No meal plan results in – you guessed it – our falling into the convenient fast food, heat-and-eat processed foods and the pricey take-out trap. Like clockwork, we know roughly the times during each day when your body screams "feed me." For most of us, this may be breakfast, lunch and dinner. Granted, we live in a fast-paced, fly by the seat of your pants paced world, but just a little thought today for what and when you eat tomorrow can build into long-term better eating habits, save money, and often reduce our impact on the environment. After all, preparing a salad with ingredients you already have on hand cuts down on resources used up by calling in a delivery for pizza.

Some thoughts on developing a meal plan:

• Prioritize pre-preparation. When you’re famished, the last thing you want is to dice and sauté onions. Instead, decide to have stir-fry for supper the night before and washing and chopping up the vegetables that evening, storing in Tupperware in the refrigerator overnight. When you get home from work, you can quickly sauté up supper.
• Defrost efficiently. While a microwave can save both time and energy for quickly heating leftovers, it is not the place to efficiently defrost frozen food. Think of your bag of frozen mixed vegetables as a mini cooling unit: By slowly defrosting your food overnight in the refrigerator, the food lets off cool air into the place you want it: your refrigerator. This is where the old timer term "ice box" comes from. Your refrigerator then needs to work less (i.e., use less energy) to keep cold.
• Stock up on portable snacks. For those times when you’re rushing out the door for the day and the last thing you have time for is packing a sandwich for lunch, keep a stash of portable ready-to-eat-yet-healthy snacks for an on-the-go meal so you’re not tempted by the fast food drive though. In a pinch, we’ll grab a jar of peanut butter, a package of crackers and a butter knife for a filling snack that stores easily without refrigeration. Dried fruit and granola bars also work well.
• Stick with simple, core recipes. Have a small selection – three or four – of core simple, favorite recipes that you can whip together quickly. When "what’s for dinner?" is just one more decision you need to make after a busy day, having limited options from which to choose makes things easier.

This quick and easy pizza is a last-minute meal staple in our house, since the dough for the crispy crust is not yeast-based and doesn’t need to rise. The dough can even be made in the food processor. This recipe from our cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity, can be made even quicker by shredding cheese and chopping toppings the night before.

Quick Pizza

Ingredients:

2 c. all-purpose flour
½ c. whole wheat flour
1 ½ t. baking powder
½ t. salt
¼ c. butter (½ stick), chilled and cut into pieces
1 c. milk
3 c. tomato sauce
Pizza toppings of choice

Directions:

• Place the two flours, baking powder and salt into the container of a food processor and pulse until mixed. Drop in the butter pieces and pulse until large crumbs form.
• With the motor running, pour in the milk and process just until a clump of dough forms.
• Scrape the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Form 4 balls. Roll out each ball with a lightly floured rolling pin into an 8-inch circle.
• Place two circles on a greased baking sheet. Top with the toppings of your choice and bake at 450 degrees for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden on top and bottom. Peek underneath the crust to make sure it’s golden brown.

Yield: 4 small pizzas.

Basically this means eating as much as possible lower on the food chain, using a core staple of whole grains, beans and generally less processed food. Grains and beans pack a nutritional wallop — a single serving of cooked beans counts as one, one-ounce serving of lean meat in the USDA Food Pyramid, yet costs only about twenty cents. That single bean serving delivers approximately one third of the daily Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) protein recommendations.

Plus, the cost of producing beans and grains results in a much lighter impact on the planet. Over half the water consumed in this country and eighty percent of our agricultural land goes toward raising animals for food. While these statistics motivated our own decisions to become vegetarians, an unexpected perk happened on the way to the bulk bean aisle: we saved a lot of green.

Some tips on slowly bringing beans and whole grains into your diet:

• For the bean-eating newbie, start with canned beans, versus dried. Simply open the can and conveniently use it in your recipe. Black beans serve as a good introductory bean since they have an appealing smoky, almost meat-like flavor. Look for organic canned beans since conventional commercial canners add chemicals to the beans to harden the skins so they won’t mush when they cook. Sometimes conventional canned beans also have dyes and chemical preservatives added.
• Once you get the hang of some bean-based recipes, move on to utilizing dried beans and start saving big time. Plus, with dried beans, there’s one less thing – the steel can – to recycle. Dried lentils are an easy dried bean to try, as they’re typically added directly into a recipe without presoaking or cooking. The trick with other dried beans is planning ahead, since they require time to soften and cook. Soak a bowl of dried beans overnight; keep in mind that most dried beans will double in size when reconstituted. After rinsing the beans, we like to cook them in our energy-efficient crock-pot for several hours until soft. As we explore at length in our book, Rural Renaissance, using a crock-pot is just one of the many ways to cook more efficiently and reduce our energy needs, therefore reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Since you’re going through the effort, make a big batch of crock-pot beans and freeze some for easy defrosting later.
• Morning warm breakfast cereals are an easy option for adding in some whole grains to your diet: oatmeal is an accessible choice. Try some plain, whole oats and dress them up with honey and raisins for a cheaper, more nutritious alternative than the processed packets. For variety, try bulgur, a wheat-based grain that originated in the Middle East that has already been soaked and baked to speed up cooking time.

Here’s one of our favorite easy recipes using chickpeas, “Casablanca Couscous,” from our cookbook, Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity:

Ingredients:

1 c. couscous
1 lb. tofu, cubed
1 onion, chopped
1 c. carrots, sliced
½ c. chopped walnuts
2 c. cooked or canned chickpeas, drained
2 c. tomato sauce
½ c. raisins
1 ½ c. water
2 t. curry powder
1 t. paprika
1 t. salt

Directions:

• In large pan, brown tofu, onion, carrots, nuts.
• Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for 40 minutes.
• Separately, boil 1 ½ c. water with 2 T. oil. Add couscous, stir, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.
• Serve vegetables over steaming couscous.

Serves 4.

Dave and Lillian Brummet’s Trash Talk is a book that aims to get back to minimizing waste and finding everyday uses for trash. Think of it as "Hints From Heloise" meets Mother Earth News. The introduction reminds readers that reduce, reuse, and recycle should be precluded by refuse — as in, refusing to buy items that generate a lot of waste. The book is divided into four sections: the first has ideas for reusing common household items (some not-so-common — who has a plethora of old oven racks hanging around?), and the second has plans for habits you can implement that follow the four Rs, like composting, or cutting open toiletries bottles to get all the product out. The third section focuses on tips and habits related to paper, and the brief fourth section gives statistics that remind the reader that the little things do add up.

It’s clear that the authors walk the walk: many of the tips are reuse ideas that I hadn’t heard of, and their extensive gardening background was surprisingly helpful. The home garden seemed to be a playground for reuse. And, again, this seems to be more for the crunchier crowd — it definitely had the vibe of Mother Earth News as opposed to Real Simple. That doesn’t mean that it was packed full of radical ideas; most of the tips and habits are pretty practical for those who are in the process of going green. But there were a few that I know would cause the light-greenest of readers to drop the book and never look back.

There are issues with the text. The editing leaves something to be desired; I don’t know if the format of the book was the best way to present the information. The second section just seemed a catchall for random green-living ideas. Why is there a whole chapter about picking up trash while going on walks in a book marketed as "an inspirational guide to saving time and money through better waste an resource management?" I don’t think there’s really enough material here for a book like this: there’s a lot of unfocused information that, while interesting, didn’t really have a lot to do with solid waste reduction. And for $19.99, you’d think you get a lot more out of a paperback than 190 pages with a lot of white space.

All in all, the book is worth a read, but not a purchase. You’d be better off checking it out from your library, if you can find it.