How to create a Time Plan....

 

There are a few basic rules to creating a Time Plan for food preparation and today I'll share some of them. I hope you find these tips helpful. They certainly make a huge difference to the way we eat, shop and of course to our bank account!

 

First, you need to know what you're preparing, so menu planning is a good habit.

 

Secondly you need to know how long it takes to prepare each item.

 

Thirdly, you need to decide the order in which you'll prepare, so that you can manage your time effectively. 

 

So for example, pasta or rice may take ten minutes to cook, but that's once you've brought your water to the boil, which may take another ten.

Can you bake two things in the oven at once? Can you make twice the amount of a basic batter (cake/muffin/pancake), and do half with fruit and half with choc chips or an icing?

Quite often, the preparation of dishes is fairly swift, it's the steaming, or baking or roasting that takes all the time.

So you will be amazed at what you can prep in short blocks of time, once you get the hang of it.

Takeaway food nasties will be a thing of the past.

 

Here's an example:

 

7 day menu:

 

Poached chicken breast and salad

Slow cooker beef curry

Marinated salmon fillets

Sweet potato and bacon salad

Fried rice

Twice baked potatoes

Enchilada crepes

 

Sandwich spreads: Egg spread, Chilli orange hommus, lemon pepper salmon

 

Snacks: Berry muffins, choc chip banana muffins, peanut butter cookies

 

So now I decide the cooking methods and in which order I will manage them:

 

Soak: Chickpeas for hommus, red kidney beans for enchiladas

 

Marinate: Beef cubes, Salmon fillets

 

Steam, poach or boil: Eggs, Chicken Breast, rice for fried rice

 

Mix: Muffin batter and crepe batter, tinned salmon and seasoning

 

Roast or bake: Sweet Potato and bacon, Potatoes, muffins, cookies

 

Dice or chop: Salad ingredients, bacon

 

 

1. In theory, anything that can be done quickly and with a minimum of fuss, and the food stored in the refrigerator or freezer, should come first. This clears the bench and gives a feeling of accomplishment. So I tackle soaking and marinating first as these simply entail adding water or liquids to a bag or bowl, before refrigerating or freezing. No further action required.

 

2. Steaming and poaching comes next as it's just adding ingredients to water or broth and leaving to cook before cooling and storing.

 

3. Mixing to prepare for baking or storing if making multiple batches actually takes very little time if you have arranged ingredients on hand ahead of time.

 

4. Baking muffins or cookies and roasting vegetables or meat together to make best use of the oven, is smart for energy conservation.

 

5. Dicing and chopping can be done while roasting and baking is completed, and cleanup can be finished by the time those muffins, sweet potato and whole potatoes come out of your oven.

 

See, not that complicated at all, and the more you do it, the easier it gets.

 

Go on. You can do it. You'll feel like a real Home Based Warrior at the end, I promise.

 

...until next time...

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 



Budgeting & Insourcing...Use small windows of time to be prepared!

I have to be honest and say that the idea of Once a Month cooking always made me feel overwhelmed.

Just the thought of having to cook meals to last for a month made me a bit woozy. That's not to say that I didn't subscribe to the idea, because I most certainly did. I'm a great fan of being prepared for anything and pride myself on feeding my family from my own fridge and pantry rather than the local takeaway outlets.



I'm actually horrified sometimes, as two suburbs from us is a large group of takeaway stores that are almost a suburb in themselves, always packed to the rafters with cars and people from all walks of life, looking for an easy dinner alternative. I feel like running through the carpark screaming 'Nooooooo....you can have four times as many yummy meals for what you're about to spend on fat and sugar laden burgers and pizzas!!!'

Unfortunately, for some families, for a variety of reasons, takeaway makes an almost nightly appearance on the menu.

Things like cooked chicken, pre-prepared and marinated meat, frozen potato wedges, prepacked salads and so on are a good replacement for takeaway dinners if you must, but even then, you don't have to look too hard sometimes, to appreciate that there isn't that much to them that couldn't be done at home with a bit of forethought.

