There will be days where we are too busy to cook for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, so we may often skip meals just to finish a specific task at work or activity at school. However, it is not good to skip meals, as you will also be skipping the nutrients that you will get for those meals. So, as much as possible, you need to eat at least three meals a day.
Luckily, there is a way for us to fill our stomachs without cooking, which is through simple food options that are ready to eat. To know more, here are quick food options for when you can’t cook or need a snack.
Canned Goods
While there is a negative stigma surrounding canned foods, there are actually healthier canned options that you can purchase. One of these healthy canned foods is canned beans, which contain a lot of the nutrients that you would usually find in fresh beans.
Canned tuna is another healthy canned food, and many experts consider it as one of the healthiest, as it contains plenty of nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids, Vitamin D, and more. Other healthy canned goods include canned tomatoes, canned corn, canned pumpkin, and canned artichokes. You can mix and match these canned foods and see if you can come up with a unique recipe.
Frozen Meals
Frozen meals are another type of quick food that is criticized by many for not being healthy. But, much like canned goods, if you know what you’re looking for, you can find healthy frozen meals that can give your body its much-needed nutrients.
There are so many healthy frozen meals for you to choose from, which include frozen salads and even frozen meat that is accompanied by other healthy foods like green beans, rice, and mushrooms. Pick the healthiest frozen meals so that you can get sufficient nutrients even if you can’t cook a proper meal. Of course, you will need a microwave oven for you to thaw or heat up the frozen meals, so make sure that your house, the office, or the school has one.
Jarred Foods
Jarred foods are similar to canned goods, but they are much healthier since they don’t contain artificial ingredients. However, keep in mind that most jarred foods are pickled, so they may have a sour taste that you might find tasty or awful, depending on your tastes. But, there are a few jarred foods that aren’t sour, like roasted bell peppers, olives, artichokes, and tomatoes, so you may want to consume those instead of the usual pickled foods.
What’s great about jarred foods is that they can last longer than fresh foods, so you can keep them in the pantry and just open them whenever you need emergency food for when you can’t cook or can’t buy ingredients.
Pre-Cut Fruits and Vegetables
Salad is arguably one of the easiest meals or snacks that you can make, as all you need to do is to chop some vegetables and pour salad dressing on top of the greens. But what if you also don’t have time to chop vegetables? The best option to still make salad is to purchase pre-cut vegetables that are already cut in a way that they will already fit in a bowl nicely for salad.
In addition to vegetables, you can also buy pre-cut fruits that are nutritious and can even be eaten on the go because of how compact and portable they are. You can place these pre-cut fruits inside a Tupperware container so that you can bring them as a snack for work or for school.
Food Bars or Snack Bars
The healthiest snack that you can eat is snack bars, particularly the high protein low carb bars that give you the energy to continue working on a task or activity at work or school. A great feature that snack bars have is that they are portable, so you have the choice to eat them on the go while walking or commuting. Pick the snack bars that are not only tasty but also nutritious so that you can still get nutrients even if a snack bar is all you can eat during the afternoon or your break.
Get Food Delivered
If you really don’t have the food options above available, then the best way to get food is to have them delivered to your home, your office space, or in front of your school. Through food delivery, you will be sure that what you are going to eat will be tasty and healthy, as long as the restaurant or shop you will be buying from uses fresh ingredients.
There are a handful of food shops and restaurants that offer healthy meals and food options, and some of them would even have vegetarian meals. If you are a picky eater, then getting food delivered may be the quickest way for you to get food, even if its delivery is not the quickest on this list.
So, those are just some of the best and most popular quick food options that you can have if you cannot cook or if you want to have a snack. Of course, you just don’t want to get quick food, as you will also need to have a healthy meal to give your body more energy and nutrients. Choose the quick food option that is the healthiest to make the meal much more worth it to eat.