Combining foods to create a satisfying meal

I’ve been thinking about how meals should be made up, all through my life, as a child and upwards, I’ve always thought that the majority of the meal should be carbs. It shouldn’t. Thinking about a restaurant we visited when my parents were here to visit the primary part of the meal was the ‘meat’, the secondary  focus was the vegetables (gorgeous too) and the smallest portion was a little pile of rice (just enough to fit into one of those single serving pudding cups).  Now current thinking is saying this is correct and to be quite frank it worked very well for me. I was more than satisfied with the meat and veg and little spoon of rice and I was done, I couldn’t finish the rest. 

But when you’re at home and thinking about making dinner the old habits creep back in. We weren’t a “rich” family but we got by and my thought processes for combining food has been influenced by the fact that when I was growing up carbs were cheap. Rice, pasta, potatoes, bread, lentils were all cheap filler foods. Meat was expensive, vegetables were expensive so there was a little of those and it was made up for with the addition of extra pasta, lentils to bulk out the stew, a single slice of ham between two thick slices of bread.

I’m not whining about being “poor” or anything like that just that the austerity of my childhood and probably my parents, was different to how we lived when my sister and then my brother came along.  My dad got a better job, shortly after so did my mom and then we moved to a bigger house. There was more money for things like meat and vegetables from the big supermarkets, but the mental reliance on carbs was already there saying “you need me to bulk out this meal” and “there’s not enough to eat without a big pile of rice/bread/pasta”

At present it's very difficult to cook for the two of us. My husband is not a big fan of vegetables, especially all the ones I like. He won't eat cauliflower or broccoli, no sprouts, no broad beans, no leeks, no squash, no celery, no cucumber, no courgettes, no olives (scandalous in the Mediterranean). I struggle to make meals that consist of more veg than carbs because he won't eat them and given his size (6' 8") and calorie consumption (TDEE 3000/day) if I wanted to increase the protein content in the meal (instead of filling it out with carbs) we'd be broke.

Thankfully over here vegetables are cheap, I managed to buy over 10 kilos of fruit and veg for less than €15 and 3 kilos of that was grapes (a weakness of mine).

As I was writing this my hubby and I have had a confab, he has agreed to retry squash, courgettes and leeks with a later option on cauliflower and broccoli. I will NEVER get him to eat sprouts again in this lifetime but we have made progress.