Proactive people who strive to cultivate healthy habits, including eating habits, often get bogged down. In the case of food it often happens that cooking takes too much time, in the end it becomes lazy and the hunger is satisfied with unhealthy snacks or ready-made food from plastic packaging with lots of “E” additives. But you can learn to allocate time for cooking so that you don’t go home after work, depressed at the thought that you will have to spend at least an hour preparing dinner or lunch the next day instead of gambling at Bet20, watching Netflix, or spending time with your family. Here are a few tips that will save you time cooking and help you build a healthy diet at the same time.
Make a Menu for the Week
And based on that, make a shopping plan. Choose the most convenient time for you to plan your diet (of course, with your loved ones’ needs in mind) and grocery shopping. This way you won’t waste time on this several times a week and lament that you don’t have time for anything again. You can arrange for delivery, which will also save you time, but remember how many bags you will accumulate again, which will end up in the landfill and will take a long time to decompose.
By the way, it’s also good to plan ahead because you’ll usually think of quality meals and snacks in advance, not dry snacks (remember how many times you’ve put off a normal lunch while drowning in a work or household routine?).
Prepare All the Ingredients and Utensils at Once
To avoid rushing around the kitchen looking for a missing ingredient and ending up complaining that you forgot to add something, lay out absolutely everything you’ll need during cooking, right down to spices and salt. And immediately prepare the utensils and tools that will be involved in the process.
Cook With a Two- or Three-day Supply
For example, you can definitely make porridge or soup for a couple of days and just vary the way you serve the dish with additives. One day you can have breakfast porridge with dried apricots and prunes, another day – with honey or butter.
You should prepare several dishes at the same time, one – in the oven, another – on the stove, and the third – in a multicooker. That way you definitely won’t have to spend a lot of time during the week multiple times.
Make Preparations With Frosting
Think about what ingredients you use most often – peppers, zucchini or pumpkin, chicken or fish, something else? Process it all at once, wash it, cut it up, and put it in the freezer. Break the preparations up into several fractions so they can be thawed quickly in batches. If it’s a large piece of meat, fish, or minced meat, calculate how much you will need at one time and put it in separate containers or ziploc bags. In the morning before you leave for work, take out the piece of meat you need and put it in the fridge – by evening, you will have a defrosted piece of meat or fish that you can quickly fry.
Frozen vegetables don’t need to be defrosted before cooking – that way you’ll be able to preserve the most useful ingredients. If they do need to be defrosted, however, we suggest doing it in the refrigerator so that a gradual defrosting takes place. Take them out of the bag and put them in a bowl.
By the way, if you haven’t finished some cooked food and you’re not sure you’ll eat it in the next few days – freeze it! When you realize you have a busy day ahead of you and clearly don’t have the energy to cook, you’ll have a meal ready to eat. You can move it to the fridge in the evening to take with you to work or school the next morning. Or do it in the morning, so that in the afternoon and evening you will no longer think about what you will need to prepare for dinner. That way you won’t spoil the food and you won’t throw money away.
Clean up as You Cook
You’ve taken the vegetables out of the plate, you’ve grate the carrots – wash the kitchen utensils immediately, before the leftovers stick and you grow a mountain of dishes. Try to use small amounts of dishes so you don’t waste time washing them later. If you do like to use as many tools as possible and have a dishwasher, load dirty dishes in there as you cook.
Keep Your Favorite Recipes Handy
Make a list of them and hang them on the fridge, create a note on your smartphone, start a recipe notebook – everything should be in one place so you don’t have to waste time searching for that very recipe online. But of course, no one cancelled the addition to the list of recipes!
Don’t get upset if at first, you can’t do everything quickly. In any case, with a few attempts you will adapt to this mode and definitely learn how to save your time.