Less time in the kitchen, more time for work and play!

Saving time, saving money and eating healthy is one of the most popular daily goal for modern families.  This month Corina On Work focuses on bringing out efficiency in the kitchen (and next month we will tackle getting the house and office organized so everything you need is handy whenever you walk in).   Why?  Because the more organized and efficient you are at home with your daily tasks, the better you can handle the demands on your job during the week – and even overtime!

I have asked chefs and cooks in my inner circle, as well as friends who have recently made drastic changes in their lifestyle habits to in order to find out what a person should do to become efficient in the kitchen – in other words, spend less time in the kitchen, and more time doing other things they love.  One of their top three answers: mastering basic techniques.   This post will therefore review some of the basics that will help you speed up the process:

Basic Cooking Techniques
Basic Knife Skills
Basic Prepping Skills 

Basic Cooking Techniques

If you’re really in a rush, making an omelette, a steak and salad or grilled vegetables are options to have something  healthy on the table in less than fifteen minutes.  That’s faster than calling delivery!

Basic Knife Skills

Most of your cooking time can be diminished if you master the basic tools in your kitchen.  Since most recipes start with chopping or cutting of some sort, here is one skill your can acquire that will automatically speed you up no matter what you cook!

 

Basic Prepping Skills (or Mise en Place)

Lastly, a lot of time can be saved if you become efficient at organizing your time in the kitchen.  This goes for prepping everything you need before cooking, to how you design your kitchen and the objects you place in it.

What’s For Dinner? Handy Tips for Inspiration!

Cooking a meal can be quite fast when you don’t have to scavenge the web in search of inspiration.  Here is an idea on how to build your custom cooking-inspiration in your inbox so it’s handy (and searchable by keywords!) when dinner time comes around!

Step 1: Subscribe to cooking emails

Youtube cooking channels, magazines, recipes online databases and healthy living blogs regularly put out content which you can subscribe to be notified about.  Look at your favourite sources and see if you can subscribe to their update emails.

Step 2: Create filters in your inbox 

The last thing you want is an inbox with incoming recipes flooding your email.  The solution: Create some filters for your inbox, which will automatically send your subscriptions to a folder such as  “Cooking Recipes” (and skip the inbox!) when they arrive.

Step 3: Chose which labels to display on your Gmail 

This may not be a problem if you use Outlook, but gmail has very little space in the margin for your folders to appear, making you scroll to view all.  If you have many labels already, you may go in Gmail’s settings, under “labels” to hide, and unhide the labels you want to see.

 

Note: for this method to be optimal, I would advise incorporating 5 minutes either in your morning routine, at lunch time or before going to bed to quickly scan and ‘mark as read’ your daily digests related to food.  This will give you a chance to already get your brain thinking about some options.  If you find you do not find anything interesting in a given email digest, delete the email immediately.  Only keep the recipes you would actually enjoy cooking, and eating!