Sometimes it can be very challenging to prepare meals for yourself or your family. Three meals a day, seven days a week… that is a lot of food to prepare, even if you are preparing the food only for one person. Multiply that by 2 people or 4 or many more in large families. You can imagine (or maybe you can’t even fathom) the amount of food being served each week. But who really has time to make all of that food? If you are at work all day, you don’t have time. If you are at home with small children all day, you don’t have time. If you have a big family that you are shuttling from school to appointments to extra-curriculars, you don’t have the time either. If you fall into several of those categories at once, then you most certainly are not just hanging around cooking all day. So, what are some ways to help you get you and your family fed without relying on fast food and without exhausting yourself? Here are a few of my favorite techniques for saving time in the kitchen, and most start in the same way: Doubling.
Doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling the food you cook can relieve a lot of the pressure of constant food preparation. But for now, let’s just focus on doubling our recipes. I wouldn’t want to scare anyone with too ambitious of a project. There are a lot of recipes that can be doubled and used in the following ways:
1. Cook both and eat the same meal for two dinners in the same week. For example, this week we grilled some chicken breast and some drumsticks. We ate the drumsticks along with some nice side dishes on the day we grilled the chicken. Then on another night, I sliced up the chicken breast and used it to make wraps. Two meals on two nights, but I only had to cook the chicken once.
2. Cook both, eat one and freeze one for later. I do this all of the time. I double my chicken soup and put half in the freezer for later. I double lasagna, chicken dishes, meatballs, and many other foods and freeze some for another moment when I don’t have time to prepare them. And that happens a lot.
3. Cook one for now and freeze the assembled one for later. This technique works beautifully for marinating meats (they will be even more flavorful after they have defrosted in their marinade) and cookie dough. You can also freeze pasta dishes (cook the noodles, add the sauce and cheese, and freeze), bread dough (shape and freeze), fruit pies (fill the crust but don’t bake), and many other dishes. Sometimes you have time to prepare the food, but not enough time to bake it. This is perfect for those moments and still gives you something to throw in the oven for a hectic day’s meal.
4. Cook both, eat one now and use the others for lunches. If I am making pasta or a make-your-own-salad meal, I like to double it. Then I package up the leftovers for grab and go meals for the next day or so. That saves me from having to worry about lunches.
Obviously, there are other ways to save time in the kitchen, including using some of the really quick and simple recipes you can find on this blog and in my cookbook. Or save even more time by combining those quick recipes with one of these doubling techniques to make your food preparation take even less time. These are my favorite ways to speed up my food preparation and some of my favorite foods to do that with. What are your favorite ways to cook on crazy, busy days?
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