[LettieLoo]

Do you do any prep work ahead of time?

We are carnivore eaters, so cooking takes maybe half an hour for each of the two meals we eat. Dishes I can have done in 10 minutes. My 4 year old isn’t carnivore, so his dinner takes maybe 10-15 minutes to make.

I would look into just what you’re making, meal prep ahead of time, and review your dish washing system. If it is all on you, is it possible to have your husband or kids help out?

[Sunstone]

Prep work is included. Doing it ahead of time wouldn’t really make much difference since it’s still the same amount of time, just possibly earlier in the day. But as it is I’m pretty busy homeschooling during the day so I can’t get much else done until evening.

When you say carnivore, do you mean strict carnivore, as in nothing but animal products? We eat meat for dinner roughly 2 days out of every 3. There’s not much difference in time though because I try to have veggies on the side regardless. So steaks are quick and easy, but then I have to make a salad or roast some veggies or something to go with it. Or I might make a single dish with veggies in it, but that’s still a lot of prep time. Occasionally I’ll do some pre-made sauerkraut or the previous night’s leftover salad as the side but I like to vary the veggies since every plant contains a different combination of nutrients.

I know there are faster options – I can heat up canned chili or make pasta and throw some canned veggies in it. But my first goal is our health – I want us to be eating fresh, unprocessed ingredients as often as possible.

Washing the dishes would definitely be easier if people helped, but that’s not likely any time soon. I’d like to recruit my oldest (6) to help but he’s often still finishing up his school work right up until bedtime, so I don’t want to interfere with that by adding extra chores at the moment.

[LettieLoo]

Strict carnivore…beef, pork, occasionally chicken. I use butter instead of oil. Breakfast we have sausage (My Man will cook bacon from time to time, but I don’t eat it). Lots of steaks and burger patties. Season with salt & pepper.

[Sunstone]

Ah yeah I can see how that might be less time consuming… a lot more expensive, though, unless you’re processing your own. I actually used to be vegetarian for a long time. Finally started eating meat a couple years ago, maybe in part because I got suspicious when legacy media started pushing veganism and bug-eating, and billionaires started buying up all the farmland. So naturally now that I want to eat steak and salmon, the prices have skyrocketed and I have to curb my appetite anyway to save money. I guess that’s what I get for being a contrarian.

[LettieLoo]

It’s not actually that expensive. This year we stocked up on steaks from Aldi when they were on sale. Next year we will be buying a half beef. Yes, it is a lot of money up front, but it’s not much more than what we would be paying commercially, and it breaks down to be a better deal all around when you realize you are paying the same per pound for all of the different cuts of meat.

[Sunstone]

I also buy meat in bulk, to the extent I can – we don’t have enough freezer space to do a quarter cow or anything but I’ll drop about $450 on a few dozen pounds of beef at once, and that’s with avoiding the more expensive cuts of meat. Even so that only lasts us a couple months. Sadly I haven’t found a way to save on poultry or fish buying in bulk, other than joining a CSA which we’re going to try as we really need to reduce our spending on meat.

I don’t know, maybe because we’re buying all pasture-raised hormone-free from local farms, or maybe because I need to cook 2-3 lbs of meat for dinner, in addition to sides, to have enough for everyone (and that’s with small kids who eat more the older they get). I mean if I took out all the vegetables and bread and beans and grains, I’d probably have to do 4-5 lbs of meat for dinner every night to ensure everybody gets enough to eat, so that would probably double our meat costs.

Meanwhile I don’t usually get sticker shock from buying local organic vegetables or organic bread, but as soon as I start shopping for meat or cheese, I start having to do triage and decide which items I can afford this month. Maybe our margin is tighter than yours, or maybe we’re feeding more people. We spend more on food than any other expense in our household, including rent.

[Hebrews12v2]

I spend a great deal of time there. I cook quite a bit as I used to be a chef/cook in the restaurant industry when I was much younger.

I Smoke, BBQ, Sous Vide, Fry, Steam, Roast, Slow Cook, etc etc.

