Time Is Money – Including In Your Kitchen
There’s nothing quite like a good home-cooked meal. Unfortunately, many of us simply can’t find the time or energy to cook an entire meal from scratch each evening, especially with all of the pressures of modern life.
This might have led you to sabotage your own health by relying on microwavable meals and fast-food takeaway just because you can’t find the energy to go grocery shopping or portion ingredients. While we acknowledge these options aren’t ideal, many of us simply find the cooking process too time consuming – especially after a long day of work. This is why the following tips are designed to help you save time in the kitchen, so you can get back to preparing delicious home-cooked meals.
Keep Recipes Simple
Contrary to popular belief, cooking healthy meals at home doesn’t require a long list of obscure ingredients. There are plenty of simple and healthy recipes available for you to discover with a simple internet search. For example, you can make stir-fried beef & Hokkien noodles in under 30 minutes with just 8 ingredients. With a little effort, it’s easy to collect a bunch of great recipes that you can conveniently prepare in your home kitchen any time you want.
Plan What You’re Going To Cook Ahead Of Time
One of the best ways you can save time in the kitchen is by knowing what you plan to cook before you even step into the room. By writing down what you plan to cook, you’re far more likely to actually stick to it and avoid take-away options.
Having a solid plan in place for exactly what you’re going to cook will save you a heap of time in the grocery store and allow you to jump straight into action as soon as you get home. By doing this, you’ll eliminate those moments of staring into your fridge or pantry wondering what on earth to cook.
Make sure you refresh your catalogue of dishes every so often, so you don’t get bored of cooking the same type of things over and over again. It can be useful to learn about multiple dishes using the same core ingredient, such as some amazing salmon-based dinner recipes.
Buy Essentials in Bulk
Instead of buying the same staples each week, see what you can purchase in bulk. For example, if you use rice in a lot of your dishes then it would be prudent to buy rice in bulk, saving you time and money. It also means that you have healthy foods available and aren’t sacrificing health for wealth.
Taking some time to improve your kitchen storage will give you plenty of space to store everything so that each item is easy to find. This really helps to streamline the logistics of your kitchen by making sure that common ingredients are both easily accessible and always in supply.
Cook and Prepare for Multiple Meals At Once
With the help of a crock pot, it’s easy to slow-cook a piece of meat so that you can use it in recipes for the rest of the week. This saves you a lot of time you would otherwise spend cooking the meat from scratch each evening.
You can do the same thing with dried ingredients like beans, grains and nuts. Simply soak or cook them and then store them in the pantry for later. Vegetables can also be washed, cut up and stored for later use. Or you can simply make a big broth and store it in the fridge. You can then easily scoop out a bowl of delicious soup to enjoy anytime you want.
Doing this on a Sunday before the week starts is a great way to speed up the process of cooking dinner each night. Knowing that you have a bunch of ingredients already pre-portioned and ready to go can make the prospect of cooking after a busy day much less daunting.
Involve Other People
A huge time-saver in the kitchen is to involve other people in the cooking process. Even if the people you ask say they aren’t good at cooking and therefore don’t see how they can be involved, there’s always some simple ways they can help out, such as grabbing you the utensils you need or helping to wash up.
You can even involve children in the process, and this is a great way to help them develop essential cooking skills as well as an interest in preparing their own meals.
Clean Up As You Cook
One of the most time-consuming kitchen processes is washing up after the meal is eaten. To save time, wash pots and pans soon after using them rather than waiting until the end of the night.
Most food stains come off much easier the less time you give them to harden, so you’ll be saving yourself a lot of scrubbing effort by cleaning as you go. This also makes it easier to relax and enjoy your meal as you won’t be dreading a big wash-up later.