Every time I blink, there's some new prepacked salad, vegetable or meat dish available. From Butterflied Tandoori or Mexicana Chicken...basically the littlest chicken you've ever seen, split down the back and drowned in red spices of dubious origin...to Rainbow Salad, which ubiquitously claims 'seasonal variations will occur', which apparently licenses the manufacturer to include shredded broccoli stalks in the mix. Now I have no problem with eating broccoli stalks OR making the most of every piece of the animal, fruit or vegetable. But I do have a problem with paying $5 for a bag of grated carrot and broccoli stalk with 3 shreds of raw beet in it for colour, when I could produce the same salad at home for one fifth of the price.

I want to talk to you about maximising your food prep time, to ensure you have a constant supply of fresh, healthy food in your kitchen. That way, you can completely eliminate or at least limit, your consumption of convenience and takeaway food. I guarantee that this will save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year off your grocery and food bill, AND improve your health immeasurably.

 

So what I suggest as an alternative, is using small windows of time to pre-prepare meals, not just for today and tonight, but for several days and nights running. Think about it...why peel and cut up 5 potatoes, when in just a few minutes, you can peel and cut up 25. We're talking economies of scale here. If you've got the equipment to hand, and the ingredients in front of you, don't fiddle around making one meal. Prepare the base of several in just a few more minutes with very little additional effort.

This truly can be done in small windows of time. You don't necessarily have to go through the whole marathon, once-a-month style cookup if that doesn't suit you. I can achieve almost half a weeks preparation in half an hour, and so can you.

In 30 minutes you could:

Cut 5 kilos of washed potatoes into wedges and toss them into a large ziplock bag with oil and herbs, and throw them into the freezer for roasting later in the week.

Cook a large batch of steamed rice to prepare fried rice for dinner later in the week and refrigerate it. Fried rice made at home, with pre-steamed rice, beats the takeaway stuff, hands down.

Cut a one kilo block of cheese into neat slices (Did you know you get about 70-90 slices from a block and this takes no more than five minutes to do?)

Invest in a Mandolin slicer and use it to slice tomatoes and cucumbers for a salad for dinners and lunches and have some left over for microwave pickles.

Attack some apples from the fruit bowl, slicing them  for layered apple cake for dessert, a truly healthy alternative to apple pie or apple crumble or cobbler and very yummy indeed. Here's the recipe...

 Healthy Individual Layered Apple cake

Equipment required:

1 small ramekin per person

Vegetable Peeler

Apple corer

Mandolin slicer or very sharp knife (the mandolin slicer makes easy work of this)

Cookie tray

Ingredients:

1-2 apples per person depending upon size of the apples

Cinnamon sugar (see below for instructions)

Cooking Spray

1. Make the cinnamon sugar first, by blending 1-2 cups of caster sugar with 1 heaped teaspoon of cinnamon per cup of sugar. Use more or less according to your love of cinnamon. Once you've used it for this recipe, store the excess in a recycled jar or airtight container...another pre-prepared ingredient ready to go for French Toast, Pancakes, Cinnamon Sugar Toast or another Layered Apple Cake!

2. Preheat the oven to 180C.

3. Peel and core the apples, and slice into thin slices using the mandolin (please use the spiked holder! These things are darned sharp and will slice a chunk of flesh off if you are careless!).

4. Spray the ramekins liberally with cooking spray or grease lightly with butter or oil. Sprinkle the base of the ramekin with the cinnamon sugar, or a little honey or maple syrup.

5. Layer the apples in the ramekins, sprinkling a little cinnamon sugar every second or third layer. Fill to the top of the ramekins and compress well by pushing the base of another ramekin down on the top layer. Sprinkle the top layer generously with more cinnamon sugar.

6. Sit the ramekins on the cookie tray and slide them into the oven.

7. Bake until a skewer inserts easily into the centre...anything from 20-50 minutes.

8. Allow to cool.

9. To serve, run a sharp knife around the edge of the ramekin, and invert onto a serving plate. Serve with a scoop of icecream or whipped cream.

Our favourite gluten free ice cream is simply a tin of condensed milk or condensed 'coffee milk' whipped with 300mls of cream, and frozen. Yum! Another inexpensive, home made treat!

