Everyone has the power to make choices to improve their health and healthy eating doesn’t have to mean giving up delicious and satisfying food. With these cooking tips you and your family can enjoy the wonderful flavors of delicious food that’s healthy too.
Healthy cooking doesn’t have to be bland and boring and cooking, in general, doesn’t have to be laborious and time consuming. That said. There’s no denying that when you eat a healthy whole foods diet, you spend more time preparing meals than you would going through a drive through or heating up a frozen dinner.
The good news is a little extra time in the kitchen is a great investment in your health and I have 10 tips that will help make your cooking experience more enjoyable and efficient.
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10 COOKING TIPS FOR AN ENJOYABLE AND EFFICIENT EXPERIENCE IN THE KITCHEN
- Read a recipe from beginning to end before you start preparing. Avoid getting to the middle of a recipe just to realize you’re out of green onions. And if you do realize you’re out of an ingredient, save ourself a trip to the grocery store and substitute ingredients with whatever you have on hand.
- When planning meals, recreate new versions of dishes you love. Try your favorite pasta with a different sauce or your favorite stir fry with different veggies. Make your favorite pasta sauce and try it over rice or vegetables.
- To minimize waste, prepare meals with the foods that will spoil the most quickly first. Plan recipes with the most fresh produce to serve earlier in the week.
- Use herbs and seasonings from your favorite cuisines in your own recipe creations. If you love Mexican spices (I’m a big fan of cilantro and cumin) use them in a variety of dishes.
- The rule for substituting dried herbs for fresh is 1:3. For example 2 teaspoons of dried herb versus 6 teaspoons (2 tablespoons) of a fresh herb.
- Instead of salt, add a boost of flavor to your recipes with herbs, spices and salt-free blends. With the great flavors you won’t miss less salt.
- Create seasonal recipes. Preparing recipes with what’s in season not only tastes amazing, it’s cheaper and has the best nutritional content.
- Keep it simple. It’s often the simple things in life that are best. Great tasting recipes don’t have to be complicated.
- Batch cooking for the week. Foods like rice, quinoa, salad dressings and pasta can be made at the beginning of the week for multiple quick and easy meals throughout the week.
- Get in the habit of weekly menu planning and meal prep.
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You may be thinking, I’m too busy, my schedule is packed. My days are full. And sometimes I come home and have absolutely no idea what I’m cooking for dinner tonight.
Sound familiar?
This is a struggle for many while trying to create a healthy lifestyle that sticks. It’s just so simple to speed through a drive-thru on the way home from work, and not have to worry about cooking. Right?
Clearly, fast food isn’t going to help us reach our health goals — this, we know! So something else has to happen… something more permanent.
It took awhile, but I finally hacked the kitchen confusion and figured out how to plan healthy, simple meals without spending hours in the kitchen daily.
And I’m going to teach you those simple strategies! Go ahead, take that deep sigh of relief.
Join me for my 5-day Simple Summer Meals challenge!
What You’ll Learn
✽ How Meal Planning Helps You Stay on Track with Your Health Goals
✽ The Amazing Health Benefits of Eating Fresh, Seasonal Fruits & Vegetables
✽ How Snacking Can Make or Break Your Goals
✽ Cooking In Bulk and Why It’s Helpful
and more!
BONUS
Peace + Wellness,
#1 is really the best tip! I often forget some minor ingredients because I thought I still have it in my kitchen. I always end up lacking few spices. I enjoyed reading all your tips. It’s very useful and relatable!
These are great tips, thank you! In super busy seasons when I don’t take time to plan, we have so much food waste and it drives me nuts.
Great read! I love the one about recreating recipes, I often do that with many European dishes by adding a touch of Mediterranean spices or going paleo.
I do tend to get frustrated when food goes bad before I have a chance to make it. I chalk that up to not knowing how long each food lasts, but luckily I have been getting better with that. Thanks for the tips!
Thanks for the tips! I never thought to batch cook my quinoa and pasta at the beginning of the week, but it would be such a great time saver!
Ive gotten halfway through a recipe to realize Im missing ingredients more times than I care to admit lol
Super tips! I agree about reading a recipe from beginning to end. I learned this the hard way. I try to cook food in batch and work on doing menu planning to avoid frequent grocery store stops.
Yay! This is wonderful. I love reading about kitchen tips. This is so helpful! Thank you!
hehehe, great tips! I really need to work on #1 to save myself more time/work. I’m definitely a huge fan of batch cooking! :]
these are all such great tips – especially the one about cooking seasonally – I kind of only do this in the summer months but I should def apply it to the other times of the year!
I don’t usually do the cooking at home, but I do bake a lot and it took me a few times to realise how important it is to read the ENTIRE recipe BEFORE you start! Sometimes I follow recipes from other blogs, and every now and then they’ll forget to include an ingredient in the actual list, but it will pop up in the directions, and if I didn’t read them beforehand, then I’m left a bit stuck! I also try to make sure to use up the ingredients that will go bad first to eliminate as much waste as possible.
My wife usually does the cooking in our house, but when I do cook I tend to follow most of these rules. I love reading a recipe in it’s entirety before actually cooking based off of it. I hope that I’ll be able to cook more and use more of these tips when i do!
These are great tips to make cooking much easier and more efficient. Meal planning really helps to reduce the number of trips to the store too, so you can save on gas. Not to mention we always end up with a few extra items on each trip, so we save there too with fewer trips to the grocery store.
These are all such great tips! I’m going to get back into meal prep and planning once school starts back up!!
Keeping it simple is my #1 tip that I share and follow myself. Thanks so much for these!
Love the dried herbs tip! And keeping it simple is what I’m all about! Lol
So many great tips to promote healthy eating ! Thanks for sharing
I love cooking and find it really relaxing and rewarding. Reading through a recipe all the way definitely helps make sure you are prepared. I like to get all the ingredients out and prep them