Five Ways to Save Time in the Kitchen

Get Organized

An important part of creating and maintaining a healthy home (your natural green oasis!) is keeping it organized. When it is organized you have more time for the important things that you must do everyday including making your home healthier. But, when it isn’t, it is so easy to slip back into old, unhealthy habits because if nothing else, unhealthy habits are usually easy.

For instance, one area of your home that definitely needs organizing is your kitchen! If your kitchen isn’t in order, you’re more likely to skip meals and let your blood sugar drop or simply resort to fast food.

How can you work to make your home healthier if you’re dizzy from lack of nourishment or stuffed with a greasy, double-meat, double-cheese burger? 🙁

So, what can you do?

Instead of preparing a meal that takes a couple of hours to prepare, skipping it altogether or eating unhealthily, you can enjoy a healthy meal that requires very little prep time.

It just takes a little planning in advance.

Develop Food Prep System

Here are a few steps that can help. I call this my food prep system.

1.  Keep kitchen orderly and ready for the next meal.

There’s nothing like entering a clean and orderly kitchen. It helps you relax and enjoy the preparation of your food.

On the other hand, entering a disorderly kitchen can be quite unsettling and cause dread.

Instead of preparing your meal, you will more than likely spend time trying to create some sense of order first.

Trust me, I know. 🙂

2.  Write down weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly menus.

The main thing to remember when planning your menu is to keep things simple.

This is something that I’ve always struggled with because I tend to complicate things. During my attempts at menu planning, I would sit down with cookbooks and grandiose ideas of a meal and how it should be planned out.

Inevitably, I’d get stuck.

I’d laboriously calculate how much of each ingredient I would need to purchase for each meal only to discover that some of them weren’t even available at the grocery store.

So, I’d switch to default mode and shoot from the hip for our meals – deciding each day what we would eat.

Eventually, it dawned on me that there are certain meals that I prepare on a regular basis. Why not write them down?

Voila! I have my menu for the week. And if along the way, I prepare something different and it is a success, that meal will just be included in the menu. This is a much simpler process than what I’ve tried in the past.

Not having to think about what to prepare for each meal is freeing and leads to the next step.

3.  Pre-measure and pre-package baking mixes.

If you deal with several food allergies like my family and I do, you know that you can’t just go to the grocery store and pick up a loaf of bread or a frozen dinner. You must prepare it yourself.

Measuring out your ingredients and packaging them for storage will save you a good chunk of time.

When you want a quick pan of bread, coffee cake or brownies, all you will have to do is grab your pre-packaged mix, add your required liquids and pop it in the oven.

4.  Pre-measure and pre-package seasoning mixes.

This is similar to step 3.  In addition to saving time,  it can be easier to prepare your own seasoning mixes for your savory dishes than to try and weed out which pre-packaged ones at the grocer fits your needs.

5.  Double recipes and freeze one portion.

When you’re cooking your meals, cook enough for two or more meals and freeze the extras.

For those times when you really don’t have time to cook, take the meal out of the freezer, defrost it and reheat.

If you find these tips helpful and/or you have others you’d like to share, comment below or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+!