The other day I had a great opportunity presented to me.  My first thought was sheer delight, followed quickly by fear:  how on earth was I going to fit one more thing into my day?

The kitchen is definitely one place where, with a little planning, you can save a lot of time.  I’ve put some standard tricks below (I’m sure you’ve heard of most or all of these); what sort of time saving kitchen tips do you have?

• Keep a stocked pantry.  There’s no bigger time waster than trip after trip to the grocery store!  Here are items that I try to keep in my pantry at all times.
• Keep a running grocery list.  If you have older children, a pad of paper in the kitchen for them to write down items as they consume them.  Otherwise I like using Reminders on my phone, or there are a ton of different grocery list sites and apps out there!
• Plan your meals.  I talked about this in an earlier post, and I admit it is not one of my favorite things to do.  However, it saves me hours of time when completed.  Consider meal planning for weeks or even a month; put everything on your grocery list and get as much as you can (minus the perishable items that wouldn’t survive the month).
• Have dinners on hand.  I know for a fact that I could walk into my kitchen right now and make a handful of meals.  I make it a point to always keep those ingredients on hand so that in a pinch, I always have the ingredients to make my ‘standby’ meals.
• Keep your freezer stocked.  When there is a great sale on meat, I buy it.  My freezer always has chicken, various cuts of beef, fish (usually tilapia), often shrimp and pork too.  It always has a few bags of frozen veggies.  Usually our freezer has ice cream in it too.  Again, that way I know if I want to make a chicken meal, I don’t have to 1) figure out whether or not I have chicken, and 2) run to the store if I don’t have it.
• Cook ahead.  Now I don’t mean full meals.  Honestly, I have to be in a “I feel like cooking for hours” mood if I’m going to pre-cook and then freeze meals.  I mean brown 2 pounds of ground beef at a time:  use one and freeze the other.  Make Anything Chicken, using some of it for dinner that night and freezing the rest.
• Prep ahead.  This I do most during summer garden harvest time.  I dice onion after onion and freeze them in one cup serving bags.  I blanche pounds of green beans so that they can be quickly steamed and added to our meal.  Sometimes, when I get back from the grocery store, I chop green or red peppers and place them in an airtight container in the fridge so when it’s cooking time, all I need to do is throw them in.
• Consider using prepped foods.  Baby carrots and jars of minced garlic have saved me hours of shredding, chopping, peeling, and mincing.  I’ll admit though – there are quite a few ‘prepped’ foods that I won’t use.
• Whatever you do, try not to go grocery shopping on a Saturday!  I am spoiled and can grocery shop any day of the week at any time.  Because of this, I am often going early afternoon before getting the kids from school, or perhaps morning after dropping them off.  I ventured into a store on a Saturday recently and WOW – what a difference!  What would have taken me about 15 minutes normally took closer to 40 minutes just because of the crowd.