This site updated on
04/25/05
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Cooking Tips
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1. Do it once |
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| What do I mean by this? If you buy a 10 pound bag of onions and you always use chopped or grated onions in your recipes (grating veggies is a great method for you to hide onions from children), then skin 10 pounds of onions and chop 10 pounds of onions at the same time. I prefer to run the onions through the chopping blade or the large shredding blade of my food processor. When I am done with the onions they are placed in Ziploc freezer bags and placed in the freezer. This will NOT give me fresh onions for a dish like tacos or to place on a hamburger, so you may want to leave an onion or two un-cut. However, the rest of your onions are now ready for soups, sauces, spaghetti, casseroles, skillet dinners and more. I estimate that peeling and chopping one onion then cleaning up the food processor for the one chopped onion takes me 10 minutes, however, I estimate that peeling and chopping 20 onions takes me less than 20 minutes. So | |
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1 onion = 10 minutes 20 onions = 20 minutes or about 1 minute per onion Your time savings is 9 minutes per onion. If you use 10 onions a month that is 90 minutes a month and 18 hours a year |
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| By processing 20 pounds of onions (that were
going to be processed at some time or another) at once I just saved 100
minutes. An additional benefit to this method is that you will not ever
go to your bag of onions and find that they've gone bad before you had a
chance to use them all. So you can buy bigger sizes and save money
without wasting food. Now the single people and the people with smaller
families are starting to think "This site is for LARGE families. It
won't work for me." Wrong, I have a family of three and I use this
method, in fact, I DEVELOPED this method for my small family. Even if
you are a single person you can buy 20 or 50 pounds of onions and they
will never go to waste as long as you process them all and store them in
the freezer. Bags of chopped onions take very little room in your
freezer and if you need just a few onions you take the bag out of the
freezer and whack it against your counter to break up the pieces and
then put the onions in the dish you are cooking.
This same strategy works for carrots, zucchini, bell peppers, green onions and fruit. Again, these food will not come out of the freezer "fresh" like they are from the grocery store. You will not want to use freezer produce for fresh salads or condiments because the texture does change slightly. I use a lot of mushrooms so I buy them in large cans instead of fresh and save even more time because I don't have to wash and cut them, only bag and freeze them. Since most of my "time-saving cooking" is sauces, casseroles, soups and skillet dinners, this process works great and even the pickiest eater will not know that the produce was pre-processed and frozen to save time. The flavor of your dishes isn't compromised, in fact, what I have found is that my meals from scratch taste BETTER because I have some extra veggies on hand to toss in. Those with small children will find that grating veggies with a small blade before freezing will produce a vegetable that cannot be "detected" but will add to the flavor and nutrition of your meals. (See the Soup Mix Soup Recipe here.) |
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2. Do it big |
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| This principle is closely related to do it
once. Does your family enjoy spaghetti sauce made from scratch, lasagna,
home-made soups, enchiladas, chicken pot pies, pasta with Alfredo sauce,
chicken and dumplings, garlic mashed potatoes, breakfast burritos,
jambalaya and other home-cooked meals? Do they enjoy
home-made-from-scratch muffins, cookies, cornbread, brownies, biscuits
and pancakes but you never have time to make them? I didn't either, but
using my method you can make them, they will taste better than store
bought or made from a mix.
My secret is to make BIG batches. I know when people come into my kitchen and see my big stock pots they are puzzled because there are only three of us. My principle is that if you like meals (like I listed above), you eat them on a regular basis and they freeze well then don't EVER make just one meal when you cook! Spaghetti sauces taste just as good out of the freezer as it does the night it is cooked fresh, in fact, it might even taste just a bit better because the flavors blend together more. So don't cook one batch of spaghetti sauce cook 6 batches every time you cook it. Use one batch for dinner that night and freeze the rest of the sauce in meals size portions in Ziploc freezer bags. Then the next time you want spaghetti, the hardest part of the meal will bet setting the table! For this method your time savings will vary with each different dish dish but I estimate |
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| 1 batch of spaghetti sauce (to feed your
family once) takes an hour to prepare and cook
1 batch of spaghetti sauce that will feed your family 6 times takes about an hour and twenty minutes or less than 15 minutes per meal. Your time savings is 45 minutes per meal. If you eat spaghetti 2 times a month/ 12 times a year that is 60 minutes a month and 12 hours a year. |
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| You can take this principle one step further
also. If you family likes spaghetti, lasagna, manicotti and other dishes
with a spaghetti sauce base, you can make a bigger batch of sauce. Then
when it is done you have two options:
1) freeze the sauce as is and it will be ready to assemble the meal later 2) Go ahead and make a few batches of lasagna, manicotti or whatever meal your family enjoys that is based on spaghetti sauce. You will have a long day in the kitchen but you will realize additional time savings on each meal. I estimate that |
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| 1 pan of lasagna takes 40 minutes including
slicing the mozzarella cheese, boiling the noodles and assembly
6 pans of lasagna takes an hour and a half or 15 minutes per meal. Your times savings is 25 minutes per meal for the lasagna assembly and 45 minutes for the spaghetti sauce. If you eat lasagna twice a month/ 12 times a year that is a savings of over 2 hours a month or 24 hours a year. However, if you are like me, you probably aren't spending over 2 hours twice a month to prepare homemade lasagna. Instead you are eating fast food or frozen prepared lasagna or skillet dinner lasagna type meals. If that is the case you are spending more time on these meals than you would on a home-made meal AND paying more for the "convenience" all for food that doesn't taste as good as home-made and isn't as nutritious. So in the case of more "complicated meals" like lasagna what you will save is time and money while you are improving your family's health. |
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3) Stay home |
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| Grocery stores are time and money zappers- STAY OUT OF GROCERY STORES! When at all possible buy in bulk or in large quantities and get your food at warehouse stores, restaurant supply stores, farmer's markets, food co-ops or other alternative places. Before you dismiss this rule, remember that I have a family of three and I don't have a food storage room. You can follow this rule even if you are single and live in an apartment, you will just have to adapt it to fit your lifestyle. (To be continued....) | |
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Jennia Hart
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