Episode 145 How to Find Time to Fix Dinner.wav – Transcript

Welcome to the feed, your family tonight, podcast. Do you dread hearing the question, whats for dinner? Whether you spend your days, keeping up with toddlers, running kids to after-school, activities are juggling, a career and family getting dinner on the table. Can be a struggle for us all I dont Rafi, Bok, a business owner wife, and mom of four. Im on a mission to build stronger families. One dinner at a time. And Im here with tips, tricks and inspiration. You need to feed your family tonight. Hello friends. Welcome to the feature family tonight. Podcast episode 145, I mean Rosemarie fiebach. Im so happy to be here with you today. Cuz today were going to talk about one of the most prolific challenges that I find people have to getting dinner on the table and that is time. Today, were going to talk about how to find time to cook dinner. And as we get deeper into the episode, Im going to have four points for you to consider as you are trying to find time to fix dinner. When youre thinking about dinner to get dinner on the table, youve got to plan, but youre going to make, you got to do some prep, and you have to do some physical cooking and you got to clean up the mess. Thats kind of that. Four main parts of getting dinner on the table and all of these steps take time. When you use the feed, your family tonight, weekly meal, planning sheet. Which if you dont have your free copy go to feed your family tonight. Calm plan and just grab a copy but it prompts you to look at your schedule and think about what kind of day you are having so that you can plan meals, that work with your schedule rather than against it. Because I have found in my years of working with families and helping them get dinner on the table that weeknight dinner is so much about time management. And we are going to take that concept and we are going to go deep today. So get ready for a real deep dive into looking at time and recipe. Now, shes been around here, a hot minute, you know that. I believe that there are two kinds of cooks. They are cooks that follow recipes to a tea and there are cooked that use recipes only for suggestions I am. Definitely in the latter Camp. I really do not pay attention to recipes all that much except for to spark creativity. But what I do pay attention to when I am looking at recipes, is the cooking time when I am developing recipes for the website and I usually when Im developing a recipe, Ill look in See if theres recipes that are similar to it. And look at what kinds of cooking times. Other cooks are suggesting and that kind of gives me a place to start when Im developing a brand new recipe cooking. Time is just that it is the time that you are cooking. And when I say cooking, I mean, like adding heat, you can be cooking on the stove, you can be cooking in the oven and the grill in the slow, cooker in the instant pot. And the instant pot is sneaky because the quote on quote cook time and instant pot is not the real amount of time that it takes to cook something in the instapot. Same amount of time that something is under full pressure, but you have the time of, bringing it up to pressure and you have the time of releasing the pressure, My son last year during the pandemic had a science project. You know, the teacher was trying to find all sorts of things that they could do from home and she had them bake cookies. She said I want you to use one recipe for cookie dough. I dont care if its gluten-free I dont care. Use whatever cookie recipe you want, but what youre going to do is youre going to measure the amount of do youre going to turn the oven on to the heat that it says in the recipe but were going to look at the different cooking times and were going to start at 2 minutes before the amount of time. It says in the recipe and then one minute then the amount of time and then a minute over and then two minutes over, were going to look at the differences in the cookies and I thought of this is fun it was a chance for me to have my son make my chocolate chip cookie recipe off of my website and see if I really did have the best baking time for my cookies. It was clear that you know the ones that were two minutes under werent quite done enough. The ones that were two minutes over were a little bit too Brown for my taste turns out my recipe with write the amount of time that I said was exactly correct. And the cookies were done how I like them in that time but it goes to show you that the amount of time spent cooking is something that can be a little bit precise and its really really important when you go to cook dinner there is the cooking time where the food is actually with heat and then there is the prep time and thats different in my sons science experiment the time that it took to make the dough and chill the dough with all those things. Werent a part of the quote unquote cook times, but when you are fixing dinner, the prep is a giant part of your cook time. Today, I got four things to get used to start thinking about your meals and your time and going a little bit deeper by separating your preparation time and your cooking time. So if forceps number one, were going to talk about how much actual cooking time does a recipe, take when you are looking at a recipe, most blogs will have recipes and itll say cook time, itll say prep time and itll say additional time. But how much time are you actually cooking? And what kind of cooking are you doing during that time? So, four hours in a slow cooker is one thing and 15 minutes cooking. A stir-fry is a completely different thing that for hours of cook time. You are not needing to attend to it. You are not needing to pay attention to it. But if youre standing at the stove, cooking a stir-fry in 15 minutes that is time. That requires your constant attention. So when youre looking at cook times is it the kind of cook time that requires your attention or is it the kind of cook time that you can kind of set it and forget it and not really pay attention to it because that makes a difference in how you get a meal on the table. If you have noticed on my Instagram, I have been starting to put my meal plan Monday, cook times. These are not the prep times, this is