Save time and money. It seems to be the cry in every household today. It makes sense. We begin to look at where we can save time and money, one of the places that we sometimes forget to look is in the kitchen. Cooking takes both time and money. What if we could transition over to easy cooking? What if we had quick and easy recipes that would be easy recipes for dinner and easy on the budget as well? To me, that is really appealing.
We like cooking ideas that give us healthy easy recipes to use and we are always looking for new things to add into our cooking book collection. The other thing that we have done recently is to revisit some things we used to do, but put on a shelf.
We now often use our crock pot for dinner. Crock pot cooking is easy cooking. Yes, I do have a recipe book. We like the crock pot cooking recipe book we offer for sale on our website, (see the resource box below) We also like to experiment and try new cooking ideas. The best part of using the crock pot is the time savings we get and the fact that it makes for easy dinner recipes. We throw it together in the morning. If we are cooking with kids, my son would take basketball shots with stuff that goes in the pot (fun but sometimes messy). When we get home, we set the table and eat. Time wise, crock pot cooking makes for a great meal.
Another tool we get more out of is the food processor. Several times a year, I will take two entire days to cook. I pull out the food processor and slice, dice and chop. I put together healthy easy recipes, bag them, and put them in the freezer. I do a month’s worth of cooking all at one time. Each night for the next month, I can just pull an easy cooking recipe out of the freezer and it’s hot and on the table in about 20 minutes.
No, this is not as fast as serving from the crock pot. It does take some planning. For a few weeks prior to my cooking adventure, I know what I need to buy in terms of meats and vegetables. I shop every sale. When my days of cooking arrive, I am stocked up with everything I need and I planned it, got it on sale. I take my food processor and go to town. There is no more day to day wondering of what to cook and by planning out my month worth of meals, I save time every day and have saved money at the store. My grocery shopping for a month is mostly bread, milk, and eggs.
The other thing we do to make easy cooking a reality is limit what goes into a meal. What do I mean by that? We almost always use quick and easy recipes that have few ingredients. My personal cooking book includes a lot of recipes I have acquired over the years and then simplified by reworking the recipes until they only have four five ingredients. The fewer ingredients I have to worry about, the more easy dinner recipes I collect. My other consideration in this is that I am cooking for kids, so I want to make sure these are healthy easy recipes as well.
What is the result of all this? It is easy cooking. Cooking that is easy on our time, easy on our schedule, and certainly easy on our pocket book. Hopefully there are some cooking ideas you can use, too.
