It Works For Us

The time I spend in the kitchen is important to me. My goal each week is to have healthy food on the table, foster a peaceful environment in the kitchen, and involve my kids along the way (sometimes easier said than done)! Over the past several years, I’ve developed four habits to ensure our weeks run smoothly and our time cooking is well spent and filled with joy.

#1 Have a Flexible Plan

I am one to open up a physical planner and write down meal ideas for the week. I usually make a note for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. Do I always stick 100% to the plan? Definitely not! But this routine has become a sacred part of my Sundays, and I find it actually helps me immensely with sorting out details of our week. I cross-reference our calendar and plan easy meals or takeout on nights I know I won’t have much time to cook.

I’m also a big fan of variety, so thinking through how breakfast, lunch, and dinner play together throughout the week ensures that we’re not eating chicken for all three meals several days in a row!

#2 Master Grocery Shopping

If you’re in the thick of motherhood like me, you know just how hard it is to squeeze in extra time for grocery shops. I prefer to do one big grocery shop per week. I do usually end up supplementing once a week with a smaller shop, but not always! Here’s the schedule that works for us:

• Sunday — meal plan
• Monday — shop at our main grocery store
• Thursday or Friday — smaller grocery run for some fresh produce or a trip to Costco (usually every other week for us)

Lastly, make grocery shopping work for you. There are so many options these days for how and where to shop. I resisted grocery delivery for years because my preference has always been to pick out fresh produce and peruse sales on meat and seafood. However, I recently started adding a pickup to my order each week and I’ve found its the best of both worlds. Sunday night, I place an order online for our weekly staples (mostly pantry and dairy items). On Monday morning while I’m shopping, I breeze through the produce and meats, then grab my pickup order on the way out. This has shaved at least 20 minutes off my shopping trip and also keeps me from forgetting anything!

#3 Batch It, Baby

I prioritize homemade meals and snacks for my family, but with kids and work to juggle, there’s no way I’d be able to accomplish this without batch cooking and baking. Nothing revolutionary here, but simply doubling a recipe truly saves me hours a week! Here are a few ideas of things I batch:

• Sourdough bread
• Muffins
• Scones
• Granola
• Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Lasagna
• Soup (!!!)
• Chicken Pot Pie
• Shephard’s Pie
• Any type of slow cooked/pulled meat

#4 Freeze, Freeze, Freeze

Batch cooking and freezing go hand in hand. Its a running joke between my husband and I that every cooking “hack” involves freezing one thing or another.

In addition to freezing what I’ve batch cooked or baked, we also freeze regular leftovers. After each meal, I think critically about when we might best enjoy the rest of the meal. Oftentimes it is for lunch the next day, but if we already have lunch or dinner plans for the next few days, I freeze what’s left of dinner from that night. I find most meals freeze just fine, plus we don’t leave them in the freezer for more than 6 weeks. Each week as I’m meal planning, I typically include one lunch and/or dinner to come from the freezer — for us that’s usually at some point on Saturday or Sunday when our fresh groceries are starting to run thin. That’s one less meal to cook each week and keeps us from ordering excessive amounts of takeout!

What tips am I missing? I’d love to hear what you find most helpful! x