Then when I have done any or all the above I will typically Freeze Dry those foods / meals and bag them into mylar with an oxygen absorber for a future meal when times get hard later.

I love to cook, and I love storing some food for later use. My wife @MamaLlama does our Canning and freezing shorter term foods for later as well as all the main garden items.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by  Hebrews12v2.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by  Hebrews12v2.

[Sunstone]

Yum!

I recently looked into freeze driers…then saw the price tag and sadly looked away again. I’ll put it on the list below a pressure canner, a plucker, a cow, and farmland…

[Hebrews12v2]

Wise decision.

I bought mine two years ago. It pretty much paid for itself in a year, but just like any storage of food, you have ongoing costs for packaging and oxygen absorbers. I cook extremely large meals, then freeze dry so when shtf happens, I can just add water then eat. We have enough now for over 1 year for the two of us.

Best part is, it isn’t all sodium and junky carbs. Our food tastes great and has needed calories to sustain life well.

[Sunstone]

That’s some high quality survival food. We have a lot of canned beans and dried grains that we’ve built up over many years and cycle through so that nothing gets too old. Nothing fancy but at least it’s organic so we won’t be stuck eating GMOs. And short of nuclear winter or other environmental catastrophe, we should be able to grow fresh produce and hopefully get some from neighboring farms as well. But I’ll still have to prepare them…not a lot of pre-made meals in storage.

[Moew]

My freeze dryer arrives on Monday, and I can hardly wait! I have my list of foods that I plan to put up as soon as we have the machine set up and running.

[PWDOhioRaptureReady]

👍🏼

[skainsgirl]

Save time by meal prepping. Plan out your menus ahead of time. Recycle to save time (Monday’s meatloaf becomes Wednesday’s Shepherd Pie). I was a single Mom (most of the time), worked long hours (RN), and didn’t have time to spend hours in the kitchen. I took a Saturday every week or every other week and prepped meals for myself and the kids. Have the kids help! Even if it is just writing on containers. Once a week I grilled chicken & pork chops for quick meals at work or for the kids after school. I cooked up large batches of different items such as veggies, casseroles, etc. and divided them into smaller or individual portions and put them in the freezer. This also helps not to waste food if you have that “picky” child. Also allows you to grab as many as you need for any given meal. I made freezer meals in those aluminum pans with lids (they come in all sizes). Wrote the cooking instructions on top in case the kids needed to start dinner or fend for themselves. I froze crockpot meals in a gallon Ziploc bag and threw those in the pot before heading off to work. Was I able to maintain this all the time? of course not! Life happens. Emergencies, Work, etc. But when I did, it decreased my stress level tremendously.

Now, my kids are grown, and I am providing elder care for my mother. Her one joy left is cooking. She can no longer see well enough to cook herself but would love to keep me in the kitchen all day. I am single prep-steading trying to whip this property into a homestead and prepare this old house for winter. So here I am back to implementing some of my old methods to save time. It has taken me over 6 months just to finally get her freezer organized! We had Surprise Saturday for months because we couldn’t figure out what was in different containers. Some were delicious, some went to the dog and some to the trash.

I have added pressure canning to my skill set this year (sure wish I had learned this earlier). I can in smaller jars for us, larger for company. When I am busy, I can just open a prepared meal or several others to make something else quickly. I am trying to get her on board with some meal planning. But some days it feels like I am in the kitchen all day! I have to often remind myself that it is a work in progress 😁

[Sunstone]

Yeah I should probably do more meal planning…I’m usually deciding last minute based on what’s in the fridge, or at best in the morning when I take out some meat to defrost. It’s also hard to plan too far in advance because I might make plans for the last hunk of feta cheese, or the leftover potatoes, and then open the fridge at 5 PM and realize that someone already helped themselves to that ingredient, which blows up my plan for dinner.

I do repurpose leftovers though. If I can turn them into a new meal by adding other ingredients or changing the presentation I’ll do it, although many leftovers don’t make it past lunch the next day, so again, I often have to decide that at the last minute.

