It is 5:30pm. You have a fussy baby who wants to snuggle and nurse, a toddler who’s quickly getting hungry for dinner, and your husband is due home from work any minute. You only looked at the clock 15 minutes ago when transitioning from changing a diaper to dispelling a meltdown, and you realized you forgot to even think about dinner today. Your family is on a budget, and take out is not an option. You don’t keep pre-made processed foods in stock because you want to feed your family whole and nourishing foods, but right now, you’re wishing that wasn’t a concern. As you scan your fridge and freezer, you feel defeated, overwhelmed, and completely indecisive.

If this is a position you have found yourself in, you are not alone! Coming to the realization that my family needed to eat 3 times per day, and I was the one responsible for ensuring we had the food available and prepared, has been a learning curve for me as a wife and then a mother. This is something I commonly hear from women, especially ones who do not enjoy spending time in the kitchen. As I have aggressively sought to problem solve in this area, I have found a few key things that have helped to ease the function of my kitchen.

These tips are applicable and may be helpful whether you are seeking to cook from scratch 100% of the time, or not at all. If the kitchen is a pain-point in your home, I hope this post might give you some inspiration and practical help! Read on…

Making a plan:

Meal plans can be great for some people. Sometimes all someone needs is written out direction to keep them on track. However, I have always struggled with the practice of meal planning. I found that the week generally didn’t always unfold as I thought it would when I wrote the meal plan, and part-way through I would decide that it made more sense for me to change course. Often I found that the weeks I meal planned, I ended up spending more on groceries, as well. These things, coupled with the fact that I prefer cooking based on what we’re feeling like that day, have resulted in me going without a meal plan most of the time.

If meal plans fit into your life well, then embrace them. They do protect you from many of those last minute, chaotic moments before dinner during a long week. Try to plan your meals in such a way that they can build on each other. For example, I love to cook with whole chickens so often my written meal plans would look something like this:

Day 1: Roast a whole chicken with some roasted potatoes and broccoli. After Dinner– divide out and save extra leftover chicken and start a bone broth in the croc pot for later in the week.

Day 2: Dinner- Shredded chicken tacos.

Day 3: Chicken soup with either dumplings, noodles, or rice; with bone broth as the base.

Day 4: Pork Roast with mashed potatoes and peas.

Day 5: Take any leftover bone broth, the drippings from the pork roast, and the leftover pork to make a gravy and serve as biscuits and gravy with a side of green beans.

Day 6&7: Brown up some hamburger (or any other type of ground meat) and make a large batch of meat sauce for both goulash and lasagna.

Each of these meals are very simple to make and actually require very little hands on time. Save and try this meal plan for yourself if you need inspiration this week! For further resources related to these meals, navigate to the following links:

• 3 different ways to cook a whole chicken.
• Equipped for soups! Your basic chicken bone broth and meat stock.
• How to cook a pork roast
• Biscuits and pork gravy

Planning to not have a plan:

Now, for when you don’t want to plan! If I don’t have a meal plan, the best thing that I have found I can do for myself to keep me from ending up in a pickle is to make allowance for not having a plan. For me, this involves 3 habitual practices.

1. Ensuring that I have quick cooking staples on hand like rice, pasta, frozen veggies, and ground meat of some kind. With these on hand, you can realistically have a from scratch, nutritious meal prepared in 20 minutes.
2. Pulling out a roast or a whole chicken from the freezer at dinner time, while it’s on my mind, and allowing it to thaw in the fridge for the following day.
3. Getting really good at a couple favorite meals. This makes cooking these meals easy and thoughtless which helps me to overcome the decision fatigue and frustration of starting a meal last minute.

Allow yourself to experiment:

When it comes to cooking with ease in the kitchen, the truth is you just have to practice. You learn best when you allow yourself to experience trial and error. Pay attention as you follow recipes to learn which sort of flavor combinations go well together. Take note of cook times and temperatures, and then just close the computer and try it yourself. You don’t have to measure your spices! Especially for an everyday dinner.

When we use our devices and put these step by step recipes in front of us every time we cook, it tells our brains that this is a complicated job which requires 100% capacity. We go back and forth between the counter and our computer between every step to reaffirm we are doing it “just right.” We have to psych ourselves up to tackle this task we perceive as challenging, and when it is done we just want to wind down. I believe this is the same reason people will so commonly say that baking wears them out. When the truth is, cooking and baking is just part of life in a from scratch kitchen, and it is no big deal!

What I recommend you do instead when you are starting out, is find a recipe for the thing you want to get good at cooking. Write on an index card the list of ingredients, maybe jot one or two notes about the process, and hang it on your fridge. Then incorporate it into your routine in the kitchen making it at least once a week. After the second or third time you’ve made this meal, you will find that you just about have it memorized and it took you a fraction of the time and a fraction of your brain capacity. Before long, you will have enough recipes that you are familiar with and enough awareness of your own style of cooking, that you will be comfortable winging things, and they will come out great!