How to Cook from Scratch (Without Spending all Day in the Kitchen!)

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Bowl of flour on a table with eggs, a rolling pin, and other baking ingredients scattered around the table.

Switching over to a healthier, real food lifestyle can seem a little bit daunting at first, especially if you're used to grabbing fast food on the way home from work or popping a TV dinner in the microwave.

Cooking your own meals is the best way to save money, avoid the artificial ingredients in many processed foods, and ensure that the food you're eating is good quality (since you know exactly what ingredients you're using and how you're preparing them.)

When you hear the phrase "cooking from scratch," though, you might think of someone from your great-grandmother's generation, spending hours and hours in the kitchen. But while it's true that cooking healthy food from scratch takes might take more time than popping a TV dinner in the microwave, it doesn't mean you have to spend all day in the kitchen either!

There are lots of ways to save time in the kitchen so you can eat the healthy food you want to eat but still have time to do the other things you want to do too. And as old-fashioned as I might be about some things, I can very much appreciate the modern conveniences that make cooking from scratch so much easier and faster than they were in previous generations.

With the right time-saving techniques and modern conveniences, you can cook from scratch like your great-grandmother without having to spend all day doing it. Here are 8 tips for saving time in the kitchen:

8 Tips for Saving Time While Cooking from Scratch

1) Use a Slow Cooker

In our modern era, we have dozens of different appliances available to make cooking easier and faster, but one of my favorites for saving time is using a slow cooker. Slow cookers can be used for anything from making soups and stews to things like making homemade broth or even applesauce. I love being able to put a few ingredients together and then just let the slow cooker do the work while I do other things. Using a slow cooker saves you the time that you would spend standing at the stove stirring and allows you to do other things you need to do while your food is cooking.

Another related time-saver is to use casserole-style meals because once you have put all of the ingredients into the casserole dish you can let it cook in the oven while you do other things and you don't have to stay at the stove the way you would with a meal cooked in a skillet on the stove.

2) Make Ahead "Frozen Waffles"

This is one of my favorite ways to have a home-cooked breakfast without having to spend as much time actually cooking in the mornings. When it's convenient, I'll make a big batch of waffles or pancakes, and then I'll put them in the freezer in layers separated with parchment paper so they don't stick together. Then, in the morning I can just take a couple out and heat them up in the toaster using the "defrost" setting. And while I'm waiting for batches to cook I can use the time to do some other food prep or tidy things in the kitchen, etc.

3) Make Single Serving Soup

Rather than buying homemade soup cans at the store, I'll make a big batch of soup in the slow cooker and then divide them up into single serving Mason jars that I keep in the freezer. (I use the freezer-safe half pint jars.) Then, whenever I'm in the mood for soup, I have some ready to go, and I can just take a jar or two out of the freezer to defrost. These are great for a quick lunch (as long as you remember to take them out to defrost in time, of course.)

4) Double Recipes and Freeze Extras

You could also save a lot of time by just doubling whatever recipe you're making and saving half of it in the freezer for another time. Since you've already got all of the ingredients out and you're already chopping, or mixing, or stirring whatever you're making, you can do that work one time but get two meals out of it. This could be a really big time saver, and it would be a nice feeling to have a meal already prepared head of time that you only need to defrost and heat up.

5) Use Meal Plans

Meal plans are another way to save time because if you have a menu already planned out, you can avoid wasting time standing in the grocery store trying to decide what you want to cook that week. You can make your own meal plans by making a master list of all of the meals you and your family enjoy eating and then you can choose from that list each week depending on your schedule and what you think you would want to cook. And you can make things even more organized by writing down all of the ingredients needed for each meal, too, so you already have a shopping list for the grocery store ready to go.

6) Use Organic Convenience Foods

Cooking from scratch doesn't necessarily mean doing every single step by hand yourself. You can buy "convenience foods" that are good quality, natural, and organic that can save you time.

For example, the last time I made soup, I wanted to add butternut squash, but I didn't want to spend the time cutting open a whole squash, scooping out the seeds, and roasting it in the oven, so I bought a bag of organic frozen butternut squash that was already peeled and cubed. It saved me a lot of time because when I went to make the soup, all I had to do was open up the bag and add it to the pot.

7) Make Ahead Mixes

If you have certain favorite meals that use a lot of dried herbs and spices for seasonings, you can prepare your own spice mixes to save time. Following your recipe, you can measure out the amounts of spices and put them in a jar and label it with the name of the recipe when the time comes to cook you'll have them all ready to go. You could do the same thing with dry ingredients for baking, too. That way when the time comes to bake you could have the dry ingredients all measured out and ready to go and all you would need to do is to add the wet ingredients.

8) Don't Try to Do it All

I think this might be the most important tip because the real food lifestyle doesn't have to be all or nothing! If you can't cook every single meal from scratch, then that's perfectly fine. Just do whatever you can, and every little bit helps.

Even if you're only able to cook supper from scratch, but you're still eating out for breakfast and lunch, then that's better than nothing because at least you're having one healthy, home-cooked meal every day. While eating healthy food might be important, finding a good balance in your healthy lifestyle is even more important.