Making Time to Cook at Home
Making Time to Cook at Home
It’s a busy world, and our lives often reflect this in what we do and how we eat. We’re all guilty of taking a shortcut when it comes to meals here and there. Swinging by the drive through, order take-out from a restaurant down the road, and even settling for frozen, microwaveable meals has become a normal choice. Although it seems like a convenient option when navigating a busy life, cutting corners is not conducive to living a healthy, both physically and mentally, lifestyle. Finding time to cook for yourself or your family is an important aspect of life that’s often overlooked. Even though life might not allow for home cooking every day of the week, setting yourself up for success to have this option majority of the time will help you lead to healthier lifestyle choices.
One of the single best ways to have control over what you eat is preparing your own food. You know what it’s made of, the quality of ingredients used, and how it was prepared. Not only does it provide you basic life skills, it’s going to provide you a sense of accomplishment. Let’s make cooking from home desirable again!
Meal Prepping Basics
Meal Prepping can be utilized in a variety of ways. Not everyone's schedule is the same, nor is it the same week after week. In order to do any sort of meal prepping, you must look at your week in advance. Based on the amount of time you have available to cook you can then plan what you are going to cook ahead of time versus make as you go. Below are a few different options that tend to work for most peoples schedules (in no particular order):
Bulk Prepping
Partial Prepping
Bi-Weekly Prepping
Cooking Daily
Bulk Prepping - This variety of meal prepping would be best for those who don’t have any time during the week to cook. Having all your food prepared ahead of time so you’re at the “convenience” of having grab and go options available. This method usually takes 2-3 hours, especially if you’re new to organizing this type of batch cooking and don’t have a solid routine down yet. Although it’s more time consuming initially, it saves you a lot of time in the long run. It’s basically like planned-overs, just cooking it all at once.
Example: select all your proteins, vegetables, healthy fats, and carbs for each meal and bulk cook them. Throw your meat on the grill or in the oven, sauté up your vegetables, use other kitchen tools such as a pressure cooker, air fryer, or toaster oven to help you multitask cooking all of the ingredients. Portion all your meals out in containers and store in the fridge.
Partial Prepping - Partial meal prepping would be cooking part of your foods for the week. Let’s say you wanted to have all your breakfast and lunches prepared for quick mornings + lunch on the go at work, but still planned to cook dinner each night. This would be considered partial prepping.
Example: Making egg muffins or breakfast burritos to have for your breakfast or preparing wraps or tuna egg salad for easy lunches. Having part of your meals already organized for your week can save you from making unhealthy decisions in a crunch.
Bi-Weekly Prepping - Sometimes, your schedule might workout where you have time to cook for 2-3 days worth of meals. Splitting your week in half might help make it easier to still be on track with having healthy meals from home but not too overwhelming making too much food at once.
Example: Let’s say Sunday and Wednesday are days that you decide to do some cooking. This would be the same concept as bulk prepping: you're just only doing 2-3 days of meals at once instead of a full 6-7.
Cooking Daily - If you have time in the evenings and/or enjoy cooking regularly then this might be your preferred method of cooking. This is personally how we approach cooking in our house. Although, we usually take some extra time to prepare breakfast options ahead of time or utilize quick choices for the morning.
Example: When you cook dinner each evening, ensure you cook enough to have for lunch the next day. When you’re serving up dinner that evening, grab your left overs containers and fill them up so in the morning you’re good to grab your lunch and go.
Your schedule, lifestyle, and preferences will depend on which method of meal planning you move forward with. No matter what you decide, it’s going to be beneficial to do some sort of organizing and planning to ensure you’re hitting your goals for the week. Whether you pre plan your breakfast, lunch, or dinner or organize your snacks it’s going to make a world of difference in how smoothly your week goes when it’s one less thing you have to stress about in the moment. Once you get in a rhythm, it will become second nature and the way you prepare for the week ahead will be a part of your normal routine. Find what strategy works best for you and go for it!
We created a Meal Planning + Grocery Shopping Toolkit for this exact reason - to help you plan successfully for the week! Check it out on our Free Downloads page to download your copy.
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How to get the family involved
Maybe you have picky eaters at home, or maybe everyone in the family is in the mood for something different. One way to navigate this dilemma is to set up a schedule where each day of the week someone in the family gets to choose what's for dinner. When it comes time for their choice of dinner, ask them to help you cook. This gets the kids involved in their choices, teaches them how to prepare food, and is a great time for bonding.
There might be times when you want to prepare a family favorite that’s been passed down for years but isn’t made of the healthiest ingredients. This is a great opportunity to upgrade the recipe! Make some swaps for healthier ingredients or adjust amounts given. Getting creative in how to still enjoy some homemade favorites but in a healthier manner will still provide that sense of connection you’re looking for when making a meal like that. Better yet, start new traditions with healthier alternatives!
