What We Eat In A Day – With Healthier Alternatives From Tesco

I don’t know about you, but one of my biggest dilemmas when it comes to family life is deciding what to eat each day. It can be such a nightmare trying to manage the balance between quick and easy food and healthy and nutritious food. We lead a pretty busy life style. Between both the husband and I working, the kids being in full time childcare, and having no family around to help out, we never seem to stop!

Tesco are helping us to make better choices for a healthier diet through their new, reformulated products which contain less sugar, salt and fat in order to help us stay on track with a well-balanced diet. At the same time, they have made a huge effort to make sure the taste hasn’t been compromised and that everyone continues to enjoy all their food!

I thought it would be fun to share a food diary for one day with you, showing how we have managed to fit some of Tesco’s new products into our daily life.

This was a typical busy week day. At the weekend we tend to take things a little slower and make a bigger deal of meal times, for example having a big cooked breakfast on a lazy Sunday morning. But I thought it would be more useful to share a week day.

Let’s start with breakfast. My FAVOURITE meal of the day! I love love love going out for brunch and generally just love all things breakfast related. Lucky for me, Little I is the same and can often be found eating at home and then going into nursery and having another breakfast.

We are usually a toast and cereal kind of house. I was a huge cereal monster until I had to give up dairy whilst nursing the youngest member of our family. Rice crispies and almond milk just don’t quite taste the same. Little I is a big, big cereal fan and is known to have three bowls in one go. Her usual choices are Shreddies or Cheerios so I picked up the Tesco Malt Wheats instead.

We also have toast and yogurt so I swapped our bread to the Tesco Wholemeal Bread, our butter to the Tesco Butterpak Spreadable Light and our jam to the Tesco No Added Sugar Jam. I can honestly say I can’t taste a difference with the jam and there were no complaints from Little I on the butter front. Who doesn’t love a bit of jammy toast?!

Next up was our snack, at about 10am. We just had our usual snack of fruit, which today was strawberries and grapes. YUM.

Then onto lunch. Little I requested cheese on toast, which she hasn’t asked for for a while so I thought I’d make her up a little lunch plate using the Tesco Wholemeal Bread and Tesco Butterpak Spreadable Light again, along with Tesco Lighter Mature Cheese. I was SO JEALOUS that I couldn’t have any. It smelt great. Of course she had to have some ‘dip dip’ with it aka ketchup and I managed to pick up this Tesco Lighter version that had 50% less sugars and 65% less salt. You don’t tend to think of sauces being too bad for you because they’re just an accompaniment, but they can mount up. Especially in my case, I have way too much!

I had to settle for a ham, chutney and lettuce kind of half sandwich. I find two bits of bread a bit too much sometimes and this way I can drizzle oil and vinegar dressing all over it and eat it like a flat bread. Super tasty.

We always seem to get hungry around 3pm and today’s snack was one of my favourite – hummus! I am quite partial to a flavoured hummus so I was super pleased to see that the Tesco Reduced Fat Hummus came in Red Pepper flavour. It just jazzes it up a bit, doesn’t it? Little I wolfed it all down and asked for more so another thumbs up from her.

I’m not going to lie, she then asked for a biscuit so I gave her a Tesco Reduced Fat Digestive. She’s lucky her dad isn’t home at the moment because he is an absolute biscuit fiend and can eat a whole pack in one sitting which means biscuits don’t last long in our house!

Onto our final meal of the day, dinner. Tonight we needed a quick meal because we’d been out all day and I didn’t want to delay bath time too much. Bolognese pasta is always a big hit with all of us and it is so easy to make. We tend to use quorn mince because I prefer the flavour and it’s much healthier and lighter than beef mince. I often make my own sauce for our bolognese but tonight was not a night for that! The husband is away at sea and I am solo parenting so I am always up for making life as easy as possible.

I bought the Tesco Mushroom Pasta Sauce which has reduced salt. Salt is hidden in a lot of foods so it’s good to know that companies, such as Tesco, are doing their bit to make us more aware. I jazzed up the sauce with chopped up tomatoes, mushrooms and a bit more garlic (you can never have enough garlic, am I right?!) and added the quorn mince. We tend to always have wholewheat pasta just because I prefer the taste and feel like I digest it better (TMI? sorry!).

Little I requested hers in separate bowls and was lucky enough to get to sprinkle some cheese on the top. Oh how I long for the days where I can eat ALL the cheese again!

And for pudding there was a Tesco Low Fat Greek Style layered Yogurt. Little I loves a yogurt that comes out of a tube as much as the next kid, but she saw these with the fruit at the bottom and chose one instead. She ate about half of it before declaring she was full.

In terms of drinks, we are pretty boring and tend to drink water most of the time but I did pick up some Tesco Blackcurrant 50% Juicy and Bright No Added Sugar Fruit Juice Blackcurrant Squash for when we have playdates etc.

And that was our food diary for a random Monday! Hope you enjoyed seeing what we ate. Let me know what your favourite meal and snacks are and if you eat any ‘healthier choice’ option foods?

Find out more about Tesco’s Better Choices campaign here.