the amount of time, it takes to physically cook a specific meal but it doesnt take into account the time of prepping it to get ready to cook. And I did that on purpose because I want people to start thinking about cook times and prep times in separate buckets. So step number one, how much actual cooking time does a recipe take Step number two is to think about the prep time and the prep time is all the stuff that you do before you actually add heat and cook it. How much of your time does it take a dinner? That takes a low amount of your time, would be to grab a bag of steam and bag vegetables and a bag of chicken nuggets and put them on a tray and put them in the oven. The amount of prep time is basically going to the freezer and opening two bags, but other recipes, might take two to three days of prep time. My roast chicken is kind of an example of that. Where I I salted the night before and then let it sit in the refrigerator for one to two days. Now, the next day when I go to actually physically cook dinner, all I have to do is take it out of the refrigerator and put it in the oven. So its a real hands-off kind of cook time, but the prep time has to be done several days in advance. I personally have a real heightened sense of the many steps of prep because I cook on television, spoiler alert cooking and television is not real life. In real life, I do not use five little glass bowls to get dinner on the table. On a Tuesday night, I am going to my spice cabinet. And I am opening up things. Im probably not even Beijing, unless Im working on a recipe for you. And Im just kind of dumping in as I go guesstimating, they drink in my hand, that type of thing. Im not putting everything in little tiny glass prep bowls, like I do on television. But when you have 4 to 7 minutes on television to make an entire recipe, I have to dissect every minut step and calculate how long it is going to take and where I can shorten those steps for demonstration purposes. Ive really think about how long does it take to open the lid, on a jar of olive oil and lift up the spoon, pour the oil into the measuring spoon and then set the spoon down all of those little steps take time. Know if you do not need to get that detailed but you need to get your mind thinking about those little steps because those steps matter, even little things like, where is the olive oil located in your kitchen? How many steps does it take to get to the olive oil from the stove? All of these little things are part of what it takes to get dinner on the table. I am a big fan of Lisa. Wood River org. 365 I talked about her before she wants him on one of her podcast was talking about attention deficit disorder and executive functioning and she said it takes 34 steps to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You have to first identify where is the bread? You have to go to the location of the bread. You have to open the back of bread. You have to pull out two slices of bread and were just not even talking about the peanut butter or jelly at this point. All of these little steps we do without thinking but each of these steps take time. So when you were looking at recipes and when you are cooking, I want you to start thinking about these micro little steps that you are doing, as you are preparing to physically cook dinner. Step number three, I want you to identify where you can break down, some of the steps of a recipe. Are there things that you can do ahead of time to make cookie a little bit easier for sample. In episode 141, I was talking with Emily about blanching vegetables for roasting. I have a really great recipe for blanched and roasted vegetables, they are so delicious and she asked me, can I do that earlier in the day? Blanche him and then refrigerate them and then roast them right before dinner? And my answer, of course was absolutely you can do that. As a matter of fact, sometimes Ill even Blanche several pounds of vegetables. Keep them in the refrigerator and then roast them throughout the week. But she in her mind separated, the blanching step and the roasting step and wondered. If those two could be done at different time, and that is how I want you to start looking at your recipes to wear. Can you separate some of these steps? Now? There are varying degrees breaking down these steps. It doesnt make any sense for most people to go and pre-major all of their spices and put them into little baggies. Like I do when I go into the television Studio. but if you are having chicken twice for dinner and the same week, it might make a lot of sense to buy the family pack of chicken and when you cut chicken for the first nights dinner, Get the chicken cut into 1 inch pieces for the second nights dinner and just put them in the refrigerator because youre cutting boards. Already out you already have the mess there and hes going to have to clean up anyway. So why not do a little bit of prep for later on in the week when you already have everything out for dinner? Tonight, if you want to take this to even a higher level, you can Outsource some of this preparation. This isnt for everyone, but some really really busy people. Outsourcing some of their prep is the most brilliant way to get dinner on the table. Little easier thinking about buying pre-chopped veggies from the produce section or even the salad bar at your grocery store, get the butcher to touch your chicken into 1 inch pieces for a stir-fry. I know my Kroger does that totally for free and me, I can go to the meet, Ill grab it and take it over to the Butcher and they will cut it into pieces for me. While I do the rest of my grocery shopping, my free. And swears by buying chicken tenders, rather than chicken breast. For grilling, especially when making tequila lime chicken, because the chicken tenders are all basically the same size and same sickness. So you dont have to break them down to get an even thickness which makes prepping chicken way faster at work, is already done for you. Outsource in your prep, is something that you definitely can do, but more importantly, Think about all of the different parts of prep for dinner, and where can you break some of those parts down and do them at a different time? Step for slow, straight from that because