Do you feel overwhelmed and stressed everytime you walk in your kitchen? If so, it’s time to make some — easy-to-implement — changes. The kitchen is the heart of your home, where your family gathers, where you nourish their bodies, where you likely spend a good portion of the day. When you feel burdened and rushed to get meals on the table, the enjoyment of breaking bread together as a family is crushed. To help you start finding pleasure in fixing the family meals, here are our top five time-saving kitchen tips.
Do you feel overwhelmed and stressed everytime you walk in your kitchen? If so, it’s time to make some — easy-to-implement — changes. The kitchen is the heart of your home, where your family gathers, where you nourish their bodies, where you likely spend a good portion of the day. When you feel burdened and rushed to get meals on the table, the enjoyment of breaking bread together as a family is crushed. To help you start finding pleasure in fixing the family meals, here are our top five time-saving kitchen tips.
1. Plan your meals
If you’ve heard “meal planning saves time” numerous times and still haven’t adopted this time-saving trick, stop complaining and start planning! Sit down on Sunday and make a menu and ingredients list for the upcoming week. Go to the store with your list, stock up, and have your recipes handy so all you have to do is cook. You waste time every day trying to figure out what to cook and then waste time weekly making multiple trips to the store.
>>We’ve got plenty of vegan recipes to inspire your meal planning!
2. Use a food processor
Some kitchen gadgets are nothing but clutter while others are worth their counter space. Multi-disc food processors not only shave time and labor from your meal prepping, they may also inspire you to actually cook more. Food processors slice, dice, shred, grind, blend, and puree just about anything.
3. Batch cook
If you’re spending the time to make one dinner, make an extra batch or two and freeze them. Lasagna, enchiladas, and casseroles are easy to batch cook, but you can also make extra rice, vegetable sides, breads, and desserts, which will give you entire meals at an arm’s reach to your freezer.
4. Love your leftovers
Don’t let your leftovers go to waste. Eat them for breakfast, lunch, or even dinner the next day. To keep leftovers from being a second-day yawn, get creative with how you serve them. Leftover rice can be transformed into a grain salad with nuts and fruit or even a rice pudding for dessert. Leftover sauteed veggies can be a tasty sandwich or wrap filling. Leftover fruit salad can be whipped into a smoothie or a sauce for vegan ice cream. Give leftovers a new look and you’ll not only save time on the next day’s meals, you’ll also save money because the leftovers won’t go to waste.
5. Be time wise
How often do you just stand in your kitchen waiting for the coffee to perk, bread to toast, or water to boil? These precious minutes can be wisely spent loading or unloading the dishwasher, packing the next day’s lunch, writing your meal plan or shopping list, or even organizing your cabinets so you have better access to ingredients. You’ll be surprised how being efficient in the kitchen will give you a feeling of time-saving accomplishment.
What’s your favorite time-saving tip in the kitchen? Share it with us below!
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