Saving Time While Preparing Homemade Meals

It's no secret - if you're going to be cooking homemade meals you are bound to spend extra time in the kitchen.  There are some ways to prepare nutritious meals without hours cooking, though.  Preparing casseroles, cooking meals and freezing them, or crockpot meals are a few ways.  Preparing the main parts of your meals and freezing them is another.

I'm not talking about batch cooking entire meals, although this is very do-able and saves lots of time.  But if you cook a lot of meat, pick out the most popular ways you prepare your meat.  In my household this includes browned ground beef with our all purpose seasonings, browned ground beef with taco seasoning, browned chicken breast cut up into slices, shredded chicken (cooked in a crockpot, I let it cool then pick the meat off the bones, shred it as I pick it and use it in chicken pot pies.  I freeze the bones for stock) and cooked cubed chicken breast.

Taking the extra time to brown meat, or cube and cook chicken can take quite a while and it is kind of an intensive process to crumble the ground beef and make sure it doesn't burn, and to cube and cook the chicken (also making sure it doesn't burn!).  I will prepare enough meat for a typical meal, FoodSave it, label it, and stick it in one of our deep freezers.  Then when it comes time to prepare a meal using one of those packages, I pull it out the night before and it's usually thawed.  I begin to prepare my meal not having to prepare my meat.

You can take this a step further and prepare soups and stocks that you might use in other recipes.  For example, I use a "cream of cheddar" soup in my chicken pot pies.  I hate using storebought canned soups with all of the preservatives so I found a recipe and make about 10-12 "cans" worth of soup on my own and freeze it in individual packs.  Freeze your stocks in 1/2 cup or 14.5oz packages for meals (I tend to use 1/2c more than I use full cans for my recipes using chicken broth, so I only freeze in 1/2c bags).  If you want to prepare enough chicken broth, freeze a big batch of it and add fresh vegetables, chicken and noodles when the broth is thawed and heated. 

I'm not one who likes a bunch of kitchen appliances clogging up my counter and cabinet space, but there are a few that I feel are entirely worth the space they take up to store.  Those being my food processor, my KitchenAid mixer, and my crockpot!  The mixer being the most versatile as I don't need to stand to mix things on my own anymore, and kneading dough is much easier because I don't need to devote a full 10 minute (more or less) block of time