If you are like most people, the thought of cooking at the end of the day is not appealing. You have already put in a full day and now you are hungry, and tired and not in the mood for a marathon cooking event.
With a little advanced preparation or “pre-prep”, you can have a healthy meal in no time. Pre-prep means having recipe ingredients in a state of readiness for meal preparation. This means the cleaning, slicing, chopping and sometimes even the cooking are already done, all you have to do is put the ingredients together.
You can either pre-prep yourself (perhaps on a less busy day) or you can take advantage of the many “pre- prepped” items available in stores. Assuming time and money allow, always try to buy fresh. There is no doubt that fresh foods are highest in nutrients and lowest in additives. If money is tight and/or time is short, try some of these other ideas.
Here are some ideas on how to save time in the kitchen using pre-prep strategies:
- Buy bags of cleaned and chopped lettuce for salads. If you prefer you can clean and chop a whole head of lettuce yourself and keep it in a ziplock bag in the refrigerator. Note: Using a lettuce spinner can save you a lot of time when drying lettuce. If you wish you can also buy a lettuce crisper, basically a “Tupperware” like container that keeps your lettuce crisper longer.
- Buy bags of cleaned and cut vegetables such as spinach, vegetables for stir fry, carrots, and celery. You can also clean, chop and store bags of vegetables yourself.
- Also consider the use of bags of frozen vegetables no prep work just microwave and eat.
- Purchase bags of individually frozen chicken breasts—take out what you need, minimal cleaning. Or, buy fresh and put in individual bags and then freeze.
- Take advantage of pre-shredded cheese-- no cheese grater to clean. A big advantage to this is that you are less likely to snack on the cheese when you are cooking. It gets messy trying to eat shredded cheese while multitasking.
- Double a recipe and freeze for future meals. You have created your own line of frozen entrees. But, know what is freezable and what is not. Some recipes don’t thaw well. An entrée with a lot of vegetables or fruits can be very soggy when thawed.
- When cooking pasta and rice, prepare extra for use at another meal during the same week. Just dip in boiling water for 1 minute to reheat. Caution refrigerate leftovers promptly and discard after 3 days in the refrigerator label and date leftovers.
- Buy minced garlic if short on time or skill to chop.
- Hard cook several eggs at a time and keep refrigerated---discard unused hard cooked eggs after 1 week.
- Shape lean ground beef or turkey into patties and individually wrap and freeze them for a quick burger meal. The patties will thaw faster than a whole pound of ground meat. Just season and cook.
- Take advantage of precooked chicken strips and precut meats for stir frying.
- Freeze tofu to use in recipes where you would ordinarily use ground meats. Freezing imparts a ground meat like texture to tofu. Easier yet, buy cooked tofu in the freezer section. Called TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein) looks and handles just like ground beef.
- Fresh pasta cooks in less time than dried varieties—be prepared to pay more for this variety.