Making Life Easier: Time Saving Meal-Making Tips

When it comes to cooking, experience is the best teacher. Those who earn their living in the kitchen can't afford to waste their time or energy, so they learn time saving tricks as they go along, and we can benefit from their experience! Injecting a little efficiency into your kitchen routine will save you time and make you feel more in control of the process. Here are a few tips from professional chefs to help you save time and energy in the kitchen.

Save Time and Energy By:

1)     Using Flexible Plastic Cutting Boards in Your Kitchen: After cutting vegetables, fruits or herbs, you can lift them up and pour the contents into whatever bowl or pan you're using. These flexible cutting boards are dishwasher safe, thus saving you the time it would take to wash or sterilize them by hand! Another advantage of having several plastic cutting boards is that color-coded plastic cutting boards can help you avoid cross-contamination.

2) Trying Energy-Saving Cream Cheese Storage:  Remove your brick of cream cheese from its wrapper and store the cheese in a 1 cup lidded container. This keeps the cheese fresh longer, while it also saves you some time and energy when needing to use it--no hassling with the unwrapping and re-wrapping of that annoying foil wrapper.

3)  Lining your broiler pan with foil that can be thrown away when the food is done leaving your pan clean.

4) Spraying the inside of your crock-pot with cooking spray. This helps prevent foods from sticking to the sides and you will be surprised how much easier it is to clean the crock.

5) Making Packets of cooked ground beef, or sausage, chopped vegetables (green peppers, onions, carrots, etc.) and grated cheese placed in usage size packets and frozen . On nights when you are low on energy, or in a time crunch, those frozen packages can be your "dinner insurance." Keep meat and veggie packages together in an easily accessible space in the freezer.

You have three options for keeping frozen packets fresh longer:

• Regular heavy-duty freezer bags.

• Zip lock bags with built-in pump that pumps all the air out of your packet.

• Food saver vacuum system that actually vacuum packs your food.

I hope you enjoy using these tips. Remember, they came from famous chefs to make life easier at meal- making time!