InStep for I want you to think about finding pockets of time to do a little bit of dinner prep. Were all crazy busy. Some of us are home during the day. Some of us are out of our homes all day long. This is not about a one-size-fits-all solution, this is about finding pockets of time. That work for you. A few pockets of time that you might want to consider. The first one is my personal favorite is right before I clean up my dinner dishes. I prep school lunches, then get everything into my little blue bin. I chop veggies. I salt meat, I do this because my kitchen is already messy and what would take me, 15 minutes the next day, because I have to pull out my cutting board, pull out my knife, do the work, and then clean everything up. Hes only going to take 5 minutes because my cutting boards already out and Im already having Something cost of cleaning up after dinner so I dont have to clean up twice. I only have to clean up once another time that you might find a little pocket of time is in the morning. At breakfast, time years ago, I was a missionary and I was staying with a family in Reno Nevada and I will never forget, I learned so much from this mom. She was just super, super neat lady and one thing that she did as she was pounding chicken breasts at 6 in the morning and the reason was her children did swim practice at 6 in the morning and so she had taken them to swim practice and it come back and she had a little pocket of time. So she started prepping dinner. At 6 in the morning, just to step of getting the chicken breast to an even sickness, which takes a little bit of time. Its kind of messy. She did at 6 in the morning because she had a little pocket of time. Do you have a little pocket of time in the mornings around breakfast that you can do to? A little bit of prep and other places. Sometimes you can find a little pocket of time as if you are home during the day, in episode 93, I talked with Kendra. She the lazy genius and she talks about finding little things that you can do to make dinner easier. And one of her big tricks is to just fill the pot of water for the pasta and put it on the stove and youre going to say Marie that is a ridiculously small step and you are not wrong but if you stack a few ridiculously small steps here and there throughout the day you were going to save yourself so much time at dinner. Its kind of like when I tell people that work outside, the home to put on an apron and get something started before they go and change clothes. If you feel that water in the morning before you go to breakfast and just go and turn the stove on and get the water boiling youre going to save yourself. Beast 20 minutes for the amount of time before you sit down to dinner because of that one, little step do not discount. The power of teeny tiny steps in teeny tiny pockets of time. They can really add up one teeny tiny step that I talked about way, way way back in episode 12 is my blue lunch. Since I like to prep lunches when Im cleaning up dinner and I put all the stuff for lunches that have to go into the refrigerator in this one particular blue bin and I put it in my refrigerator. So the next morning I just pull out the blue bin and either put things in the microwave to heat up for thermoses or just drop them straight until lunch boxes, and youre going to say that kind of sounds silly. I mean, why it have a special Ben and let me tell you because it saves me time and brain space. I can just pull one thing out. Im not having to dig through my refrigerator, but even more importantly, Im not how Do you remember what I prepped the night before? Because to be honest with you, sometimes things like that just fly straight off the top of my head. So I know exactly everything in the blue bin is what I have planned for lunch and I dont have to think about it. If you want to take this to a Ninja level, how about make your own meal kits, going by yourself five bins and when you go to the grocery store, put everything for a particular meal in each, been in your refrigerator. If youre going to have tacos on Tuesday, put the package of ground beef in the bin, the package of taco Mex. The lettuce, the Tomato. The cheese is sour cream and the avocado. And then on Tuesday, when you go to make tacos, you just pull that been out of the refrigerator and you start fixing dinner and everything is already there, ready to go? But practically would work real well in my house because my refrigerator is usually kind of stuff that Im feeding six people and I dont have a giant refrigerator but you may be in a phase of life where you have that amount of room in your refrigerator and thats small step assorting, everything by meals is a piece of crap that will help you. So you dont have to run around your house trying to locate all the items to make dinner and youre going to save yourself time when you are fixing dinner. All of these steps are here to help you to start separating cooking from prep and starting to find little pockets of time where you can do a little bit of prep which will make fixing dinner, easier, you want to, first of all, look at the actual cooking time and think about what kind of cookie time it is, is it Hands-On? Is it hands off? You want to look at the prep time? What kind of steps do you actually have to do to prep before you physically cook the meal? How much time does it really take to get things ready before you physically? Start adding heat or quote on quote cook dinner identify where you can break down those steps so that you can do them in the little pockets of time of prep? Prince. I am going to be talking about time and fixing dinner, more and more. I am so close to releasing my new feature family tonight, meal planning system that really focuses on how you utilize time in your kitchen. Follow me on Instagram. And if you have questions or want to connect, always join me to feed your family tonight, Facebook group. It is always so fun to connect with you there and hear what you have to say about getting dinner on the table. Friends. I want you guys to have the best ball ever. And I want weekly meals, to serve your family in your situation. So Im so glad that you spent some time here and I cant wait to connect with you next week. Take care.