This post brought to you by American Frozen Foods Institute and the Frozen Food Roundtable. All opinions are 100% mine.
I’m no whiz in the kitchen. I’ve been known to unintentionally set a fire or two while cooking and I’ve melted such things as steamers (forgot to put water in the bottom of the pan) and casserole dish lids (who knew the plastic ones weren’t oven-safe?!?)
While I don’t have the best history in the kitchen, I have been improving! Being in our new house with a bigger kitchen has helped a lot! I’ve also been perfecting a few tricks that really help me stay sane, even when doing something I don’t love – cooking!
- Closet toys – I’ve written an entire post about this in the past so I won’t spend too much time on it here. The shortened version is that I keep some “special toys” hidden away in a closet and only get them out when I’m cooking or really need some peace and quiet. This doesn’t eliminate all the questions and needs that toddlers can muster up when mama is busy, but it certainly helps!
- Pinterest – Meal planning was always a stress for me becuase I always had trouble finding the recipes that I had planned later int he week. That’s why I cam up with this trick! When I’m menu planning I pin the recipes we want to use onto my new “Dinner this week” board. This keeps them all in one place so I can easily find them when it’s time to cook dinner. At the end of the week I transfer the ones we like to my “recipes we love” board and delete the ones that I’ve cooked before or the new recipes that we just didn’t love. This is such an easier method and I find I’m cooking a lot of new reicpes this way too!
- Frozen foods – Sometimes I feel like “frozen” has such a stigma about it, but I love cooking with frozen foods! There are so many benefits of frozen foods not the least of which being it’s sanity-saving and easy! There are plenty of debates about fresh vs frozen but I’m not going to spend time on that today. Lots of our lunches and snacks come from the frozen isle of our store! Most recently my kids have been enjoying these new (to us anyway) Jimmy Dean pancakes and sausage on a stick. Now you can pretty much put any food item on a stick and my kids will be thrilled, but these are actually really yummy and cook in under a minute. I call that a breakfast win! Some of our other favorites are steam fresh veggies (you can cook them in the microwave if your stove is full!), and all the new Stouffer’s options. My husband and I have very different tastes when it comes to food, so that means a lot of the time one or the other of us isn’t enjoying what we’re eating. Last week I fixed this problem by re-heating leftovers for him of one of his favorite meals (that I don’t love) and cooking the super-fast but delicious favorite of mine – stir fry from Stouffer’s! I love everything about stir fry but my husband isn’t a huge fan, so I was thrilled when I realized I could still have one on my favorites without feeling like I was slaving away over two meals (the stir fry cooked in under 15 minutes and in one pan!). Another new favorite we’ve discovered this week is cheesy-fries. I’m a huge fan of french fries as are my kids! I realized I can buy fries in the frozen isle, bake them up adding cheese at the last minute and have homemade cheese fries. YUM!!!
What are your best sanity-saving tips for the kitchen? Do you use pinterest, toys and frozen foods like I do, or do you have other tricks? Share in the comments!
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