I just chopped a pound and a half of shiitake mushrooms for the week. That’s just one of the things I prepared in advance.
I am a bit of a loser, yes.
But if you read on you will pick up some tips to save you precious minutes–even hours–of otherwise wasted time (that is, unless you love spending time chopping vegetables, recreating lists unnecessarily and wasting time at the market, in which case you might want to come back to my blog for the next post).
As I have mentioned in other posts, we are constantly trying to do things around this house more efficiently…Everything from paying bills to food prep. For example, I set it up so I have almost all of my bills due within 2 or 3 days of each other, so I only have to sit down once a month to pay them all (there’s a tip for you before I got to my official list 
)
Maybe some of the stuff seems anal, or at least overly organized.
The purpose, however, is to free up time, the most valuable thing any of us have.
I would much rather have more time to really be with Anjali than to waste it paying bills. I cherish an extra 15-30 minutes I may get each day to write or practice music rather than having to repeat boring tasks in the kitchen. And if Madhavi and I plan to reach financial goals in order to free up more time, every minute counts, and I don’t want to waste time recreating the wheel when it comes to meal planning, shopping lists and food prep.
The other thing is that we don’t want to sacrifice the quality of our food or meals for the sake of saving time. We eat very little processed food anymore…No more prepared, frozen dinners, canned soups, cereal, etc.
Okay, now that I have justified myself (thus proving that I do feel a little lame being so practical, organized and effective), here are some tips for you in no particular order.
- Create a master shopping list. This list should include the staple items for your household–anything you use every week. An example: we make green smoothies every morning, so bananas, pineapple and greens are items on our master list. You print out a copy of the master list, cross off anything you don’t need and add items you do need that week. Prior to doing this I was wasting time and mental energy going through the cabinets trying to re-create what was already a given. If you want to get ultra-geeky, like me, you can divide your list by sections of the grocery store. I put all produce on one side of the paper, and all other items on the other.
- Plan your meals for the week. This is tried and true. The idea here is to batch the task of figuring out what you will eat every day, rather than spending time and energy staring at the fridge saying, “what should we eat?” This will also save you time at the grocery store. I probably used to spend at least a half hour more at the store because I was just buying and trying to figure out what I would use them for on the fly.
- Chop what you can for the entire week. As I mentioned earlier, I chopped a bunch of mushrooms. We make miso soupevery day (also a time saver, I know exactly what I am eating for lunch and don’t have to waste time figuring that out everyday. Plus, it’s super yummy!). I realized that I save time if I chop them all in advance for the week. This is another batching thing. Of course, there are certain things that won’t work out so well. If I washed all the mushrooms in advance, they would start to go bad sooner. Consider chopping celery or onion in advance and freezing it to quickly add to soups (as long as it isn’t left in the freezer for too long). Chop all of your greens for the week (we use a lot of greens, so this saves us a ton of time). My mom used to chop ginger and garlic and put it in little foil packets in the freezer to quickly grab when preparing meals.
- Keep a folder or binder with your favorite and/or most used recipes. I am getting really tired of sifting through a dozen cook books to figure out what we are going to eat that week. The fact is, we really use 2-3 of them the most. We copied the recipes we liked out of the others and kicked those space-wasters to the curb (we live in a row home in Philly…we’re also constantly improving the use of our space ). After some trial and error we will find a good balance of meals we like a lot that don’t take a tone of time to prepare. Those meals go into the binder, thus making my meal planning less draining and time-wasting.
- Slow Cooker Meals. My new thing is doing one slow cooker meal a week. It is so easy to just chop a bunch of things (or even easier if they are chopped in advance!), throw them in the cooker and walk away for 6 hours. Plus, the house smells awesome.
- Same breakfast, same lunch. I kinda mentioned this already. But at the risk of sounding boring, we eat the same breakfast every morning, and the same lunch, more or less, every afternoon. Oatmeal and green juice in the morning (used to be that plus eggs, but we’re moving toward being vegan), miso soup and salad for lunch (we might add something else in for lunch, like a leftover dinner or beans and rice…But something easy to reheat). The point is, I don’t have to think at all to prepare these meals. This saves and energy. It also helps perfect the things I make for those meals. Our miso soup is so ridiculously good at this point.
- Shop at odd times. I hate when we’re low on food and I have to go shopping on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I cannot freakin’ stand bumping into other people’s carts, or waiting for people to move out of my way so I can reach some cucumbers. And parking lots totally suck at peak hours (it takes me almost as long to park as it does for me to drive to the store!). That is why I like to shop (okay, this is going to really qualify me as a loser) on a Saturday or Sunday night, like around 9pm. Most of the time I go with Anjali on a Monday or Tuesday mid-morning, which is also a fair time to shop–not too crowded. By the way, when I was single, I used to go shopping at this 24 hour Pathmark at 2 or 3 in the morning, after a regular gig I had. I had that place completely to myself; it was kinda creepy.
I have a lot of other seemingly odd-ball time-saving tricks. I’ll fill you in on some others later. I wonder if any of you have some helpful or even strange tips for maximizing quality time.
Thanks for indulging me!
