So many parents find it difficult to juggle healthy eating with all of their other responsibilities. Looking after your family is a full time job and cooking fresh meals from scratch is hard to fit into your schedule. However, there are some simple tips and tricks you can use to make cooking from scratch a lot quicker. These are the best healthy cooking hacks for busy parents.
Use Frozen Pre-Prepared Vegetables
It’s the prep that takes most of the time when you are cooking from scratch. If you want to prepare a healthy meal with lots of vegetables, that’s a lot of chopping you need to do. But what if you could skip that step and have it all magically prepared for you already? The good news is, you can if you just buy frozen, pre-prepared vegetables. Most stores sell ready-chopped vegetables in the freezer section, so stock up and you’ll always be ready to cook fresh food from scratch at a moment’s notice. They’re cheap and they keep for ages, so you can even save a bit of money too.
Use Canned Soup For Sauces
This is an amazing hack that can cut your cooking time in half and help you create some incredible dishes. Canned soup, especially things like cream of tomato or cream of mushroom, make a good base for sauces and you don’t need to worry about using lots of ingredients and cooking the sauce down for a long time. This amazing shortcut can help you create some delicious dishes like these classic chicken noodles, for example. The possibilities are endless really and any dish that usually has a creamy or tomato-based sauce can be recreated using canned soup.
Yogurt Pizza Dough
Pizza is always a hit with kids and it makes the perfect dish for a Friday night treat. But making your own dough is a long process and the premade bases can be pretty expensive. There is another way, though; yogurt pizza dough. You can make a basic pizza dough with just yogurt and water and a little salt. It takes 5 minutes to bring together and you don’t need to worry about proving it like you would with normal dough, so you can make your pizza right away.
Learn To Cook In Batches
Batch cooking is the best way for busy parents to make sure that the whole family is still eating freshly cooked meals. If you have a spare afternoon at the weekend, why not cook a few one-pot meals, or a big batch of soup? You can portion it out and freeze it so during the week when you’re rushed off your feet, it only takes a few minutes in the microwave and you’ve got a healthy, home-cooked meal. If you start planning your meals for the week as well, you can drastically cut back on your grocery bill and eat healthy food every single night.
No matter how busy you are, it is still possible to cook healthy meals for the whole family if you use these amazing hacks.
*This is a contributed post. You can read more about that here.*
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