How to Make it Easier to Cook at Home

Eating out is costly and unhealthy. These tips on How to Make it Easier to Cook at Home will help you save money, eat healthier, and reduce cooking time.

I don’t know about you, but it seems that I barely have time to breathe anymore. From the time I wake up, I am go, go, going and it doesn’t seem to stop until I hit the pillow at night most days. This leaves me vulnerable to doing things that I think are time savers, but in reality they take more of my precious time and money, such as eating out or ordering in meals.

Most of us know that eating out costs more in the long run than cooking meals at home, and we are also aware that eating at home gives us more control over what is in our recipes, thus making them healthier. What is tricky, is getting the time to actually do the cooking at home and make it work in the long run. That’s where batch cooking and meal prepping can really help us! Here are some tips for How to Make it Easier to Cook at Home so we can live in harmony with our wallets, our nutrition choices, and our time.

How to Make it Easier to Cook at Home

Do meal prepping and batch cooking. Meal prepping is one way you can cook at home more often and do it in less time. Meal prepping utilizes techniques such as batch cooking in order to save you time later in the kitchen. Imagine, you cook all your protein for the week in just an afternoon while you are cleaning your house. You portion it out for meals later in the week and when it comes time to cook dinner, it takes you 15 minutes from start to finish rather than 45 minutes.

Stick with simple recipes. The simpler the recipe, the easier it will be to make. Dinner doesn’t need to be extravagant or big and hearty to count as a dinner. A simple dinner such as BLTs and soup is perfect for those nights when you just really are stretched for time. Also, if you batch cook, you can do a lot of your prep work ahead of time, leaving you more time for other things and allowing you to throw simple ingredients together with ease.

Make recipes that use similar ingredients. I bet if you looked at your family’s favorites, you would see some incredible similarities. Maybe you make lots of chicken or rice? This makes batch cooking incredibly easy to do and makes cooking at home a breeze.

Get your family to help. If you have kids, put them to work! Most kids love to help cook and if you have kids that do, find age appropriate things that they can do to help. After all, many hands make light work!

Use slow cookers and pressure cookers. Slow cookers and pressure cookers are a time crunched cook’s best friend. A slow cooker can do the work for you all day with very little, if any, interference from you and a pressure cooker is perfect for times when you didn’t get a chance to cook anything in advance. It can take frozen chicken breasts to cooked and tender in less than 10 minutes.

Set reminders. Set yourself reminders for your batch cooking and meal prepping plans. Just like with anything else, you must schedule it in and prioritize it to make it work. It might be hard to do at first, but you will find that it opens up much more time after a while.