I am trying to get more into canning, but so far I’ve only been able to do the water bath since I don’t have a pressure canner. It’s at the top of my kitchen gadgets wish list.

[HeySuz]

Surprise Saturday!! I used to pack up leftovers in lunch size portions and put them in the freezer and not know what I was taking for lunch most of the time. Coworkers would ask what I brought for lunch and I would answer “freezer surprise.”

[Moew]

Hey! Fellow RN here. I am so happy with the amount of stress relief I experience with planning meals ahead. This year was the first year that I cooked and froze all of my Thanksgiving meal (except the turkey) ahead of time. Wow! It’s the first year that I enjoyed the holiday and wasn’t such a beast to be around! Lol

I am happy to hear that you have taken up pressure canning. It sure opens up a variety of food that can be preserved

[Maytag]

<div>For me I usually spend less than an hour a day on weekdays. But on weekends it can be most of the day sometimes–baking bread, cooking a week’s worth of meals (soups, meats, casseroles, etc.), brewing kombucha, doing other experiments, sometimes multiple sinks full of dishes to wash, and so on.</div>

My breakfasts are usually a lentil, veggie, and sausage soup. I cook it in InstantPot (I love this thing) and do 2 batches in a day, then freeze it in containers easy to take to work. Takes several hours of the day to get this done, but then I have 6-8 weeks worth of breakfast ready. On weekends when I’m home to cook, scrambled eggs are quick.

Dinners are less routine, but I will still usually cook up a week’s worth on the weekend and then not need to cook again until the next weekend. So weekday time is just maybe making a salad or prepping a side dish, reheating what was cooked, and then cleaning up.

I like working in the kitchen, but I still try to be efficient about it. Cooking for just myself is of course different than cooking for a whole family!

[Sunstone]

That sounds very efficient…if it were just me I’d probably do that more. I used to make a quiche on the weekend and it would last me all week for breakfast. But my family is spoiled rotten and they turn up their noses at most leftovers. Sometimes I can squeeze out a second meal if a dish is really well liked and keeps well in the fridge, but in most cases just the storage container seems to make its contents undesirable, even when it’s from a meal they loved the night before.

Perhaps the day will come when we’re all much hungrier than we are today and have to be less picky. But as long as there’s fresh ingredients in the house (including ones they can scavenge if I refuse to cook for them), they’ll just eat cheese sandwiches and fruit and leave all the pre-made canned meals for me to eat by myself until I’m insane from the monotony. So for now it seems like I’m stuck cooking something different every day.

[Goatlover]

Some days I spend 2 or 3 hours there, other days, my feet are in the kitchen ALL day! I’ve given myself the title of Domestic Goddess because of it. LOL It is my workshop, my kingdom if you will. Oftentimes, I will have 3 or 4 things going at a time. Grinding wheat, baking bread, baking dog biscuits, canning my fruits or veggies. I even flake oat groats and make my own granola and culture my own yogurt, kefir, and Kombucha. It’s a busy place!

[Sunstone]

I do some of that stuff, too – I make my own granola (or cereal as we call it, but really it’s granola), sauerkraut, pickles and pepper relishes, chicken broth, even toothpaste. But it’s a struggle to find a window of time to do big projects because I’m busy with kids all day and often too tired at night to be on my feet anymore.

[LettieLoo]

I haven’t done so, yet, but I know A LOT of people who take advantage of meat sales, and they can the meat they buy. Making it shelf stable helps when they don’t have the freezer space. It only takes a short amount of time to reheat the meat they have canned.

Also…do you really NEED all the veg and other sides? If it is that big of a need, then I would start farming that responsibility to the other adult(s) and older children to help with.

[Sunstone]

Need the sides, at a minimum, to add calories to the meal – I can’t afford to feed them just meat every night, it’s too expensive. I’ve never seen meat “on sale,” if that’s what you mean by meat sales – we buy from local farms so the best price comes from buying in bulk, but it’s still expensive. I’d like to eventually can some meat but I need a pressure cooker first – so far I’ve only done water baths. Plus some things, like steak, can’t be canned – at least not without compromising on taste. If I’m spending $15-20 a pound on steak I’d like to taste it. But for chicken and ground beef, sure.

