Cooking at home, an activity that intertwines creativity with nutrition, offers numerous benefits.
Not only is it typically more economical than dining out, but it also allows for greater control over ingredients, ensuring meals are healthier and tailored to individual dietary needs.
Despite these advantages, the hustle and bustle of daily life often leaves little room for culinary endeavors.
Many people find themselves caught in a time crunch, struggling to balance the demands of work, family, and personal care, which can make the idea of preparing meals at home seem daunting, if not outright impossible.
This is where the transformative power of kitchen hacks comes into play.
Imagine a world where cooking at home doesn’t mean sacrificing hours you don’t have but instead becomes a seamless, even enjoyable part of your routine.
This is not a distant dream but an achievable reality.
The following compilation of kitchen hacks is meticulously curated to revolutionize your cooking experience.
From clever time-saving strategies to ingenious ways to simplify meal preparation, these hacks are designed to demystify the art of cooking.
They cater to everyone, from the culinary novice to the seasoned home chef, ensuring that healthy, home-cooked meals become a staple rather than a rarity in your daily life.
The 7 Best Kitchen Hacks
Let’s embark on this culinary journey that promises to make healthy eating not just a goal but a practical, everyday reality.
Here are the seven best kitchen hacks you can start today that will help you save time, save money, and get healthier!
1.) Learn the Art of Meal Prep
Meal prepping has so many advantages that it’s almost not optional for busy people. Meal prepping can help you save tons of time, help you stick with a budget, and it can help you eat higher-quality meals each day.
The main problem with meal prepping is that most people struggle to get their plans off the ground because it is difficult to get in a habit of meal prepping.
However, once you set your meal prepping day(s) and begin to make meal prepping a habit, you will quickly notice that it is one of the best kitchen hacks ever!
To make the most out of your meal-prepping efforts, plan meals that use common ingredients so that you can prepare multiple different meals at the same time.
Additionally, there are some ingredients that you can purchase already prepped if you’re very short on time that will quickly enhance your meal prepping efforts. Things like pre-minced garlic and spice pastes can help shave time off of your meal prep.
Along with that, frozen vegetables are usually flash-frozen, which means they’re frozen immediately after they’re picked.
Since vegetables begin losing their nutritional value as soon as they’re picked, frozen vegetables are nutritionally on par with fresh ones, so you don’t have to feel guilty about using them as a shortcut.
In terms of protein choices, be sure to stock up on grains and legumes.
Beans and lentils are great vegan protein sources that won’t go bad as quickly as animal products.
If you don’t commonly use these foods, the health benefits of lentils and beans will probably surprise you as well!
The more of these ingredients you buy, the more time and effort you’ll save.
Furthermore, many beginner meal preppers underestimate our container needs when we start prepping meals because you can’t mix different meals in one container (usually). So, you’re going to need more containers than you think. Be sure you have extras on hand at all times.
Here are some great containers for meal preppers:
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2.) Perfect Your Marinades
Marinades are a great way to add flavor to your meals without increasing the calorie count. Simple marinades are healthy, easy to prepare, and make meat taste great!
A simple marinade could include only chili powder, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and a thirty-minute soak. The prep time is negligible but the end results can be amazing!
There are endless variations of marinades posted online, but it’s personal experimentation that will give you the perfect meal every time.
Learning your favorite marinades and marinating your foods before you go to work or out for your day can make it easy to have dinner ready to be made at night.
3.) Use Fresh Herbs
Whether you have a garden or just snap up some of the fresh packages which line shelves these da, herbs pack a punch.
They add a lot of favor with almost no calories, but that’s just where things begin.
Many herbs have an array of phytochemicals and antioxidants that help you become a healthy person.
There’s a reason that herbs are often used in alternative medicine!
The great tastes are often produced by the same components that help you get healthy and stay healthy.
If you buy fresh herbs, a food chopper can become very handy when you want to add them to your food. Here is a great one:
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Adding fresh herbs to your meals is one of the best kitchen hacks because it hardly adds any time to your cooking, but they can provide enormous health benefits!
4.) Make Your Own Stocks
Making stocks is simple: keep your leftovers and boil them.
It does take some attention since you need to scrape off the biofilm on top of the water periodically, but that isn’t much of a job compared to how healthy making your own broth is!
Just set up Netflix on a weekend day and let it go, observing occasionally.
For meats, that means you can just add a few veggies, toss in the scraps, and simmer them on low heat.
You can do the same with vegetables to create vegetable stocks.
Both are healthier than commercial stocks and you can even add herbs and spices to make them extra special!
Best part? If you’re a gardener, they’re still usable as compost once you’re done! Talk about reducing kitchen waste!
5.) Use Sugar Alternatives
Many recipes call for a lot of sugar. While that can end in a delicious mess, it also a ton of calories to your food.
Even worse, added sugar can promote additional health issues such as insulin resistance and high blood pressure.
Fortunately, there are many sugar alternatives that taste great and keep you healthy!
The healthiest sugar alternatives are maple syrup, honey, date sugar, and coconut sugar. Using one of these options instead of adding sugar recipes is a quick way to make your recipe much healthier!
6.) Re-Use Your Juicer’s Pulp
Juicing once a day is a great way to improve your health. The problem is that juicing produces a lot of waste, and it is relatively expensive.
However, reusing your juicer’s pulp is one of the best kitchen hacks because it doubles the value you get from juicing, and pulp has limitless uses in the kitchen!
You can use the leftover pulp from juicing to make broth, smoothies, baked goods, or even flavored bread!
7.) Create Your Own Infused Olive Oil
Making infused olive oil is much easier than most people think, and it is one of the best kitchen hacks for saving money.
Considering the expense, you’d think you needed more than a couple of ingredients and a cheesecloth.
But you don’t.
All you need to do is add oil and the chosen herbs or other ingredients to the best nonstick ceramic frying pan, and then heat them up and allow the whole thing to simmer for 20-30 minutes. Just be careful not to burn the oil.
Then, strain the oil through a cheesecloth.
Afterward, you can discard the infusing ingredients and take the new, delicious oil.
The amount of money saved can be incredible if you regularly use flavored cooking oils!
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Concluding Thoughts – The Best Hacks that Make Healthy Cooking Easier
Having an arsenal of kitchen hacks is critical to being able to maintain a schedule of cooking healthy meals at home.
Without enough kitchen hacks, it is easy to feel like cooking at home is too much and not something you can fit into your daily routine.
However, if you use these kitchen hacks and learn some more along your way, I am confident you will learn that cooking healthy meals at home doesn’t have to be a grueling process!
So, which of these kitchen hacks are you going to try first?
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