What separates average-weight Americans from the overweight? For one thing, they spend 6.8 minutes more per day shopping and preparing their meals, which contain 6 percent less fat than eat-out food. You need to make cooking and eating better easier. Here's how.


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Those statistics come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and you can take them or leave them. But keep looking, and you'll see similar tales everywhere. Restaurant meals contain an average of 18 percent more calories than reported on their nutrition sheets, according to a 2010 study. The same goes for fast food and frozen food, too. Those calories make up about one-third of the average American diet, and half of all dollars spent on food. And even with federal nutrition label laws coming for restaurants, there will, of course, be loopholes and opt-outs—it doesn't apply to restaurants with less than 20 locations, for example, or to limited-time menu items like the McRib or burgers somehow tied into movie promotions.


Me? I don't need statistics to tell me what happens when one starts opting for convenience and speed over DIY control. My home's kitchen has been gutted for a remodel for about a month now—no stove, sink, or dishwasher, just a microwave. By this point, my wife and I are feeling pretty terrible about our health, and making the dreaded decision: buy the larger-size jeans, or hope the waistband pinch compels you to eat less?

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So this year's mission, if you and I choose to accept it, is to eat better food, mostly at home. Here's how you can do it.

Pick Out a Few Go-To Recipe Templates and Practice Them


Enthusiasm for fresh food is a good thing, but it too often turns into a two-part tragedy. There's a tremendous high to finding the freshest peppers possible at the farmer's market, or a decent price on heirloom pork at the market. One week later, there's a deep, self-loathing low when the unused goods are tossed out, usually right after a sad discovery in the back of the fridge.

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You might have had a Big Important Recipe (BIR) for those peppers and that pork, but your week might have gone topsy-turvy after your best-laid weekend plans. You might have been missing a key other ingredient. BIRs fall apart all the time, and leave you with a cynical feeling about cooking at home—Chipotle, after all, never really fails, and the price difference can seem negligible.


What you need are a few core recipes that you're good at, or can get good at, that can be adapted for almost any combination of ingredients. You probably already know them—they're the safety recipes you go to when you're cooking for other people, and you want guaranteed success. In my household, it's a chicken with Thai basil stir-fry (despite almost never having actual Thai basil), a recipe for stuffed peppers, and a few different ways of making thin white fish: broiled with butter or oil, pan-fried with a coating of flour mixed with spices, and cooking en papillote, or wrapped in tinfoil or wax paper.


Mark Bittman recommends three more "core" recipes, which have the added benefit of being very sustainable for the Earth and healthy: a broccoli/chicken/mushroom stir-fry, a chopped cabbage salad, and a lentil/rice boil with pork as an optional add-in. The Boston Globe has a few more. They work the same way my own recipes work: when you're missing something, throw something else in. By making the basic version a few times, you learn how the dish should come together, how to use your knife or food processor to prep the ingredients, and what kinds of cook times you should expect. At that point, the proteins, beans, vegetables, rice, leafy greens, and other ingredients all become plug-and-play elements.

You're no longer beholden to everything—time, ingredients, recipe, and mood—falling into place. You can just cook with what you've got, and be assured that the results are pretty good. Save the Martha-impressing recipes for when you've got a Saturday night off.


"Diet" If You Must, but Make a Simple Plan


I lost a good bit of weight with a meal plan that was so simple, even an impulsive, hungry man could follow it. I ate vegetarian, or vegan if possible, before dinner. There are, of course, unhealthy vegetarian meals (ice cream and pasta binge, ahoy!), but by removing the most dense source of calories from roughly two-thirds of my eating, I managed to skim off a little weight, and generally keep it from coming back (current kitchen-less conditions excepted). And rather than pretend I'm enjoying Guiltless/Lean/Trim frozen dinners, I'm eating sandwiches, soups, pasta, and other good food that just happens to lack for meat.


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If "Vegan Before 6" isn't your style, try another means of cutting out calories without having to actually count said calories. Two middle-aged men I know dropped about 20 pounds each on what barely counts as a diet: taking a hard line against eating between meals. Some people may prefer to graze, and you might question whether you'd eat more at the meals themselves, but it worked for them. You can force yourself to spend five minutes with some water before eating. You could do what another friend of mine did in preparing for his Marines physical and simply stop eating fries.


It's easier to do these things if you're doing most of the buying, preparing, and cooking of your own meals. You, unlike most chains, don't have to offer yourself fries as a side.


Get Even Lazier with Rice Cookers, Microwaves, and Slow-Cookers


We covered low-effort cooking in some detail last year, but this editor, in particular, is now more than ever a fan of not letting the lack of an stove become an excuse. I received Roger Ebert's The Pot and How to Use It cookbook as a gift, and it's really a great read. Beyond recipes, Ebert and his nutritionist co-author help you figure out what substitutions do and don't work, and how to put together a rounded meal inside one pot.


In addition to the magic of the rice cooker, learn how to cook vegetables, even if they're frozen, in your microwave, and set up a template for five-ingredient crock pot/slow cooker meals, similar to the extensible recipe templates you're going to work up for your stove cooking.


Learn, Improve, and Use the Food Pyramid


It feels leftover from fifth grade science class, but you can customize, use, and improve the food pyramid, and keep a better pyramid handy when you're planning out your meals. Again, we know—it sounds ridiculous, consulting a big triangle with a bread base when you're making your shopping list. But the same tendencies that lead to an unmanageable number of Big Important Recipes each week also leave kitchens stocked with far too much meat in the fridge and not enough easy-to-grab vegetables and grains.


How are you making healthy, cheaper, easier cooking a common thing for you in 2011? Got another plant to eat better? We're all ears in the comments.