I’ve let my oldest (6) help with cutting veggies a bit lately, but he’s very slow and still learnign how to cut evenly and utilize all the edible parts. The process of teaching abd assisting him actually makes the process take longer, though, and he’s often still doing school work when I’m cooking dinner anyway. Only other adult in the house works long hours so he’s not available to help.

[Helene65]

Meat sales are when stores have sales on meat

[Robin0705]

I don’t think I spend enough time in my kitchen. I love being in my kitchen – baking, canning, preparing meals.

[Sunstone]

I love it too, but with 3 small kids and homeschooling, much of my time is already spoken for, so usually I’m doing triage between several things that need my attention. Makes it hard to do big projects like canning.

[FaintlyArtistic]

Since I have begun working, I spend about an hour +/- an hour/day on weekdays. On weekends, I try to cook several meals so that I can freeze them for weekday lunches. We eat simply and a lot from the garden, whether fresh, frozen or canned.

[KansasTerri]

Are people still interested in this thread? As a handicapped person I am keenly interested in making jobs easier, and I am down to about an hour in the kitchen.

While I do spend about an hour, there are just the 2 of us and that helps. My BIG thing is efficiency and using meals that are a snap to prepare. For instance I mix the cornbread in the pan that I will cook it in, and I just set it on the table with a spatula so that people can serve themselves. I DID buy a 2-handled frying pan because it is prettier: I saw Wanda using one on Deep South Homestead and I liked it. By mixing everything in the frying pan I eliminate a mixing bowl and small savings of time will add up.

When I do something like raw vegetable strips, then I like to make enough to last a couple of days. It is much more efficient. I do the same with salads and such, and often I do this with side dishes as well. And, making a big pot of stew is almost as fast as making a small pot of stew, and it will give me two main courses instead of one

…………

I start the day spending 5? minutes taking care of the chickens, and when I wash up in the kitchen sink I then take care of any dishes in the sink: I do try to save steps. And throughout the day when I am at the kitchen sink then I move any dishes into the dishwasher and wipe things down if it needs it. My kitchen is rarely perfect but it is not really untidy either.

After the chickens are fed and the eggs taken care of, I will set out anything frozen that needs to thaw: it is no use putting this off because if I am tired then I will fix canned chili from my preps instead. I KNOW that I will, I ALWAYS go for instant meals unless the meat is already out and thawed. And so I set the meat out first thing before I do get tired.

And while I cook I also clean up. While ground beef browns I will take care of everything, start any side dishes, and often decide what I will fix tomorrow. And I will stir the beef every now and than while I work.

But MOST IMPORTANTLY, I have a long list of meals that take little prep time and uses few dishes, and that is mostly what I cook. The EASY meals, LOL! Anything that needs hovering over, like bread, is done on a day that I feel creative.

Easy meals:

Breakfast. Eggs and fried potatos, or eggs and bacon (I fry the package of bacon and set some aside for later) or packets of instant oatmeal or cereal

Lunch. Usually either leftovers or sandwiches. Possibly 5 minutes to prepare and set dishes in the sink

Dinner. Spagetti with ground beef sauce and raw veggies. Preferrably the veggies were cut up the previous day but veggies can be sliced while the water comes to a boil. Again, I slice enough for a couple of days.

Tacos: ground beef with seasonings and cheese. Shredded lettuce, tomatos, etc on the side. AND if I shred the lettuce for tacos then I also chop more lettuce for the next night’s salad.

I chop the lettuce for salads instead of tearing it as it is very much faster and easier.

Other dinners: baked beef, pork, or chicken.A potato on the side and already-made salad or veggie strips from the fridge. Or brown hamburger and mix with cooked noodles and some sauce (ragu, OR milk with grated cheese, etc) Black eyed peas: cook the peas with spices, allow the water to reduce to where it looks ready to serve. And I mix the corn bread in the pan that it will be cooked in as I do not turn the corn bread out: I set it pan and all on the table with a spatula.

