Victory Laps: How I feel About Leftovers

I’ve found that living a joyful life is less about some magic formula or convergence of perfect circumstances and more about my mindset around the everyday, mundane tasks of life.

Cooking is a category where my mindset is one of the main determining factors in the amount of joy (or frustration) I have daily.

Cooking whole, healthy meals is just plain more time consuming than microwaving a frozen dinner or grabbing take-out on the way home from work. There is no getting around that fact. From my own experience, however, I KNOW that my body feels better and has more energy when I eat real food versus when I eat quick, processed food. That said, a full-time job, family and friends definitely squeezes the amount of time I have to make meals.

Over the years, I’ve learned that when it comes to meal times, I have three choices. 1) Eat something fast & processed and pay for it with my energy levels later. 2) Rush through making a home cooked meal and resentment the time it takes me to cook. Or 3) Enjoy the process of making a meal, notice the incredible beauty in the ingredients I use, share stories with my family while I cook, dip my fingers in the sauce and lick the spoon. Option two and three both end with a home-cooked, healthy meal. But, with option two, I increase my stress and end my day resentful and unhappy, whereas when I choose option three, I end up in a place of joy, rest and playfulness.

This is where the leftover victory lap comes into play. When I was younger, I couldn’t stand leftovers. I thought they were soggy, old and gross. In my first couple years of teaching, where my average day was 10-15 hours long and I came home too exhausted most nights to cook or even go out to eat, leftovers became a survival strategy. I’d make huge meals on Saturday and Sunday, then eat the leftovers for the rest of the week. Instead of feeling disappointed by leftover night, I felt a rush of relief when I opened the fridge and there was a home-cooked, delicious, healthy meal ready and waiting for me.

As I started getting more creative in the kitchen and enjoying cooking more, leftovers became more than just a relief to have. They started to feel like a victory lap. I started to feel accomplished when I would make an incredible meal from scratch. I was proud of myself for creating something new that was good for my body and tasted incredible. In addition to the relief I felt seeing leftovers in my fridge, I would also get a little smile on my face because I knew how delicious dinner was about to be! In some ways it felt like cheating. I’d cook once and eat like a queen for two or three nights in a row. Every night I pulled those leftovers out, I would get a wave of that same accomplished feeling I got on the first night I cooked, except on leftover night it was even better because it took zero work. It was a victory lap!

These days, when I cook, I am usually only cooking for my husband, myself and occasionally a couple neighbors. But instead of cooking for two, I cook like I am trying to feed a family of eight. The result is that my husband and I cook 2-3 times per week and then revel in our creations the rest of the evenings. It not only frees up time for us to go for after work walks together, do an extra workout or read an extra chapter of our books. It also means that the majority of our meals are home cooked with whole foods. Win! Win! Win!

This last week I had a couple late nights of work and Adam was in charge of dinner. When I first married Adam he could make some rocking tacos and was great at whipping up some scrambled eggs, but that was about it and he didn’t really like cooking. This week, my man made stuffed acorn squash, beet chips, multi-colored quinoa and sautéed greens all with no recipe, just his own creative ideas. It was INCREDIBLE!!! So tasty in fact that I asked him to write down what he did so I could turn it into a recipe for the blog. He made enough that we had dinner for three nights plus two lunches. Each time he pulled those containers out of the fridge to heat up leftovers, he got a grin on his face like a little kid who just won the spelling B. Victory lap, after victory lap, after victory lap. Turns out cooking for joy is contagious and my wonderful husband who didn’t like cooking two years ago, now makes gourmet creations for fun. I promise I didn’t talk him into that. He’s learned to cook creatively and enjoy it all on his own.

For us, joy is all about mindset! We don't do it perfectly every day, but we try our best to approach cooking like it’s an opportunity to create, to make something new. Its a chance to to do something together, to talk and have fun while we are at it. We think about our leftovers as celebrations of the work we put in the night before. With these two shifts in mindset, mealtime at the Paulson household has gone from a nagging necessity to one of our favorite times of the day. Cooking takes time but we make it fun, we enjoy the process and we make HUGE amounts so we get to enjoy at least half of our meals with no work involved.

Challenge for this week: Pick a meal that you really enjoy or check out Playful Fitness’ recipe page to try some of our favorites. Double or triple the recipe. Put on some fun music while you cook, tell stories and enjoy the process. Then pull those leftovers out later in the week and celebrate the wonderful creation you made as well as the extra time you have because you have a healthy meal ready to go. Take a victory lap with your dinners this week! It’s SO fun! (P.S. this strategy works for breakfast and lunches too. Try Playful Fitness Pumpkin Spice Oats. I made it once this week and it’d fed us for 4 breakfasts. Victory laps!)

xo

Hally