5 Tips to Cook Meals Faster
Everybody, professional or amateur, is looking for an efficient way to prep their meals. Picture yourself coming home from work after a very long day and having to make dinner for the whole family. While you might want to give up and simply order a pizza, there are some things you can do to get a fancy and mouth-watering meal ready in less time than you’d think. Keep reading to find out 5 extra easy tips to cook your meals way faster and mess-free.
1. Visualize your meal, the ingredients and the space you’ll need
Before you head into the kitchen and start freaking out and spreading your ingredients all over the place, not knowing where to begin – first take a minute and close your eyes to visualize the recipe. Make a mental list of what you’ll need, in which part of the kitchen is it located, and how much space you’ll need. This way you can effectively start working focused on the steps to make your meal and clear out a good space on the counter for you to work on without troubles.
2. Turn on the oven, start boiling the water and get your appliances ready
Sometimes, when you’re closely following a recipe, you might find that there’s a point where you need to turn on the oven or put some water to boil and then end up waiting until it’s hot enough for you to keep on going with the recipe. To avoid this wasted time where you’ll just be sitting waiting for the temperature to rise, you can go ahead and start warming up everything that needs to be cooked so when you finally have the ingredients clean and chopped you can simply toss them in and keep on cooking swiftly.
3. Clean all of the produce beforehand
Just like the previous step, this one can save you a ton of time. Take out every fruit or vegetable you’ll need and start by cutting up the tops off root vegetables and cutting up the lettuce with a special knife. When you have everything perfectly cut up you can move on and toss everything into one big bowl to wash and rinse everything in one go, thus saving time and precious water.
4. Cut food into smaller pieces
Always remember that the smaller the pieces of food the easier it will be for them to cook faster. So you might want to look for recipes where you’ll have to “stir-fry” ingredients, since this is also one of the fastest cooking methods. If you’re going to cook chicken, for example, go for flat and thin chicken breast slices instead of a big, uncut chicken breast which could take several more minutes to be done.