……………………..

Of course when I bring produce in from the garden that ALSO takes time, but I do not include that in my daily hour or so in the kitchen. So, I spend day after day preparing apples from my trees for the freezer and the dehydrator, but now I have apples to make fried apples (about 10 minutes of cooking time while you tidy the kitchen f it still needs it).

I also do not count the time that I spend in snapping green beans or shelling peeling and blanching carrots, but having those baggies of frozen veggies waiting to be dumped into a pan are serious time savers when I am cooking

[MulberryGardens-Christina]

I would say at minimum I spend 2-3 hours a day in the kitchen and that is not counting canning, baking, processing meat, or dealing with garden harvest… if my kids are helping I am in there much longer… plus clean up time adds more than that. I cook just about everything from scratch… we have 5 kids, and sometimes it feels like I live in the kitchen!

[Moew]

If my kitchen wasn’t so small, I would put a bed in there! Lol

[Helene65]

I used to think heaven would be a small bedroom off the kitchen, wall to wall books with my bed on a pallet on the floor. I was a widow so was just thinking of me. I was always in the kitchen, with or without kids. We didn’t have tv. This was when internet was even pretty rare. It got more common n I was on it but for kitchen things lol – ok, ok and homeschooling as a widow ie HELP!

[Gruberhomestead]

I just made cabbage soup and it took me about 2 hours. Not counting cleaning time.

[culdesacgrocerygarden]

I learned a very long time ago that if I am going to be spending time in the kitchen, to make it worth my while. I never cook for just one meal. If I am chopping vegetables, I chop plenty extra and bag them up for the freezer. This is a practice known as “dovetailing”. When you accomplish more than one thing with one single action. If I cook anything, ground meat for example, I will cook 5 lbs at once. And I am only cooking for me! After raising 5 children I am still in the bulk cooking mindset but now instead of seeing an entire “family pack” dissapear before my eyes, I still make the whole amount and think of all the different ways I can use it. Earlier in the summer I cooked 5 lbs of ground beef in the slow cooker, had some for dinner and then dehydrated most of it. Today I made a giant pot of black beans. Im wiped out from that, but later today I will make up a bunch of bean and cheese burritos, bean and chicken burritos, portion some out for soup, some for ‘patties’, ect…maybe some for a sweet potato and black bean hash. Whatever I feel like doing at the time. Maybe even dehydrate some. It would be nice to try that and see if it would work for my BOB and for easy meals when I am not up to cooking. So, to answer your question. I am only cooking for one person but I did this same concept when the kids were young and all home and I also had a husband to cook for. Back then I probably spent at most an hour pr day cooking. Now I spend maybe an hour pr week. Seems about right since I am now cooking for 1/7th of the people I used to cook for.

[AnnRe]

I actually spend much of my day in the kitchen. It’s just a convenient place. Aside from cooking and dishes I sit at the table with my laptop, a book, or a project, or just sit and drink my coffee/tea and look out the window at my tiny homestead. It’s just the room where most things happen.

[Redcap]

About half an hour to prep and cook. We eat very simply and sometimes it’s just 5-10 minutes chopping and letting it cook (soups and stews). Even if we have steak, it doesn’t take long.

[Ampersand]

We eat scratch meals 13 out of 14 nights a week and don’t spend that much time in the kitchen. Some meals require a long time to make and so I will double, triple, quadruple a recipe and freeze the leftovers. It’s not much harder to make a bigger batch of a thing . Today I just took out a bag of frozen meatballs. Easy. That goes for prepping ingredients. Chop and wash a whole head of lettuce. Chop a whole onion. Refrigerate what you don’t use and it’s ready to go. Also as another poster described, recycle foods. Last nights pot roast is tonight’s beef and noodles. And wash dishes in between steps. Don’t wait. That drives me crazy. The husband will stand there watching onions cook after he just piled dishes in the sink. Multi tasking 👍