Making Meals

Everyone eats (with extremely few exceptions). So many problems come from poor nutrition and poor eating. In my quest to be better, I have learned that I have not been eating well. I am not a nutritionist and I am not here to lecture you on how to eat, but this is one of many ways to make sure you have a healthy meal.

Moving to Germany has been helpful in my quest to eat healthier. The European Union has a voluntary A to E score card for foods to have on them. This tells you how healthy or unhealthy a food is, in general terms. An A is the most healthy (Water, Vegetables, Fish), an E is the least healthy (Energy Drinks, some candies). If you do not live in the EU you can still use this system, as the criteria for scoring a food product is publicly available and fairly straight forward. In the United States, for instance, all of the information you would need to score the food can be found in the Nutrition Facts label.

This allows one to pick healthy foods and ingredients to eat, but it is not enough to ensure a healthy meal is had. When I was growing up meals always had to consist of 3 parts: A Protein, a vegetable, and a starch. I ... did not follow this for a good part of my adult life. Recently, I have been using this as the core of a simple meal generation program that has helped me. I share this generation schema here for those of you who may find it helpful. Feel free to change it, manipulate it, or ignore it completely.

Rolling Your Own Meals

I enjoy tabletop roleplaying games. This has lead to me having, among other things, an abundance of dice and experience in rolling complete encounters, characters, or other complex objects on sets of random tables. It turns out that if you make a concise set of tables, you can roll meals to make meal planning (and grocery listing) a breeze. I only use this to meal plan for dinners. For other meals, I generally have a simple set of ingredients and options available.

This list is also not designed to fit every last thing I, or my family, eat or enjoy. Sometimes we will skip the rolled meal and have Lasagna, or a good chili, or something. This is just a way to make a no-stress preparation process. If the spoons are there, by all means, have something else!

The way the process works is simple:

1. Roll on the meal table
   • If you get triples, treat yourself to a meal out or order in
   • If you get doubles, throw a dessert in there
2. Roll on the Protein, Starch, and Dessert tables where applicable
3. Build your meal with those ingredients

With those steps and the tables below, I am able to generate some fun, if odd, meals. Often I will roll something and it will inform the rest of the meal. For instance, I might roll Eggs, Tortelloni, and Cabbage ¹, but I would probably either change that to a breakfast-for-dinner situation or change the protein to the obviously related chicken.

The tables

Breakfast and Lunch

For Breakfast and Lunch I just keep a good assortment of foods around to have the following for those meals:

Breakfast

• Waffles
• Eggs
• Cold Cuts
• Cheese
• Yogurt
• Oatmeal
• Muesli/Corn Flakes

Lunch

• Leftovers, either complete or leftover ingredients
• Sandwich bread
• Cold Cuts
• Pickles
• Cheese
• Noodle cups or packets

Snacks

• Nuts
• Crisps
• Fruit, dried and fresh
• Cheese
• Cookies, as a treat

Drinks

• Sparkling water or still water
• Milk
• Coffee
• Tea
• Juice

From these I can usually cobble together the other meals and snacks for the day.

Footnotes

1 - Thinking more about this, a good Guanciale Tortellini in a Carbonara-style sauce with a side of fried cabbage might actually be delicious ...

2 - Fried noodles are like Ramen, Chow Mein noodles, and, although they are not fried, Udon noodles can be used to make a mean Mixed fried dish or soup etc.