If you realize the importance of having home-cooked meals, both for your physical and financial health, but you just don’t enjoy having to spend a lot of time confined to the kitchen each day, you’ll be glad to know that there are a few things you can do to speed up your cooking time and feel like you’re spending less of your day standing at the stove. So whether you’re someone in an assisted living facility who can’t stand in the kitchen for too long or someone who would just rather be spending their time doing something else, these tips are for you.
To see how you can start doing this, here are three ways to make cooking easier when you don’t want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.
Use The Right Sized Items
One thing that you might be doing that could cause you to spend some unnecessary time cooking is using the wrong sized items when you’re preparing food.
When you’re cooking something, whether it’s on the stove or in the oven, you’ll want to use a pan or dish that’s just slightly bigger than the item you’re cooking. When you use something that’s far bigger than the food that you’re trying to cook, you’re going to be spending a lot of time heating up that pan or dish when you don’t need that much space to cook your food. But by using a smaller pan or dish to cook that food in, you’ll only be spending your time heating up the parts of the cookware that you’ll actually need to be using to prepare your food.
Rethink Buying Fresh Produce
While it’s great to use fresh produce in your meals, preparing fresh produce can take up a lot of time. Luckily, there are ways you can get around this.
To avoid having to wash and cut up all of the produce you’re wanting to do for a meal as you prepare to cook it, you can purchase this produce already washed and cut. Buying frozen produce or even canned produce allows the food to maintain all of its nutrition but saves you from having to do the majority of the prep work.
Prepare Well In Advance
By the time the end of the day rolls around, you might not feel much like having to spend an hour preparing every aspect of the meal you were planning to eat. And luckily, you likely don’t have to.
If you can prepare well, you could take care of a lot of the prep work for your meals well in advance. This can allow you to do very minimal work in the kitchen at the end of the day, which can be a real lifesaver. Doing things like pre-cooking large quantities of meat or grains, which keep well in the fridge, can make all meals easier for you to prepare.
If you’re ready to cut down on the time you spend in the kitchen, consider implementing some of the tips mentioned above to streamline your cooking.
