One Pot Meals: New Age Minestrone

Achievement unlocked with this one-pot wonder of health, taste, and tummy happiness!

It’s so great to cozy up to a warm bowl of goodness during the longer and colder days that are coming. The best part is that one-pot meals are easier than preparing your average dinner at home (which usually involves more than one recipe to get a balanced meal).

For your one-pot meal to cover the entire basis of your meal, you are going to need a few things:

Vegetables: onions, carrots, and celery provide a great base for a soup or stew, to give your water some flavor. Then you can add in vegetables that are in season such as squash, sweet potatoes, rutabaga, turnips, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, fennel, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale (you can really get crazy here!)

Legumes: Preferably cooked from scratch. Choose from chickpeas, black beans, white beans, lentils, yellow split peas, kidney beans, mung beans, and black-eyed peas.

Herbs and spices – Make sure you have some basics on hand from cumin, parsley, sage, oregano, garlic, ginger, rosemary, thyme, basil, marjoram, and turmeric.

Whole Grains- Using barley, oats, quinoa, brown rice, and millet can add a dose of complex carbohydrate, texture, and substance to your pot.

There you have it – a well-rounded one-pot meal! These meals make for a convenient and easy way to approach dinnertime in the fall and winter months. You can make a batch of it early in the week or on the weekend and take portions out, as you need them throughout the week. You can even warm some up and put it in a stainless-steel thermos for you or your kids on the go! You can freeze portions in glass containers and store them for a snowy day when you don’t feel like cooking or going anywhere.
Benefit from cooking some of your own meals at home: you get to be creative, you know what goes in it, and you know it’s going to be delicious!