20 Kitchen Shortcuts

This article will show you many ways to save time in the kitchen.  A big portion of our time is mostly spent in the kitchen cooking, cleaning, washing, chopping, and everything else.  These kitchen tips and shortcuts will help you spend less time in the kitchen, leaving you more time to do your other things.

1. Buy frozen vegetables.  This will save you lots of chopping time!
2. When putting garbage bag, put two at once. This way when you throw the garbage you will have another clean one underneath ready for the next use.
3. Use a food chopper.  Make use of your kitchen tools that save you time.
4. Whenever possible, double the recipe of the dish you’re cooking so you can relax the following day and still have dinner to eat!
5. Buy the kind of salad spinner where you can use the same bowl to serve your salad on.   This way after you spin your vegetables dry you don’t need to transfer them to another bowl.  All you need to do is add in the rest of your ingredients like tomatoes, shredded cheese, croutons, and dressing and it’s all done!
6. Put the things you always use on the counter within easy reach.  For example, salt and pepper shaker and cooking oil.  This way you don’t need to open the cupboard each time you need these things.
7. Crockpots are a proven time-saver! Throw in your chopped vegetables and meat, sauce and spices into the crockpot, and your delicious dinner will be waiting for you at night when you get home from work!
8. Clean as you cook.  Sometimes some dishes just need rinsing.  If you put them all in the sink, they get mixed with the dirty utensils, and you end up soaping and rinsing so many dishes.  I find that it’s faster washing dishes by hand as compared to using the dishwasher.  When you clean as you cook, the dishes get cleaned up way faster.
9. When making casseroles, you can use a ceramic pot.  There are many beautiful and inexpensive ceramic pots available in the stores now.  You cook and serve with these pots.  Less dishes to wash!
10. After coming home from the grocery, put away all the groceries completely in the places they’re supposed to be.  This way you know where everything is at any given time, and no precious time will be wasted looking for a grocery item.
11. When you are making cookies, make double or triple the dough recipe.  Bake only what you need and freeze the rest of the dough.  The next time you want to bake another batch of cookies, your dough will be ready for you.  Let it thaw in the fridge and afterwards you can bake a fresh batch of cookies!
12. Put a recycling bin under the sink, so that each time you need to recycle something in the kitchen you can dump it in the bin.  When recycling day comes then you will have your kitchen recyclables all in one place and ready to go.
13. Make use of leftovers to create a brand new dish.  In our home we do not want to waste anything, most especially food.  When there’s leftover meat for example, we try to re-create another dish that will make use of it, such as an improvised pasta, salad, soup, or sandwich. 
14. Buy fruits that are abundant and cheap in season and freeze them.  Examples of fruits that freeze well are blueberries, strawberries, mangoes, cantaloupe, etc.  Then you will always have fruits available in your house right there in your freezer.  Sometimes when I make smoothies I use these frozen cut-up fruits, add yogurt, ice and we have instant fruit smoothies!
15. Semi-frozen meats are easier to chop.
16. When making egg salad sandwich, use a potato masher to mash the hard boiled eggs.  There’s no need to separate the yolks and whites.  With a few strokes of the potato masher, the eggs will be mashed and then you can add your dressing.
17. When you are putting tomato based food in your Corelle or Pyrex glass dish, cover it with plastic sarap wrap before putting the cover.  This way, the cover will not be stained with the tomato sauce.  When you remove the cover and the plastic wrap, the cover will stay as clean as new! No cleaning needed!
18. Chop several garlic cloves at once with the food chopper.  Put them in a glass bottle (such as a small empty and cleaned pasta sauce bottle). Pour olive oil enough to cover the chopped garlic.  The next time you need minced garlic for your stir-frys, you will have it ready in your fridge!  Saves you time chopping!
19. After using your griller, wipe it with a paper towel while it’s still hot.  The food residue will come off easily as opposed to leaving the grill to cool off.
20. Use parchment paper when baking potatoes.  Potatoes usually stick in aluminum foil, but not with parchment paper.

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