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Getting the right food on a plate can be challenging. There’s planning, shopping, preparing, and let’s not forget clean-up. Your time is valuable, so I thought I would share some basic tips to help you in the kitchen. Here’s how to streamline your routine, so you spend less time in the kitchen, and more time with your family.
First and foremost, whenever you are about to embark upon a new journey, check in with yourself and see where your mindset is. Many of us stunt our growth and stop ourselves from getting what we want by having a fixed mindset.
We have that voice in our heads that tells us we can’t do something, that something is impossible, or that we do not have the skills to achieve what we want. This kind of thinking is not helpful, and it keeps us stuck.
You are here for a reason, and I am here to help support, encourage, and inspire you. I hope to give you the tools and skills needed to make this journey fun, exciting, and successful.
The kitchen is an area of your home that gets used more often than most. So it stands to reason that if your kitchen were more organized and simple to use, your life would feel more at ease. If at all possible keep your kitchen counters, drawers, and cupboards clear of clutter. Click (here) to learn how to declutter your kitchen space.
A large amount of the recipes on my site can be made ahead of time and frozen. Or when you make a recipe, enjoy half of it and freeze the other half. Cereals, granola, crackers, croutons, bread, cookies, bars, and cakes all freeze wonderfully. If you do this each time you create a recipe, you will end up with a healthy stockpile for the days you don’t have time to prepare foods.
In our new Vegan, Gluten-Free cooked section, I have a post on Batch Cooking. That covers everything from short-term meal prepping, which means prepping all or most of your meals for the week, and then storing them in the fridge or freezer partially or fully assembled. As well as long-term meal prepping means to set aside a dedicated time to prep foods that will go straight into food storage (freezing, canning, refrigerator, dehydrating) for future consumption. Read more about it (here).
Just about every recipe on my site can be used in multiple ways. If you can adapt your way of thinking to this concept, you will be amazed at how creative you can be with just one single recipe. Here is a great example; Veronica’s Spiced Bourbon Barrel Aged Maple Oatmeal Goodies. I made ONE recipe but showed how it could be made in FIVE different ways so it could be enjoyed in multiple ways. Here are some other ideas…
Dips. A dip is a dip, right? Wrong. Well, yes, first off you can enjoy a dip as a dip (how many times can I say the word dip here haha). But that dip can also be turned into a sauce for creating kale chips. Use it another day as a sandwich spread. On the third day, thin it out with some almond milk or water and create a wonderful salad dressing.
Suppose you created a soft nut cheese. Divide it into two or three portions and season/spice each one differently. Make one sweet and use as a fruit dip. Have too much nut cheese on hand and can’t eat it all? Toss it into a bowl and add unsweetened shredded coconut to it, mixing and adding enough until it creates a thick, spreadable batter. Spread it out on a nonstick dehydrator sheet and dry into crackers.
With one bread recipe, you can make a small loaf of bread, then use part of the batter to make thin crackers, breadsticks, buns, or croutons.
Cookie recipes can be turned into breakfast bars, granola, cereals, or a crust base for a cheesecake. Sometimes splitting the batter and changing it from a cookie shape to a bar shape can add zing and variety to your life.
Those are just some quick ideas that can help you look at a recipe with new eyes. Another time-saving tip is to prepare double batches of crackers, cereals, granolas, and croutons, freezing them for a busy week. After a few times of this, you will have a wide variety of raw food staples ready at your fingertips!
