Recently I shared with you 3 Quick and Easy Breakfast Recipes that I prepare for myself all of the time. Similar to breakfast, we often struggle with snacks, make excuses, and then eat something with lots of sugar or fats. That motivated me to sit down and write here about my top 5 quick and easy snack recipes.
So, what are snacks and why do we need them?
Since it’s often the life that gets in the way of our hunger, we sometimes need to rely on snacks to keep us up and running till the next proper meal. For example, if we had breakfast at 7 AM and we’re fully booked with meetings till 2 PM, it’s good to have a small snack during the course of the morning.
It goes the same with the afternoons unless our daily job is to eat and have a workout 5 times a week. If that’s you, I guess you can skip that part and scroll down to the snack recipes.
Can’t we have a protein bar, a cookie, or just whatever there is in the office’s cantina? I suppose yes, but if our goal in life is to be fit (and financially independent, as those in the cantina actually cost more), then preparing a snack at home is the way to go.
Why should we prepare a snack in advance?
Similar to breakfast, preparing our snacks before we actually need to consume them, would save us a tremendous amount of time. Apart from that, it might save us some money as well.
With some of the snacks I’ll share, there’s not much to prepare. Still, if you at least prepare the ingredients in advance, you would be one step ahead!
Preparing snacks at home is usually a lot cheaper and healthy than getting something from the office cantina or on our way to the next meeting. Healthy, because we know what we put into them. If we limit the sugar in our snacks, our health would only benefit from that. Sugar has very low satiety, so we’re probably going to eat more of it. If we got cookies or other kinds of sweets, we’ll eat more until we feel full.
Buying processed snacks is almost always more expensive in comparison to preparing your snacks at home. Yes, a cookie is cheap, but is one enough? How often do you get out of the store with only 1 purchase? If you calculate the price of all snacks per week you get and compare it with all the money for snacks at home, you can get the idea.
I was often spending between €3 and €5/day on snacks at the office. For comparison, €5 is the cost of my snacks for 3 days if I prepare them at home. With those 5 quick and easy snack recipes, you would be able to save quite a lot!
How to store and transport snacks?
One of my biggest concerns about snacks was how to store and transport them to the office. For office commute, I am using my car, so the weight of everything I carry isn’t that important. However, for work, I was carrying my laptop bag, a medium-size duffel bag with all of my fitness stuff, and another bag for all the food.
As you can imagine, that’s a lot of bags and stuff to carry if you’re not moving around with a car. However, the storage containers with the food are the important thing here.
I’m using pretty cheap ones made from borosilicate glass (I shared with you about those in a previous post: How to Maintain Healthy Eating Habits Going Back to the Office). They are heavier than regular glass but are a lot more durable. With their rubbery lids, they are not good for liquid-based food, but snacks are rarely liquid, so that’s fine.
The borosilicate storage containers are also better for the environment, as there might be some plastic only in the lids. Another good thing is that they are less susceptible to odors, wear and tear, compared to plastic ones.
5 quick and easy snack recipes
With those 5 quick and easy snack recipes, I want to show you that it’s not hard to prepare your snacks in advance. It would definitely be fun, more healthy, and for sure – less expensive.
Also, with those, you can easily get enough variety so you wouldn’t get bored anytime soon. At some stage, you may also get new ideas for snacks or to add variety to them. All of the snacks are relatively easy to prepare, aim to save you as much time as possible, and are based on ingredients you can find in almost any grocery store.
So, here are the snack recipes!
Boiled eggs
This is one of the snack staples for me, especially in the past year since I don’t go to the office at all. Not that I didn’t prepare those before the pandemic but now I find myself doing it more often than before.
The recipe:
- 10 eggs
- Salt
- Black pepper
Preparation:
- Boil the eggs for 7 minutes
- Peel the shells
- Add the salt and pepper to the peeled eggs
- Store them in a container
Super straightforward and easy to prepare, easy to store, transport, and consume. Keep in mind that 2-3 eggs/snack are totally fine and you shouldn’t store them for more than 5-7 days.
Egg muffins
This one is an extension of the boiled eggs. Here we’re going to make them less boring and add more flavor. You’ll need relatively the same time to prepare them. Also, you’ll need a muffin tin for this one.
