cheat (!)
There’s nothing wrong with using modern convenience foods to save some precious minutes. Tinned chickpeas, par cooked rice, fresh pasta, jars of roasted peppers and frozen peas all make a big difference.
choose ingredients wisely
Knowing the cooking times of different ingredients can help guide your decision making and save you time. For example choosing dried soba noodles instead if udon will save you 6 minutes of boiling noodles. And red lentils can be cooked in 10 minutes whereas most other lentils are at least 20 minutes or more.
keep your knives sharp
The most common activity in the kitchen is chopping. Sharp knives make it much easier to get your confidence and your speed up.
roughly chop herbs, don’t pick their leaves
While it is lovely to have whole picked leaves, if I’m in a rush I just roughly chop things like parsley or coriander. Still delicious and less wasteful.
skip the peeling
Keeping the skins on things like carrots and spuds not only saves time but gives you the most nutrients as well.
chop to the optimum size
The smaller pieces of food are, the quicker they’ll cook. BUT the longer it will take to chop. Only go for smaller sizes if it’s going to help you gain valuable cooking minutes.
increase the surface area in contact with the heat.
Think about a whole chicken breast and how long it takes the heat to get from the pan into the middle. Then imagine chopping that chicken breast into 4 pieces and bashing each one out so it’s only 5mm (1/4in) thick. What’s that going to do to your cooking time?
boil water in the kettle first
If I’m short on time I always put water in the kettle to boil for pasta or whatever else I need. So much faster than the stove top.
outsource some of the cooking
Picking up a BBQ chicken with chips (fries) and gravy on the way home from work may feel like a cop out (not to mention, the health side of things) but picking up a BBQ chicken and turning it into a chicken and bread salad means you get the brownie points (and nutrients) of a home cooked meal, without the time required to fire up your own BBQ.
Chinatown has some other awesome options for this. I love a good Chinese BBQ duck to turn into sang choi bau (just add fresh lettuce, cucumber and some hoisin sauce).
go for prewashed & pre-chopped
I always pay extra for bags of prewashed lettuce leaves. And if I’m in a hurry I do sometimes buy scrubbed potatoes.
To be honest I rarely choose pre-chopped veggies because I feel that the freshness and nutrient content isn’t as good as whole. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t if you can afford that convenience.
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