Guilty as charged. I am a junky, reading and collecting recipes. I have hundreds saved in my Pinterest account, magazines, boxes, one might say it is a problem. I call it research. I love sitting down with a glass of wine and going through Bon Appetit! A simple joy and pleasure of mine. There are great benefits to reading recipes, you learn about combinations of seasonings, spices, acid, sweet, heat, new ways of cooking food, new ideas to try. It is fantastic research and learning. If you want to improve your cooking skills I suggest spending some time reading recipes.
The struggle when you have hundreds, thousands of recipes, too many can be too many. They do begin to run together, sound similar and can overwhelm you. Find recipes you like and read through others to learn.
Two things I do to help with meal time prep and building a recipe box:
weekly menu
have themes for each day:
- Monday- Grill/Bake
- Tuesday- Tacos
- Wednesday- Soup/Salad
- Thursday- International day
- Friday- Fish
- Saturday- Try a New Recipe
- Sunday- Steak
I truly made most of this up, a few of them I do follow. Come up with themes that will work for your needs, this is an idea to get you started. The benefits of this, you have an idea already each each day what you are going to make. It takes less time to prep and make a menu than if you come up with different things each day. Or you don't plan at all and are left going out to eat consistently.
This will also help you with pantry and freezer items to keep on hand. You are low on taco seasonings, pick some up the next time you are at the store. You will begin to learn what you need to keep on hand. When you have items on hand you cook with and meal ideas already planned, you are less likely to be left with nothing in the fridge or no time because you don't know what you are going to make and have to go to the store because you don't have ingredients on hand. Easier at this point, order pizza.
Sitting down and making a menu for a week or two, going shopping once saves time in the long run. Yes, it is some work up front, but you save time by already having the menu and ingredients on hand.
This also helps with batch cooking. Say on Monday when you grill or bake meat, cook extra meat. Use it for leftovers at work but also on your salad/soup, or tacos. This will help make these meals even faster for you. Meat is already cooked, bring out the tacos ingredients and in 15 minutes or less you are eating dinner. Cooking more meat upfront takes some of the load off for other days. You are already baking or have the grill fired up, it doesn't take much more time to cook several extra pieces or add another protein to the cooking for another meal later in the week. Time saver.
What tips do you have for building a recipe box? Have you tried any of these before, have they worked?
Where your mitochondria goes, your health goes.
All my love
Jenn
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