Short Cuts to Home Cooked Meals

Everyone knows, it's healthier and cheaper to make your own dinner from scratch every day.  Meals for a large family easily come in under $20.  BUT - everyone also knows that making meals from scratch can be time consuming.  When you're hungry and in a hurry, that doesn't bode well for a home cooked meal.

Everything cut and measured for dinner.  Just dump and go.

If you're willing to invest a couple of hours over a weekend, you can easily get yourself ahead of the game, so that dinner is quick and easy, even when you get home from work and have to turn right back around and be out the door in an hour for soccer practice.

These are simple and easy tricks that I've been doing for years, long before the internet was a "thing". Now that our kids are grown and we have more time, I still find myself prepping for the week ahead of time because most nights, I really don't want to chop a bunch of vegetables.

Go shopping early on the weekend, and get your vegetables for the week.
By early, I mean early - before 9 am, if possible.  If you frequent farmer's markets, you know that earlier is better as far as finding the best produce.  The same goes for the grocery store.  Get out there early so that you can get your weekly shopping done and get on with your day.

Pre-Prep as much as you can.  This means you need to have some idea of what you'll be eating for dinner each night.  If you're not certain what you're going to eat each night, pre-prep the vegetables you tend to use over and over again.  Mince the garlic and store it in an airtight container.  Same goes for onions, celery, and bell peppers.  Each one gets stored in it's own container.

Cook once, eat twice.  This is my mantra.  There's a movement out there called "Once A Month Cooking".  Basically, you give up two days a month to prepare all of your meals for the month.  One day is for shopping, and the second day is for prepping, cooking, and freezing.  I remember when I did once a month cooking.  It was nice to have all the food ready to go, but I was exhausted at the end of my two days.

Peppers are cut, spices are measured.

On Sunday, roast two chickens.  (The oven is going to be on anyway.)  After dinner, pull the chicken off of both carcasses and put them into freezer containers in the serving you will use for a recipe.  The bones go into a stock pot - either to make soup for another night during the week, or to make broth to freeze and use later.

Are you making a lasagna or casserole for dinner?  Make two.  Serve one for dinner, and then freeze the other one for another night.

If I know what I'm making for dinner, I will cut all of the ingredients and assemble them together so that all I have to do is dump it into the pot and cook.  I've even gone so far as to measure all of the spices and put them together in a container to make assembly go faster and easier.  (I've been known to leave post it notes on the veggies so the husband or kids can start it.  See those peppers?  I left the ingredients and cooking instructions on a post-it note on top of the container.)

For my lunches, I'll assemble salads in a mason jar a couple of days in advance.  I've found through trial and error that you really don't want to assemble one of those salads more than three days out - they get a little wonky after that.

Crock pots are wonderful resources.  Put food in, 8 hours later, you have a meal.  But if you're like me, cutting food on my way out the door can be overwhelming.  Enter crock pot freezer meals.  Assemble all of the ingredients in a bag, and freeze.  Pull it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge the night before, toss it into the crock pot first thing in the morning, and dinner is DONE.

3 prepped meals, ready for the freezer.

You can follow my Freezer Cooking Pinterest page here. 
My Slow Cooker Pinterest Page is here.

For our dinner tonight, I pulled a package of pre-cooked shredded chicken and pre-cooked black beans out of the freezer.  I am going to mix them up into two separate pans of enchiladas.  One vegetarian and one meatatarian (without cheese).  I'm planning on having rice on the side.  Last night, while I had time, I mixed up the spices for everything into separate little mason jars.  I'll dump the spices directly from the mason jars into our protein mixtures.  Since we are gluten intolerant, we'll use corn tortillas.  I'll be serving this with a light salad of some kind.

What do you do to help speed up dinner preparation in your house?