It’s your truly, Wendy Battles, the Clean Eating Coach, with a fun challenge to test your clean eating and meal planning skills!

I’ve always said that the best vehicle to ensure clean eating is to plan your meals.  Meal planning helps you begin with the end in mind, create balanced meals with a variety of clean eating, no- processed foods, and save big bucks because those random acts of buying what strikes your fancy are long gone.

These days we’re all trying to maximize our dollars and do more with less given the state of the economy and the cost of food. One of my favorite ways to maximize savings is to do a periodic pantry challenge.  Simply put, I go through my pantry and see what I have stocked up that I can use for simple and quick meals.  So instead of always starting from scratch and creating dishes that have an endless list of ingredients, I put my creative skills to the test by coming up with interesting recipes based on what’s around that can contain minimal ingredients.

Here’s a short list of what I found in checking things out in my pantry:

• quinoa pasta
• fire roasted salsa
• steel cut oats
• gluten-free bread mix
• tandoori chicken seasoning packet
• canned salmon
• quinoa
• vegetable broth
• kidney beans
• black eyes peas
• coconut milk
• brown rice
• organic canned pumpkin

Based on what I found, I can already see making some quick and simple dishes that require minimal additional ingredients. For example, I’ll make beans and brown rice and add the salsa in for flavor.  I’ll make pumpkin soup in my Vitamix blender which also calls for coconut milk. I’ve made it before and its yummy.  I’ve got chicken breasts in the freezer that I can use with the tandoori chicken seasoning packet and I’ll use the canned salmon in salads for lunch next week.  I’ll whip up steel cut oats for breakfast and add some chopped nuts and fresh fruit.

That’s just a simple start based on a quick round of brainstorming. I can already see that I will buy so much less at the store over the weekend based on what I already have.

So that means healthy meals, money saved and lots of clean eating — that sure sounds good to me!

What about you, are you up for the clean eating pantry challenge? Can you see the possibility of creating healthy meals based on what you’ve got in the freezer, refrigerator and pantry? I challenge you to not only go through and see what you have but to also cut your grocery bill in half in the coming week based on this activity!

So get busy now. Go check things out and come on back and share what you found. We all have the ability to practice clean eating without a huge amount of effort or expense…you just have to have a plan.

Filed under: Food Shopping, Meal Planning, Saving money, clean eating