The recipe:
- 6-10 eggs (depending on the size of your muffin tin)
- Salt
- Red and black pepper
- Olives or capers
Preparation:
- Scramble all eggs in a bowl
- Add the salt and pepper
- If you are using olives, you’ll need to slice them. With smaller capers, that’s not required
- When everything is well stirred, spread it across the muffin tin. Every muffin cup should be about ½ full
- Preheat your oven to 150 C
- Put the muffin tin into the oven for about 10 minutes
- The muffins are ready as soon as they expand out of the cups and get their tasty goldish appearance
- Store in the fridge, in a storage container for 5-7 days
Keep in mind that these muffins (as with eggs) are with high satiety. In most cases, you would be able to eat no more than 2 per snack.
You can add hot peppers to these or everything that can enrich the flavor. Probably that’s the reason these are among my favorite quick and easy snack recipes.
Avocado
This snack is one of my favorite snack recipes because it’s a very quick and easy one. You don’t need a whole lot to prepare it.
The recipe:
- Avocado(s)
- Olive oil
- Salt
- Black pepper
Preparation:
- Slice the avocado in half and remove the core
- Add no more than 1tsp of olive oil to each half
- Add salt and black pepper on both halves
- Store in a storage container in the fridge for no more than a day
Well, that’s it! Usually, 1 avocado is enough to get me going till the next meal, but if the avocados are smaller, you may get a second one just in case.
Keep in mind that on the 2nd day they don’t look as visually appealing as on the 1st one (and don’t taste better), so make sure you consume them quickly.
Nuts
This one is probably the laziest among them all. However, it’s really easy for storage and transportation, as well as consumption. Nuts are also nutrient-rich. As there’s nothing to prepare here, I’ll just share with you the kind of nuts I eat and how much of them.
I prefer to mix raw and roasted nuts in most cases, as that gives me enough variety in terms of taste. Regarding the kinds of nuts, here are my top 5:
- Almonds
- Porridge
- Peanuts
- Pumpkin seeds
- Raisins
There are lots of other kinds of nuts that are included in large packs, mixes, etc. Usually, I try to consume about 50-70g or the quantity that would fit into my palm per snack. Since here we have lots of variety, I almost always have a small storage container with 100-ish grams of nuts.
No wonder this one is among my favorite quick and easy snack recipes – not much of a recipe, but it’s still amazing how much you can get out of it.
However, you need to be careful not to go on the route with all of the roasted peanuts that come with beer flavor or other stuff. They can have a variety of other fats and sugars in their crust, which kills the healthy part of our snack.
Pro tip: If you buy nuts in bulk – 0.5-1kg of type, you can definitely save money. Get yourself a jar large enough to store them and you’re good to go.
Protein shake
Last but not least, your majesty: the protein shake! We have lots of variety with this one and depending on what kind of ingredients you have around you, you can achieve true wonders.
I’ll share with you a couple of the different types of protein shakes I’m preparing for myself and how I’m doing that because similar to the nuts, we don’t have much cooking here.
The 1st way of preparing this is rather simple – add a scoop of your whey protein of choice to 400ml of water/milk and mix. This one easy to do on the go, so you can have it at the office, in the car, wherever you like.
The 2nd requires a bit more stuff around you, so I’d suggest most folks would be able to prepare it at home as it requires a blender.
The recipe:
- 1 scoop of whey protein
- 200ml milk
- 1 banana
- 20-30g berries
Preparation is easy: add all the ingredients into the blender and mix the final substance well.
This one is with higher satiety than using just milk/water because of the fruits. You would also have more nutrients and flavor coming from the fruits, so this one is plenty on its own.
As it is with the normal protein shake, for optimum taste, consumption for this one must happen relatively soon after you prepared it.
Another one of my favorite quick and easy snack recipes as it requires almost zero effort and keeps me full for a good couple of hours.
Quick and easy snack recipes – cost and health impact
As we talked about earlier, the cost vs. effort and time with these snacks is lower compared to a snack you would grab from the office cantina. 10 eggs here cost €1.5, as much as 2 avocados, which is not the case with a protein bar – it costs about €2 or more. Not that you can’t get a cheaper one, but let’s focus on the quality of the food we eat.
The time and effort you’ll spend preparing the snacks are relatively low and you can always do multiple meals at the same time. Yes, grabbing a snack from the store is 0 effort and time, but is it healthy enough? Actually, how often do you read the ingredients of the food you consume?
I bet that at least half of the processed food and snacks you buy on a weekly basis have palm oil as an ingredient and at least 20-30% sugar. Is that optimal for your health? Looking at the receipt, is it also optimal for your wallet?
Share with us down in the comments your favorite quick and easy snack recipes!
Featured image credits: Trang Doan Anthony Shkraba
