Cooking for your family can be a real pleasure, but it can also be stressful when you’re pushed for time. To help you reduce the stress and have fun with your cooking, take a look at these five tips.
1. Cook in double batches
Next time you cook a meal for your family, make a double batch, and put half in the freezer. It’s super handy to have a few meals in your freezer, these are perfect for when you need a quick dish. You can freeze just about any meal, from casseroles to curries or soups.
2. Try a slow cooker
With the help of a slow cooker you can save plenty of time on family meals. Most slow cookers allow you to cook a meal in one simple step. Simply place all the ingredients inside and you can leave the food to cook slowly throughout the whole day.
Besides saving you time, there are several other benefits to using a slow cooker. First off, slow cookers don’t generally use as much electricity as ovens do. Secondly, slow cookers can help you to tenderize meat, without too much effort. They are helpful to improve flavours, leaving you with a super tasty meal.
Check out our slow cooked honey and beer pulled pork recipe for some inspiration.
3. Plan ahead
When you’re cooking for your family after work, you won’t want a dish that takes hours. To minimize the stress and stay organised, the best thing to do is to plan ahead. To help you plan out your family meals, you may want to try these nifty meal planning apps:
- BigOven Recipes & Meal Planner: Using this app you can access thousands of recipes, to inspire your meal times. With the meal planning feature it’s simple to plan your meals and your grocery list, using all your favorite recipes.
- Eat This Much: ETM is the perfect meal planning app for families. Simply input your budget, your schedule and your fav foods. From here, the app creates the perfect meal plan for you.
These apps aren’t just great for planning meals, but they offer lots of inspiration, to help you improve your cooking and discover your inner foodie.
4. Collect quick recipes
To save yourself time in the kitchen, it’s handy to build up a collection of quick recipes. Search the web, apps and cookbooks, and save a ‘quick recipe’ collection on your phone. This is something we do regularly. We print pages in our own cookbook scrapbook, and we also bookmark many of our favourite recipes online.
Whether you want to cook a quick baked cod or a fast lasagna, there are plenty of great recipes online. Check out our recipes to get some additional inspiration.
5. Tools to save time
Lastly, get yourself a few cooking tools to save time in the kitchen. You might like to try a food processor, a mandoline, a spiralizer, or a blender. Whether it’s tools for chopping or dicing, there are plenty of gadgets which can save you a little bit of time.
If it’s a blender you go for, soups and smoothies can be a great way to plan for the week and save time. Here’s some of our favourite recipes for you to try out.
- Banana Mixed Berry Smoothie Breakfast Bowl
- Strawberry & Banana Smoothie with Flaxseed and Goji Berries
- Smoked Pumpkin & Coconut Soup
- Sweet Potato & Chorizo Soup
- Asian Style Chicken Broth
Got Something to Add?
With a few tips and tricks up your sleeve, family meal times just got a whole lot easier. Once you get on top of your meal planning, you’ll create the perfect time-saving routine.
Got any tips to share? Let us know in the comments section below.
Until next time, thanks for reading.
Helen, Nial and Lewis.
Welcome to Pikalily, an award-winning food, travel and lifestyle blog. We are Nial and Helen, a happily married couple from Northern Ireland, who share a passion for food and travel among many things. We became parents to our beautiful boy Lewis in 2017. Follow our adventures through the blog.
