Hands up who wants to spend two hours a night in the kitchen each night? 

I love cooking, but I don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen every night preparing a real meal. We all have more interesting and important things to do when we get home from work. 

The key to getting real food daily without spending hours cooking is managing time and planning. OK, I may have a slight advantage in this area. I plan things out for a living, but it’s easy to get into the swing of planning to make better use of the time you have. 

Here are the key things to managing your time and making real food easy: 

• Plan your meals before you shop
• Make sure the plan meets your needs
• Make the freezer your friend
• Make sure you clear a part of your day
• Make sure you have the right tools for the job
• Plan out your time in the kitchen
• Prep lots of things at the same time

Plan your meals before you shop 

This is probably the most important factor in minimising the time you spend in the kitchen each week. If you intend to make seven different dishes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you will have a nightmare in the kitchen and, more than likely, a very expensive food bill. 

Simple meals will minimise the time you spend preparing and cooking. Look for meals that can be frozen or put in the slow cooker, plan to make extra (the cook once, eat twice principle), and don’t be afraid to use the same ingredients. 

Save the fancy meals and new recipes to try and experiment on the weekends, when you have a little more time. Write out your shopping list and stick to it. My personal tip is to avoid going food shopping when you are hungry! It is a surefire way to end up with a million things you don’t want or need.

Make sure the plan meets your needs 

One speed bump most of us encounter is that our plan doesn’t account for everything else going on. To make the plan fit for purpose, it pays to tailor it to what is happening in your life. I plan my meals around my weekly activities and commitments, and how much free time I will have. Here is an example: Two days a week, I work from the office, which means I have at least an hour-long commute home, followed by a workout with a friend that takes at least an hour. That means on these two days, I won’t set foot in the kitchen until 7 pm at the earliest. On these days, my meals include morning protein smoothies and a meal that has been sitting in the slow cooker or just needs 15 minutes to reheat. For these longer days, I’ll plan a curry, chilli, or chicken roasted in the slow cooker, with a salad. 

Make the freezer your friend 

This is the most critical aspect of making the most of your time. Being able to prepare all your meals for a week depends on you making friends with the freezer. Don’t get me wrong; you can food prep and store your food in the fridge, but that means you have three or four days of food. 

If you only have four days’ worth of food, that means a second trip to the supermarket and another couple of hours in the kitchen on a weeknight. The alternative is to use the freezer. Plan your meals so that the produce that is best eaten fresh is used within two days after you have shopped; store that in the fridge. Then plan for everything else so it can be cooked, then frozen, or frozen when raw. That way, you have meals that can be reheated when needed or put into the slow cooker. 

Make sure you clear a part of your day. 

Find a time in your week, or on the weekend, to block out for food preparation and make it part of your routine. Saturday morning is an excellent time for food prep. I spend two hours slicing, dicing, simmering, and portioning before heading out for breakfast with friends. I do as much as possible during those two hours, so on weekdays my meals are usually ready to eat in less than 30 minutes. I feel relaxed knowing I’ve ticked off a big chore before I go to drink coffee and talk sh*t for a few hours. 

Find a time that works for you and block it out so you can work uninterrupted and get busy in the kitchen. 

Make sure that you have the right tools for the job 

Once upon a time, I would spend an entire day in the kitchen on the weekend, preparing food for the coming week. God, I am glad that is not the case now. 

Having the right tools for the job can drastically reduce your time in the kitchen. At a minimum, a food processor with a grater and slicing attachment will save you heaps of time. The slicing-and-dicing gadgets you can pick up for a few bucks can help, but in my experience, you still have to do a lot of chopping before you can use them. A good food processor that can grate and slice requires minimal chopping before you can use it. Save the money you would spend on gadgets and put it towards a food processor.

A real-world example is making cauliflower rice. Grating a head of cauliflower by hand will take at least 30 minutes, and if you are lucky, the skin of only one knuckle. The same task with a grating attachment on a food processor will take 2 minutes. 

Investing in a few key pieces of kit for your kitchen can make your life easier and give you back some free time. 

If you don’t have the right tools for the job, look in the freezer aisle at the supermarket; you can buy cauliflower rice, diced onions, diced carrots and more. If it is in your budget, buy what you need in the form you need it. 

Plan out your time in the kitchen 

You don’t need to write down a plan every time you set foot in the kitchen (unless that makes you happy, and please stop judging me), but it does pay to have a rough plan of what you are going to do and in what order. Look at your food plan and use it as the basis for your plan. You should be able to get an idea of the different tasks (chopping, slicing, dicing, peeling, etc.) and how long they might take you. 

Plan your time out so you start with the challenging and time-consuming tasks first. That way, you get them out of the way, and everything else will go quickly.

Prep lots of things at the same time 

The way I figure it, if I’m in the kitchen, I want to get as much done as possible in the shortest time. Multitasking is the key. Dividing tasks and grouping similar ones is a good approach. If you can do two things at once, do so. 

Here are some of the things I do and plan for when I’m in the kitchen 

• Have your bags or containers ready and labelled before you start. This makes it easy to throw things in as they are ready.
• Prep and portion your meat; it’s one of the more time-consuming tasks, so get it out of the way.
• Make sauces at the same time; you can often leave them to simmer while you do something else.
• If you have vegetables to peel, you can peel them all at once; it will actually save you time.
• Do specific tasks together. For example, if you have to dice onions, carrots, and courgettes, do it all together; same for mincing and slicing.