Cooking up fresh, nutritious, and tasty family meals every night is exhausting, am I right? Cooking is a lot of work! You need to understand food safety, for one, but you also need to know how flavors work together and how to bring out the best in the ingredients you’ve chosen. Then you have to save the leftovers and clean up all of the pots, pans and dishes. Plus, it can be challenging to cook something that everyone enjoys, especially if you have fussy eaters at the dinner table. Some dinners can easily take two or more hours to prepare and clean up every night, and you don’t have that much free time to begin with. Even if you ask for a hand chopping vegetables or setting the table, it doesn’t save that much time.
But you can save yourself some time and effort with the tips from my guest experts below. And don’t worry, you’ll still be able to make healthy meals for yourself and the kids - you just won’t have to put blood, sweat, and tears into the process every single time!
Make and Freeze for Later
Batch cooking is the savior of moms throughout the nation. Cook something up all at once, have some for dinner that night, and then bag or box up the rest and put it in the freezer. Easy, simple, and all the effort of making healthy dinners is done in one go. And if you’ve never really taken to the ‘batch and freeze’ method before, why not give it a try? If you have a free afternoon without the kids in the house, or you find some extra time for prep, take a couple of hours to put together 3 or 4 nights of meals at once. If that sounds like too much work, just cook up a load of one staple ingredient and save that for later. It’s much easier to reheat something than to cook it from scratch.
Add the Prepped Ingredients to Something Fresh
If you do prefer the ‘one ingredient freeze’ variety of this cooking method, it’s very easy to use portions of the prepared foods with fresh ingredients throughout the week. Whipped up a load of herby pasta in advance? Now all you need to do is put the salad bowl together and pop that in the middle of the table. Or if you want the kids to get some extra protein out of their meal, put some chicken cuts in the air fryer and have a meal ready to go in 20 minutes.
Use Pre-Made Seasonings
You don’t need to try to be a fancy chef when you’re cooking for the family. You also don’t need to constantly guilt yourself over making sure your kids only ever get the most natural and sugar-free ingredients on their plates. Start using pre-made spice mixes to add that extra something to your family dinners. And remember, it’s perfectly fine to use pre-made seasonings whenever you need to. It’s just a bit of extra flavor that won’t do anyone any harm.
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Copy Your Fave Restaurant Dishes
What restaurant (or fast food place) do you visit at least once a month? And if we asked you to pick a favorite dish that you’ve ordered, what would immediately come to mind? Take those dishes and copy them! Copycat recipes are super easy ways to make something that tastes great but also has a homemade, healthy spin to it. Plus, it’s quite easy to copy a recipe. You don’t need to spend any time thinking about what needs to go in or how you can make something that’s both nice and nutritious. You just think about the dish you like and recreate it. Of course, you can control what goes into the dish and even add a few more veggies if you need to. That's so much easier than creating a dish from scratch!
Not to mention the amount of great copycat recipes to be found out there already. If you love
Cava bowls, there’s a recipe option right there for you. Or if you love big mac sauce and want to throw it on a burger, there’s another recipe for you to follow!
Canned Veggies Save a Lot of Time
Not everything has to be bought fresh to be nutritious. Veggies contain essential vitamins and minerals, whether they’re fresh from the farm or were canned up within the month. And when they’ve been canned, you just need to open, drain, and add them to the dish. They’re usually already fully cooked, so you can just add the vegetables last minute for an extra healthy kick.
Throw it All in a Pan
If it can all go in a pan and roast up or boil off together, then throw it in the pan. One pan dinners leave very little mess to be cleaned up afterwards, and you can just pop the pan straight into the dishwasher (be sure to dump any oil into the garbage first).
Healthy Dinners Don’t Need to Be Exhausting
They really don’t! You don’t need to go to the same monumental effort every night to feed your family. And while we’ll never say cooking is the easiest thing to do, you can make it easier on yourself. Make batch meals and freeze them, then use them up with new and fresh ingredients in the days after. Throw everything into a pan and put it in the oven, or let it bubble away on the stove. And try to use canned veggies every now and then to save yourself the trouble of washing, peeling, and boiling.
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