There’s a perception that eating a healthy diet and cooking from scratch is time-consuming. And to a point, that is true. But you do NOT have to totally sacrifice health for convenience! There are ways to save time in the kitchen and still eat healthy.
Even as a stay-at-home/work-from-home mom who enjoys cooking, I don’t like spending a TON of time in the kitchen. I still look for ways to save time. If you work outside the home, then you’ll be even more strapped for time. But in this blog post I have 9 tips for you on how to save time in the kitchen without sacrificing your health! Read on for the tips.
Use a slow cooker and/or pressure cooker
Utilize a slow cooker and/or pressure cooker multiple times weekly. I have both and these devices are especially great for cooking meat without much fuss.
If you have a moment in the morning, throw a roast with veggies into the slow cooker. You’ll come home from a long day at work with a delicious aroma to greet you and dinner ready to go!
On the other hand, if you forget to prepare anything for dinner or still have meat totally frozen, a pressure cooker t is your best friend. On many occasions I have cooked frozen or nearly totally frozen meat in it when I didn’t plan ahead. You can then have dinner on the table in less than an hour!
Don’t be a short order cook
One way to really waste time in the kitchen is to try individually pleasing everyone in your household. I was raised in a household that was the complete opposite of that. You eat whatever is being served at dinner! But if this is not something you have practiced, you can change it.
So in order to save time, don’t be a short-order cook! Everyone in the household eats the same thing, at least for dinner. If someone has a dietary restriction, such as being gluten-free, then just make everything gluten-free. If you’re having pasta, for example, everyone eats gluten-free pasta because otherwise you would have to boil two pots of water for two different types of pasta.
Use short recipes
Make recipes with a short list of ingredients. There should definitely be less than 10 ingredients and ideally around 5 (not including salt and pepper). Just because a recipe has few ingredients doesn’t mean it’ll be boring!
If a recipe calls for a homemade sauce or spice mix, which would make the ingredient list exceptionally long, you have a couple options. You could prepare those things ahead of time – in themselves, they won’t take up too much time, so you could make them when you have a spare moment. Or you could buy a similar pre-made version from the store. Just make sure the ingredients are pure and don’t have unnecessary fillers or unhealthy ingredients!
I have a couple of easy recipes on my blog! They are my Italian meatball and easy sauce recipes, and my vegetable beef soup recipe. Check them out and let me know how you like them!
Prep breakfast
Prepare breakfast the night before or even for the entire week, depending on the recipe. Just go onto Pinterest and search something like “healthy breakfast meal prep” and you’ll get a ton of ideas. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Overnight oats, soaked oatmeal, or baked oatmeal
- Egg casserole or quiche
- Sausage hash
- Frozen smoothie bags
- Yogurt parfaits
Utilize healthy “fast foods”
Cooking totally from scratch is the #1 best way to eat. But being 100% from-scratch isn’t always feasible, regardless of whether you work outside the home, run a business, or are a homeschool mom.
One way to keep your from-scratch cooking pretty healthy is to utilize healthy “fast foods.” These are things like frozen precut vegetables, marinara sauce, pre-washed salad greens, and seasoning mixes (without fillers or unnecessary ingredients). Yes, buying pre-washed salad greens instead of a head of romaine might be a little more expensive. But time is money, and if the only way you’re going to eat a salad is to buy the pre-washed bag, that’s better than no veggies at all.
Meal plan
Meal planning deserves its own post. But in a nutshell, meal planning will prevent last-minute take-out or staring at the fridge wondering what to have for dinner when it’s already 6:30pm. You could plan weekly or even do several weeks or a month at a time.
Regardless of how often you set a meal plan, only reference one or two cookbooks at a time to avoid decision fatigue. You could also meal plan by searching Pinterest based on what ingredients you already have on hand. Then when you grocery shop, you only need to buy whatever is needed to fill in the gaps. This is a good policy to stick to regardless of how you are meal planning.
Shop in bulk
Shopping in bulk helps with time management in a couple of ways. First, you reduce the amount of time spent going to the grocery store because you go less frequently. Some people even shop just once a month! (I have not reached that yet.) Second, when you shop in bulk, you have more of your most-used ingredients on hand and will run out less quickly. This makes meal planning or whipping up a last-minute meal so much easier.
You can shop in bulk at your regular grocery store or at a wholesale club. The latter tends to offer better prices and there are many options that are organic. However, another way to shop is by not even going to a store. Instead, join a food co-op where you place your order online and then go to a “drop” to pick up your goods. I recently joined the Azure Standard food co-op and wrote a post about it. Buying in bulk from Azure also helps save money, not just time!
Have a list of “go-to” recipes
This is another thing I need to implement myself: have a list of “go-to” easy family favorites that you can cook frequently. If you feel in a rut with meal planning (it happens to all of us!), then just go to that list and pick out dinners for the week. I’d say have at least 10 family favorites.
This principle also plays into the previous one about bulk shopping. If you know what your family favorites are, you can stock up on the staples that those recipes require. That way, you can always cook those meals in a pinch.
Use or freeze leftovers
Depending on your family size and how big of meals you cook, you may frequently have leftovers. It is crucial to make sure those leftovers get eaten one way or another! There are several options for using leftovers.
I think the best way to utilize leftovers is to use them for the next night’s dinner. That way you get a break during the week and don’t have to cook! I love when this happens in our household. If there’s not quite enough for an entire dinner, a few family members could eat the leftovers for lunch. Another option, especially if there’s a LOT of leftovers and you’re getting tired of it, is to freeze the food. I have done this a couple times recently with large pork roasts. Then you can pull out the food at a later time for dinner.
So there are my 9 ways to save time in the kitchen while still eating healthy. What is the 10th tip YOU would add to this list?
Jessica says
Great tips, Malori! In our house we always joke that we only make two things: take it or leave it! We have a daughter with Celiac disease so we tend to make everything GF just to keep it simple.
If I had a 10th tip, it would be to keep cut up “snack vegetables” like carrots, celery, bell peppers, cucumbers, etc in the fridge in portioned ziplock baggies. Put them in a special drawer in your fridge that you can call the “grazing drawer”. When your kids hound you for snacks outside of scheduled meal or snack times, tell them they can have anything that they want…from the grazing drawer 😉
They can get it themselves and it’s more veggies in their diet (if they decline, they’re not that hungry and can wait to the next meal!)
Malori says
That is a great 10th tip, Jessica! I love the idea of a “grazing drawer.” 🙂 I also did not know your daughter had celiac disease! Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to leave a comment.