You can be time poor and yet still eat well. It’s a question of choice, of decision making and of timing.

Timing is essential. We pretty much all have time available somewhere in the week, but often it’s not at a time that suits us for going shopping or preparing food.

Having said that, food can be prepared at almost any time and if we can break free of conventional thinking and instead get part-meals ready in advance it can have a huge impact on how we live our lives.

If you already have the protein component of the meal ready, putting together a salad is the work of only minutes and even cooking a few vegetables doesn’t take that long, especially if you don’t mind using a microwave.

Lunching on leftovers is a grand standard for anybody. Some meals can be kept in a cooler and eaten cold and if you have the wherewithal at the office to heat food, you can eat almost anything you bring from home. A nourishing soup with a slice of the very best bread you can afford. Something with a bit of Mexican flair that segues easily from dinner to lunch.

If your idea of a good lunch is sandwiches and you’re not a morning person, there’s no reason you can’t make them when you’re in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner and refrigerating them overnight. Some people even do once-a-week preparation for lunchtime sandwiches using fillings like cheese and relish/meat and pickles/chicken and mayo. It just means popping in a ziplock baggie of salad makings when you’re packing your lunchbox.

Decide when you’re most time poor and look at your schedule for when you have time to spare. You can do anything if you’re organised enough to use your available time well.

The way we deal with the concept of simplicity can be strange indeed. Those of us who desire simplicity in our life can make it a very complex process.

We decide to declutter so we read books and blogs about it instead of simply getting on with it. We think about simplifying without actually doing anything about it. Surely that’s making a simple process more difficult than it actually needs to be.

One way to simplify is to become free of addictions. If you’re addicted to nicotine or alcohol, you can’t simplify in that area. You can’t decide not to use that product . You need it. You have to think about it. Plan for it. You must go to the shop so you don’t run out. The product, then, is your master. If you’re a hoarder, your things own you, not the other way around. If you’re addicted to sugar, the cravings overcome any knowledge you have about the subject and you find yourself having to eat something (a lot of it, usually!) you know is not healthy.

If you’re not addicted, you can drop something effortlessly simply by deciding to do without it, leaving you with extra time and often extra money. When nicotine, alcohol and sugar no longer hold dominion over you, you are free. Free and happy, because there is no conflict between the thing and you. The thing ceases to have importance. When things you no longer use are not left around to make your house a cluttered graveyard of the past, cleaning is quicker and the visual effect of your home gives you satisfaction instead of angst. It makes life easier. You have space for the important things.

Simplifying food can be a good idea. You can have easy, uncomplicated meals that take little preparation yet give you lots of nutrients. Finding simple food and simple preparation styles helps you overcome the desire for fast food for reasons of convenience. You increasingly realise that food can be just as convenient to prepare at home and that you are in control of the timing of the delivery. It’s just a case of buying a little differently during your weekly or monthly shop. You might have stores of tinned chickpeas and butter beans to help make easy salads or stews or put whole potatoes and huge pumpkin chunks in the oven to roast while you’re busy doing other things. It’s really just a case of thinking about it anew, rather than doing things the same old way you’ve always done them. Simple.

Marie Antoinette supposedly said, “Let them eat cake” when told that the peasants had no bread (their staple diet) and were starving. (The quote has also been attributed, perhaps more accurately, to the wife of Louis XIV, Marie-Therese, who lived a century before.) The example was to show how ignorant the French upper class was to the common man’s predicament, as at that time cake (brioche) was hugely more expensive than bread.

Nowadays many of us have the opposite problem. We have all the bread and cake we could possibly need, and most of us eat a lot more than we should. We know that to have a healthy diet we shouldn’t really eat cake. But is there a way that we can have our cake and eat it too? This is a pretty frivolous look at the subject of health, but here it is anyway.

Even little changes can make a difference. If you want cake, cook it yourself from scratch. Live by the rule that you can have any kind of junk food you want, but you have to prepare it yourself from real ingredients. It slows you down but doesn’t put anything totally out of bounds. (It helps if you’re a great cook, of course.)

You just must have cake? Zucchini works in some recipes, pumpkin makes a moist cake or great scones and beetroot can go into chocolate cake, and where would a carrot cake be without …? Then there’s apple cake, banana cake, rhubarb cake, carrot and apricot muffins, all kinds of fruit loaves. Many berries work well in cakes and muffins.

So pick a kind of cake, do some research and you’re well on your way to at least slightly healthier cake than the store-bought stuff.

Here’s one recipe to start you off. It’s deliciously moist with a slight tang—and it’s as far from health food as you can get. But we’re hastening slowly here. If this replaces cake with some ingredients you can’t even pronounce, it’s a step in the right direction. It’s also an incredibly easy recipe and once you’ve made it a couple of times you can start tweaking ingredients, substituting wholemeal flour for the white, maple syrup for the sugar et cetera.

WHOLE ORANGE CAKE
1 whole navel orange, including skin
150g butter, melted
3 eggs
1 cup caster sugar or substantially less
1 ½ cups SR flour

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C (350 degrees F)
2. Grease a cake tin and line base and sides with baking paper
3. Cut the orange into bits and discard any really big pieces of pith
4. Process in food processor to slightly chunky mush.
5. Add all other ingredients and process until well mixed.
6. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.

This is quite a dense cake. It freezes well, which is good when you’re looking for something extra to pop into your lunchbox. Don’t ice. We’re trying to be slightly healthy here!