Enjoy!

Budgeting and Insourcing..Preparing meals ahead & getting your workspace right...

 

Step 1

Prepare your workspace

As with any other job, being a productive Household Manager, requires tools of the trade. Today I'll give you my suggested list of kitchen tools.

 

Here are what I consider to be the essential kitchen tools and equipment....

Sharp knives
Apple coring wheel
Chopping boards
Mandolin slicer
Food processor
Electric mixer
Large, medium and small mixing bowls
Large and sandwich size ziplock bags and marker pen
Plastic or glass storage containers
Empty sterilised jars
Pie or flan dishes or other baking dish
Large saucepans with lids x 3

Pots and Pans...

There is a school of thought, probably promoted by people who manufacture pots, pans and frypans, that an expensive version is better than a cheapie. Like many things, I have never found this to be true. You can burn your food just as easily in a $300 frypan as you can in a $10 one . My husband has thoughtfully bought me some lovely frypans over the years as I use them so much. I've had a super duper brand name one that was so heavy I could barely lift it from the bottom of my cupboard, and I've had an oval shaped one that was useless on my round hotplate. I don't use either of them much to his chagrin. The ones I love most are:

My $10 non-stick pan from KMart. It's large enough for omelettes, easy to scoop things out of, and cooks 8 sausages or 3 steaks (of the size suggested by nutritional guidelines..not a T-Rex sized one) at a time. It makes the best pancakes and pikelets and is my pan of choice for bacon and eggs.

My Wok which Husband bought me about seven years ago. It's big, non-stick, substantial but not overly heavy, has a big domed lid and I use it for everything from stir-fry to casseroles to pot roasts.

And if you only want one frypan/roasting pan, you can't beat the old electric frypans. They are roomy, efficient, heat evenly, are non-stick, and you can cook just about anything in one. I don't have one at home, but I do in our holiday cottage and it's the one piece of equipment that I cannot do without when we're there as we have limited cooking facilities. Absolutely brilliant.

As for 'other' pots, I have a small one for boiling eggs or cooking single serves of noodles or pasta, a medium sized one for veges (it has a steamer that sits on top but I rarely use that either), and a super large one for cooking large amounts of spaghetti...which frankly I rarely do these days, so I could probably toss it, but convention dictates that I keep a large saucepan...I might need it one day :)

So if you lack space or have a limited budget, my thoughts would be to keep 3 saucepans with lids in graduated sizes, and an electric frypan. The Wok is a luxury, but once you've had a decent quality one, you won't look back...don't go with the cheapies, get a decent one and it will last you forever. Unlike saucepans and frypans, a good Wok is worth it's weight in gold in my opinion.

Add to that list, the following:

Aprons..they don't have to be frilly ones so don't go all silly on me. There are plenty of simple, professional looking aprons out there. My favourite is a plastic/vinyl one from Harrods. It is easy to wipe clean, easy and comfortable to wear, and doesn't make me look like Samantha from Bewitched.

Anti Fatigue Footwear or Mat...I spend a great deal of time on my feet in the kitchen. Therefore, it's essential for my energy levels to wear either comfy shoes or alternatively to stand on an anti-fatigue mat. Just make sure it's non-slip, and made from kitchen friendly materials. My preferred footwear for working, are Birkenstock Gizeh sandals. They're comfy, look pretty enough for round the house and garden, and last for ages, so don't be frightened of the price tag. You can buy them online direct from Germany with free postage on larger orders, so get a few friends to order some as well and you'll save heaps. They're about half the retail price at Footshopping.com

Anti-Bacterial soap in a pump dispenser...you don't want to have raw chicken all over your hands and then find you have to get a tray of cookies out of the oven. Just common sense really.

Baking sheets...again my preference is for the old fashioned non-stick metal ones, but if you want silicone then go for it. Just make sure you have some.

Baking paper..the non stick silicone stuff..absolutely invaluable.

Okay...off you go...I'll be back in a day or two with the next step.

Kitchen organising is on my Tray of Bliss today...what's on yours?