Effortless Meals

wildtree meals

Food. We’ve all gotta eat, right? Why does healthy eating sometimes feel so complicated?! This was me awhile back:

  • Darn it, the lettuce went bad before we ate it! (Feel free to replace “lettuce” with: beets, ham, pesto, expensive cheese, avocados or whatever else recently went bad in your fridge or pantry. I guarantee that if it went bad at your house, at some point, it went bad  at my house. Ask me about the alien carrots with big black lumps on them….
  • No need to detour to the grocery on the way home from work; we have food in the house! Only to find that yes, we have hamburger but no veggies. No matter how “paleo” I like to be, I need me some veg to go with my meat.
  • Uggggh, I simply cannot commit to making a full week recipe plan, organizing the grocery list, buying it, schlepping it home and making it. It feels overwhelming, so I only buy a couple days worth of meals and then I’m complaining about having to hit the grocery store 3-4 times a week.
  • The heck with it, lets just get a pizza. Add a caesar salad, so we can pretend to be “balanced.”

Then, a friend turned me on to a miracle company called Wildtree! I use their “kit” service for make ahead meals. Here’s how it works:

Select one of their 12 Make Ahead kits. New options pop up seasonally.  Each Wildtree Kit gives you:

  • 10 main dish recipes with suggestions on simple side dishes. Each recipe makes 4-6 servings. If you’re a household of 2, you can split these so that you have 20 dinners covered by one Kit.
  • All of the Seasonings for all 10 recipes. I love this part. Many of the recipes have a bunch of seasonings, which imparts a ton of flavor. Wildtree creates seasoning mixes, so you end up getting about 6-7 jars in your kit. You’ll use all of the seasonings in your 10 recipes, so no endless jars hanging around your house. If you love a specific seasoning, of course you can buy more outside of the kit.
  • A grocery list for all 10 recipes. You won’t need to make the list or combine how many onions or carrots or pounds of meat to buy. The list is GOLD!

On my first grocery trip, I bought everything — and I needed to search for a couple things at my store — and was out the door of the store in less than 60 minutes.

On my second go ’round, I ordered online from Safeway. It took me 30 minutes to purchase all the ingredients for 20 meals — and I didn’t have to drive to the store, deal with other shoppers, drive back, lug the groceries, put on shoes or put on pants. Seriously, I’m feeling like a genius!

There IS a 3rd option, where you can buy all of the groceries from a partner company of Wildtree — one click and it’s all delivered to your door. I haven’t tried that yet — will let you know when I do.

    • Freezer bag instructions. Listen UP: assembling all of the freezer bags takes 60 minutes. For my house, with just me and Frank, I created 20 freezer meals in ONE HOUR. Holy smokes! Total. Game. Changer.

You pull out the groceries you just bought, freezer bags and the Wildtree seasonings and just fill up them bags. The kit even comes with pre-printed lables for your freezer bags. We live in a condo and have a “standard” sized freezer. The bags didn’t take up 100% of the freezer. Score!

    • Cooking Instructions. Sunday night, I grab a couple bags out of the freezer and pop em in the fridge. Monday night, I grab a bag out of the fridge and dinner is ready in 20 minutes. Repeat on Tuesday and grab a couple more bags to pop in the fridge for the next couple days. Most meals are either sautee for about 20 mine, or pop it in the oven for about 20 minutes. A few are slow cooker recipes.

“Easy to prepare on a weeknight” was important to me.  Mon – Thur, I am not looking for a ‘cooking experience.” I want quick, easy and healthy. This is it!

Beyond Simplicity: 5 reasons I love Wildtree:

wildtree healthy

 

  1. Wildtree products contain no additives, preservatives, MSG or food dyes. Wildtree is a USDA Certified Organic Processor and Handler. I don’t know about you, but I feel waaaaay better without suspect additives in my food!
  2. If you’re a follower of Whole30, Paleo or Primal Eating, there are compliant meal kits!  My first kit was Primal Plates, and it fit right in to my Whole30 eating plan. Hallelujah!
  3. If you need to avoid Gluten, Sugar, or dairy, Wildtree kits can make meal planning so much easier! In November, we’re using the Off the Wheaten Path kit, which is gluten-free. 
  4. What, you want comfort food, soups, easy game-day recipes and crock-pot love stocked in your freezer? Wildtree has those too!
  5. If you’re picky (aren’t we all) you can also “free-style it.” That’s what I’m planning for mid-December. (I have a couple weeks off from my Pilates studio that month and can futz around with new stuff.) I’ve selected recipes on the Wildtree app and had only those seasonings sent to me. So, I’ll be making my own set of freezer meals instead of following a prescribed 10 from a kit.   Will let you know how that goes! There was a bit of a learning curve to figure out how to use their website for this — I’ll make a tutorial when I’m off from teaching Pilates.

I love the simplicity of this system and I’m a big fan of quality of the ingredients, so I decided to offer the products to my students, friends and family. Please subscribe to my blog to hear more about my adventures with Wildtree.