. So, I try to find especially easy meals to make or end up eating out to save time.
For breakfast yesterday, I used up the rest of the Strawberry Chia Seed Jam that I made the other day. I spread it on a toasted English muffin with almond butter. This took all of two minutes to make, and I was able to take it on the go to eat on my way to class.
Lunch
For lunch, I didn’t have time to stop at home to make anything, so I stopped at Revive, a café on campus, and got a salad. It can be hard to choose a salad when there are so many other tasty options to eat when you’re dining out, and I’d be lying if I said I always go for the salad. But, to make the choice easier, I like to load up my salads with a bunch of my favorite vegetables and ingredients so that I actually look forward to eating it. This chopped salad had avocado, tomato, edamame, roasted brussels sprouts, roasted squash and a portobello mushroom cap, all dressed in herb vinaigrette. Yum.
Dinner
For dinner, I had a microwaveable meal: Amy’s Brown Rice and Vegetables bowl. This is by far my favorite frozen dinner out there. It has broccoli, mushrooms, onion and tofu and is coated in a sesame tahini sauce that makes it creamy but not too heavy. I topped mine with a little sriracha to give it some spice.
On the side, I had a roasted acorn squash. Just like delicata squash, acorn squash is super easy to prepare. You just slice it in half, scoop out the seeds and coat the insides with a little bit of olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and whatever other seasonings you want, and then bake face up on a baking sheet at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes, or until tender. Acorn squash is less sweet than some other varieties, and definitely not as sweet as sweet potatoes, but it’s delicious. And the fun thing is, they can also be your bowl! There are tons of good recipes out there to give you ideas to what to stuff your acorn squash with, like this one for quinoa-and-kale-stuffed acorn squash.
I didn’t stuff mine with anything this time, though. I just put a half in a bowl and scooped out the insides as a side dish, and saved the other half for a snack later. I actually had time to eat this at home, but if I hadn’t then it would’ve been easy to transfer the Amy’s bowl to a Tupperware and cut up the squash to mix in.
So, my tips for eating healthy on a busy day come down to finding things that are quick to prepare and easy to take on the go, or finding ways to make a salad interesting and enticing enough to make it an easier choice to make when a slice of pizza is staring you down.