How to Cook Real Food Without Spending All Day in the Kitchen

I do my best to feed nutritious meals to my family. It’s been really tough during this season, though. I’m in the third trimester of pregnancy and I’m caring for my 3-year-old and 2-year-old. I’m tired. By the time evening arrives, I’m tempted to feed them any old convenience food in order to avoid being on my feet and working over a hot stove!

As I’ve been planning our meals, it’s occurred to me that there are ways to save time while preparing real food. Homemade meals will always take longer to prepare than it takes to prepare a frozen pizza, but they don’t have to take forever. Read on to discover the ways I’m preparing real food without spending hours in the kitchen each day.

How to save time when cooking real food

• Double recipes and freeze half for later. One of the most useful ways I save time is by doubling recipes. I’m already chopping, mixing, and stirring, so I might as well get two meals out of it! It still takes time to prepare tonight’s dinner, but when we eat the frozen portion, the only preparation time it will take is to pull the dish from the freezer and turn on the oven.
• Use the slow cooker. I don’t know what I’d do without my Crockpot. It’s an incredibly helpful tool for preparing meals. Whether it’s a beef roast, spicy lemon chicken, chicken soup, or red beans and rice, there are scores of real food recipes that can easily be prepared in a slow cooker. For most of them, you just toss in the ingredients in the morning (this takes very little time) and let the slow cooker cook all day.
• Use frozen (or canned) veggies and fruits. As I noted in a previous post, research shows that frozen and even canned fruits and veggies contain about the same amount of nutrients as their fresh counterparts. This means there is no reason to avoid using them if they’ll make life easier! It takes less time to steam a bag of frozen broccoli than it takes to wash, chop, and steam a head of fresh broccoli. When possible, I save time (and often money) by using frozen veggies and fruits.
• Menu plan. For me, one of the most time consuming aspects of preparing meals for my family isn’t the actual cooking—it’s figuring out what to cook! If I sit down and plan out our meals for a week or a month at a time, it means I don’t stand around on a daily basis trying to figure out what to make. Also, if I know what meals I’m going to make later in the week, I can save time by doing what is often referred to as “batch cooking” (e.g., if I’m using ground turkey tonight and later this week, I can go ahead and cook the meat for both dishes tonight). Check out this post if you need ideas for getting started with menu planning.
• Buy precut fruits and veggies. Though these tend to be pricy, most grocery stores offer precut fruits and veggies. This means I can use fresh pico de gallo or have chopped veggies for soups and stews without having to spend half an hour washing and chopping the produce!
• Use select premade foods. I love my homemade spaghetti sauce, but I don’t always have the ingredients on hand that I need to make it. I also don’t always have time to make it! At times like these, I go ahead and purchase a jar of spaghetti sauce. By paying close attention to the ingredient lists on various jars of sauce, I’m able to find varieties that are very natural. The same is true of many other products. After reading over the ingredients, it’s generally best to choose a variety with as few ingredients as possible. It’s also important to avoid varieties with risky ingredients, such as hydrogenated oils, artificial dyes, and certain preservatives.

Though these strategies don’t take all of the work out of cooking from scratch with real food, they certainly lessen the load!

What’s been your experience in the kitchen? How do you manage to prepare real food without it taking all day?