Cooking at home is a given—dare I say the foundation—when it comes to living a crunchy lifestyle. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d go so far as to say I don’t think you can be crunchy if you don’t cook most of your meals at home. Does that surprise you?
The reason is simple: Healthy, from-scratch food is the bedrock of a healthy, thriving body.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a lifetime of good health inside any array of packaged foods.
And for some people, that’s enough to push them away from the crunchy lifestyle. Perhaps they hate to cook or never learned their way around a kitchen. Or maybe they can manage a kitchen just fine, but it’s simply not enjoyable. Then there are those who are so busy in their day-to-day lives with two working parents, an endless list of extracurricular activities for their kids, and a jumble of other responsibilities that make it feel impossible to get home cooked meals on the table on a regular basis.
I get it. Cooking meals from scratch on a daily, consistent basis is hard work. It’s why I call my role as stay-at-home mom a job. Especially on the days when you go from cleaning up the mess of one meal to prepping the next one . . . woof, those days can be exhausting.
All that to say, I know it’s challenging to go from cooking at home every once in a while to most of the time, which is why I wanted to share a few tips with you today on how to lighten some of that load.
I genuinely believe that the more you cook and eat at home, the better you’re going to feel, the stronger your children will grow, and the more money you’ll save. Yes, you’ll end up washing WAY more dishes and wiping down counters WAY more often, but in the long run, it’s one of the best investments you can make in yourself and your family.
5 Ways to Make Cooking at Home Simpler
Have an “easy” day at least one weekday per week. I’m specifying weekdays here because in my world, weekends are always “easy” (more on that below). For my family, Mondays are my typical “easy” day and this looks like:
Breakfast: plain greek yogurt with a drizzle of honey and Purely Elizabeth granola (I might scramble a couple of eggs if I’m still hungry)
Lunch: charcuterie or a sandwich
Dinner: something that is already cooked and just needs to be reheated (this is either a homemade meal that comes out of my freezer—so a meal I made previously that I just have to pull out in the morning to thaw all day—or it’s a meal I prepped and cooked over the weekend in a big batch)
On this particular day, I made two meals at once: a soup and a casserole so that I could have one or two nights that week where I didn’t need to cook!
Cook with minimal ingredients. It’s so fun to try new recipes, and now and again I let myself get crazy with elaborate meals. But for the most part, I’m only choosing recipes or cooking meals from my head that involve less than 10 ingredients total. Some of those meals “from my head” are things like:
A whole chicken in the crockpot with roasted carrots and potatoes
Seasoned ground beef thrown into a pot of soup
A basic ramen recipe with flank steak
Tacos with from scratch tortillas (I make these in a big batch and keep them in the freezer)
These tortillas are made with 4 ingredients: 3 cups of flour, 1 cup of warm water, 1/3 cup of melted coconut oil, and 1.5 tsp of sea salt. Combine and form into a ball and let sit for 30 minutes. Divide dough into 16 slices (I like to use a dough scraper), roll each out, and fry on a hot cast iron skillet with a little more coconut oil. Store in the freezer—since they contain no preservatives, they’ll mold quickly on the counter.
Keep your kitchen well stocked with essentials. The best way to whip together a quick, from scratch meal and avoid the drive thru is to keep your pantry and fridge stocked with simple ingredients that can be combined to make a delicious meal in a moments notice. You may not find the perfect recipe for the ingredients you have on hand, but some of the best meals are made up of a well-seasoned meat with a perfectly roasted vegetable. For me, the essentials I always have in stock include:
In the fridge:
-Eggs and some kind of breakfast meat (breakfast for dinner is the best backup plan)
-Butter
-Milk
-Blocks of cheese
-Condiments like ketchup, mustard, and mayo
-Easy sides like pickles, sauerkraut, and salsa
-Veggies that last a long time like carrots
In the freezer:
-Chicken stock/bone broth
-A variety of meats, especially ground beef because it thaws quickly
-A variety of sourdough breads like rolls, hamburger buns, and tortillas
-Already prepared from-scratch meals
In the pantry:
-Honey
-Good quality salt
-Canned beans, tomatoes, tomato paste
-Organic pasta
-Veggies that last a long time like onions, potatoes, and garlic
-Good oils like avocado, coconut, and olive for roasting foods and making dressings/marinades
-Sourdough starter I can quickly grow to whip up sourdough pancakes or waffles for a Brinner meal
Keep the weekends EASY. When you’ve been cooking meals at home all week, it’s so easy to succumb to the temptation to eat out. And don’t get me wrong, we definitely do that! But it’s expensive (on the budget and our bodies) to do that more than once or twice, so I’m still in the kitchen on the weekends making my family meals.
I will say, I typically make a not-so-easy breakfast on both Saturdays and Sundays because my husband doesn’t eat breakfast with us during the week. He’s typically packing a cold breakfast to-go, so I like to make a big, hot breakfast we can all enjoy together on the weekends. Other than breakfast, weekends usually involve fast meals like spaghetti, this easy chicken and rice recipe, homemade pizza in our pizza oven, burgers on the grill with a fruit salad, or a slow cooker pulled pork that I can throw together in the morning for dinner on Saturday and lunch on Sunday.
On this particular Friday afternoon, I thought I had “nothing” to cook for dinner. Then I realized I had ground beef, cheese, and an uncut watermelon. I also had sourdough burger buns in the freezer and all the normal condiments you need for a burger in the fridge. And BAM! We had a beautiful meal at home.
Create a meal rotation. You’ll know you’ve found a winning recipe when everyone in your family gobbles it up without a clue about how easy it was to cook it up! Keep those recipes handy—perhaps create a special Pinterest board of recipes labeled “quick and easy.” This will be the second place you look on a busy day when you’re scratching your head wondering what you can throw together for dinner (the first place is your fridge and pantry to see what you have in stock). You can even put these uber simple recipes on repeat every week or every other week to remove decision fatigue from your meal-making!
That could look something like:
Mondays: Crockpot meal
Tuesdays: Tacos (batch prep tortillas at the start of the month)
Wednesdays: A family favorite soup (this is ours and this is another good one)
Thursdays: Instant pot favorite (this is mine) or roast with carrots and potatoes (looks fancy but involves ingredients you likely already have stocked)
Friday: Homemade pizza (we have a pizza oven, but you can make them in a regular oven! Check out this easy sourdough pizza crust recipe)
You could stick to this rotation every week and just switch up which recipes go in the crockpot, instant pot, soup, etc.
I do all of these things in my own kitchen to make cooking from scratch on a regular basis not only feasible, but delicious, too.
I’d love to know: is there anything you’d add to the list? Have you found any other tips and tricks to make cooking at home easier? Let me know in the comments below for all to see!