Time Management in the Kitchen

Posted Monday, September 13, 2010 4:49 PM

By Maureen of the popular online blog Dr. Maureen

 I used to be a pretty terrible cook. I could bake with reasonable capability, but cooking was a mystery to me. I think this is because baking requires close adherence to a recipe whereas the best cooking is spontaneous. And I am not spontaneous. I once took an entire month to plan a weekend trip in Florida and thought I was being crazily spur-of-the-moment.

 Over the past four years, however, my cooking has improved approximately ten-thousand-fold. Where I once used to be amazed at Andrew’s ability to look at what food we had in the kitchen and then just make something up for dinner, I now find myself throwing together our fresh-from-the-farm-share vegetables in surprising new combinations. Wait, that makes me sound super obnoxious. The combinations aren’t really all that surprising. But I’ve come a long way and dinner is usually a tasty affair appreciated by at least two, sometimes even three out of four members of the household!

 But this improvement didn’t happen overnight, of course, and I’ve had – and have – plenty of struggles getting dinner prepared. My goal is always to make only one dinner for everyone, but today, despite my careful planning and early prep work, 4:30 this very afternoon found me up to my wrists in raw chicken pieces while the baby cried and begged to eat. I generally avoid feeding my baby raw chicken pieces, so I gave her leftovers from last night while I finished prepping the chicken and then she fell asleep in the high chair. Again. So scheduling fail, there.

 The main problem I have is, of course, that dinner must be prepared just before dinnertime, also known as “the witching hour” or the “oh dear Lord it’s two more hours until Andrew gets home and I am all done” hour. But, all done or not, the children must be tended to even between the hours of four and six pm. Thus I have had lots of practice over the past four years, and have figured out a few things along the way which I have compiled into a list of helpful tips!

 Meal plan in advance, before you go grocery shopping. It took me at least three so years to figure out how helpful this is. I still sometimes backslide and neglect this chore only to find myself scrambling to think of something to make at 4:00 pm, but for the most part I come up with meals the night before I go to the store and make a grocery list accordingly.

Prep early in the day if possible! Despite what you may think if you knew me as a teenager, I am currently most productive in the morning. Thus, the day I realized that I was allowed to, say, chop all the vegetables in the morning even though I wasn’t going to make the stir fry until the evening? That was a good day.

Prep in general. You know how on cooking shows they get the food cooked in no time because all the ingredients are pre-measured in little bowls? You’re allowed to do that too! I always used to just measure out the spices at the point of adding it to the dish, but that wastes time and leads to errors. No, it’s best to read through the whole recipe and measure out any ingredients you can ahead of time.

Crack eggs into a bowl first. This particular tip has nothing to do with time management, but I can’t seem to crack an egg without losing bits of shell and I can’t tell you how many times I have had to fish tiny pieces of eggshell out of a cookie batter, or, worse yet, a hot frying pan. And then one day, the light dawned. 
 

So there you have it. Four tips that are fairly obvious in retrospect, but they nevertheless took me years to work out. Still, there must be someone else like me out there, and that’s who this list is for. I hope I can spare you years of eggshell-fishing and last-minute scrambling if at all possible.