The pandemic hasn’t slowed down the pace of life for some people. If anything, home life might be even busier than usual. And given that it’s winter, we (and our family) are spending even more time inside the house. And that might include spending more time in the kitchen…
If you have to prepare three meals a day, that means you use your kitchen 1,095 times a year. This might sound funny, but if you go through the process a farmer goes through, you can gain some extra time for yourself. Even if it saves you just one minute each time you’re in the kitchen, you’ll have gained an extra 1,095 minutes in one year. What would you do with those bonus 1,095 minutes (18.25 hours)? (That’s like more than two days off of work!)
Farmers do a lot of repetitive tasks, so a really cool exercise we do is draw a little sketch of our work areas, then draw out the patterns of different tasks we do all the time. You can apply this same exercise to your home!
For example, when sketching out your kitchen, map out where you keep stuff, how you pack your fridge, how you move around the work space. Once you see it laid out in front of you, you’ll start to notice patterns and ways of doing things more efficiently. Here are some examples:
- I’ve moved where I store the containers I use all the time so they’re near the sink. That way, every time I wash the dishes and put them away, I don’t have to walk across the kitchen.
- We started storing leftovers in glass, oven-safe food storage containers to make warming them up the next day super quick. You just have to take it out of the fridge and put it right into the oven to heat up. Plus, less washing to do!
- I put the spices I use most commonly up at the front of my sliding cabinet drawer, so I don’t have to slide the drawer all the way out.
- Face it: We all waste a lot of time in the tupperware drawer. So now we regularly go through the drawer––If anything doesn’t have a match, we cleanse it out. It saves time and aggravation trying to find a non-existent lid for a bottom you want to use.
- We get pot pies from the local butcher to use as part of a quick meal when it’s a super busy day. We’ll add some leftovers, rice, or salad to the pie to make “not enough” a full meal. You can do this with any other dishes that aren’t full-out meals on their own.
- During our Schomberg Vegetable Box season, we have so many fresh veggies coming into the home each week. When they come in, we clean out the fridge by making a big stir fry. Just chop up all the veggies, add your seasoning, then it’s good to go.
- Also, we like to process our new veggies before we put them into the fridge. We clean and cut them all at once, then put them in different containers for the different meals they’ll go into. Put the containers in the fridge, and it’ll be easy to pull them out and use as you need them.
What other tips do you have for saving time in the kitchen? We’d love to hear about it in the comments below!