3 Ways to cook if you have limited time

So many of us live very busy lives and cooking becomes more and more difficult. Yet it is the nutrition from food we need that fuels us to manage our busy lives. In this episode of the Vegan Cooking and Nutrition show, I share with you 3 different ways to cook if you have limited time.  

In this episode, I answer a listener’s question.

What is the best way to cook when you have limited time?

I talk about 3 possible ways to make cooking easy when you have limited time. 

Batch cooking 

Weekly Planning

Daily Planning 

Recipe 

My famous spreadable cashew cheese 

FCT 

(fun cooking tip)

Freezing cheese and hummus 

Hope you enjoy this episode 

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Transcript

This episode, number 15 of the Vegan Cooking and Nutrition Podcast is a listener’s question.

It’s a question many ask but this time Jodie asked it.

What is the best way to cook when you have limited time?

Our lives are so often jam-packed these days and 

we often have limited time to cook. 

Cooking becomes the last thing we think of and we 

are left eating toast yet again for dinner.

This can be avoided with some simple planning. 

However, there is not one way that fits all.

In this episode I will talk about a few different ways to cook if you have limited time.

Wow, how did our lives get so busy.

But they do, don’t they? Especially if 

you are working full time, 

or running your own business, 

exercising, 

catching up with friends, 

attending meetings and 

if you have children in the mix that is a whole other thing. Running them to this that and the other.

Phew makes me exhausted just thinking about it.

What fuels us though to keep up with our lives, is good nutrition, 

and sadly this is what gets missed out or forgotten about.

In episode number 8 of the Vegan Cooking and Nutrition show, I talked about how to get cooking at the top of your self-care list, that is well worth listening to.

In this episode, I am going to suggest 3 ways of how to make cooking easier if you are super busy and time poor.

1.   Batch Cooking 

Number one - that is so often talked about on socials, is batch cooking. 

This works incredibly well for many people and not at all for others.

For example, I had a client who used batch cook with her husband every Sunday and they loved it, it brought joy into their relationship.

However, once they had children they just couldn’t keep it up. 

The children wanted to go out on a Sunday and didn’t want to eat the same meal each week. 

They kept trying to make it work but it caused them more stress, then I helped them find a solution that made more sense to their lives.

Batch cooking, though can be a fabulous strategy, especially if you work late or irregular hours.

Batch cooking means deciding ahead of time what you want to eat and cooking it up all at once.

To make batch cooking successful 

you need to have a rotation of regular recipes and then have a shopping list for that week.

I would suggest having 

3 weeks of recipes, then you have 3 shopping lists, all the planning work gets done in 3 weeks for the rest of the year. 

example of this; 

week 1 – 

> you make curry, dhal  

> steamed veg and quinoa and pesto sauce 

>roast veg, Mexican chilli beans and  rice – then  salad jars for lunch.

You make a shopping list for this week – then every third week you can just grab this shopping list. 

Then week 2 

You make 2 soups for lunch 

for dinner 

>    Spaghetti Bolognese

>   Roast veg and mung bean salad

>    Buddha bowls 

Then you have the shopping list for that week and every third week

and so forth.

To make batch cooking successful you need to have a regular time each week to do the shopping, (wouldn’t it be great if that could coincide with your local market day) or if you are in a city, order your food from your local health food store or supermarket.

Then you need a time to set aside to cook all your meals.

3-4 hours will do it.

I would suggest doing the veggie chopping one day and then the cooking the next.

I have a fabulous client – Liam who is so busy he has very little time to cook on a weekly basis, so he batch cooks in the holidays, (he is a school teacher, amongst many other things), so he aims to cook one meal a week fresh and then in the school holidays he spends 3 full days cooking food and freezing it for the whole term. 

He has a chest freezer and does a great job. Having frozen food is so much better than buying takeaway or resorting to toast each night.  He makes a salad in the morning before work to go with the frozen meals. He has enough frozen meals for lunch and dinner each day of the term.

Now that is real planning ahead.

Batch cooking can really work.

Tips for batch cooking 

>    Pick simple meals to make that you know you will love.

>    Make burgers and patties a part of your batch cooking as these are easy to make.

>    If you make too many portions, freeze the extra portions as this will do for times when you are not well or have something special to attend to on your meal prep day.

>    If you are not enjoying a particular meal then remove it from your menu and think of another meal.

>    Think about things that will last all week long. I don’t like to eat cooked grains or legumes that were cooked longer ago than 3 days. You could always leave out 2 portions of the grain and legume meals to consume over the next two days, then freeze the other portions.

Ok, batch cooking isn’t going to work for everyone, including me, I have never even tried to do it and can’t imagine I ever will, but I have learned I can never say never.

I love cooking to the max, but I couldn’t find a full day or even a full 4 hours that I could dedicate to cooking for the week.

2. Weekly Planning

Another option is weekly planning. 

Sit down with the family the day before you go shopping 

and decide what you are going to eat in the week, taking into consideration what events you have planned for the week. 

For families, even having this on a chalkboard (do they exist anymore) a whiteboard maybe, for everyone to write on and feel included.

My father, when he was growing up, knew exactly what he was going to eat every day of the week.

His mum was a creature of habit when it came to meals and my dad loved this as he knew exactly what he would be eating on a Monday and exactly what he would be eating on a Tuesday etc.  He said it was very relaxing and comforting. This could be something that really works for your family.

If the children know that Tuesday is taco night for example, 

or if you know you will be late home from ballet or football on a Wednesday, you know you will have a soup or curry defrosting that night, or it will be a quick pasta carbonara that only takes 15 minutes to whip up, (check out my carbonara recipe in the show notes).

So, once you have the shopping list, get the children to go through the pantry and tick off what you already have and do the same with the fridge, then go shopping the next day. 

Schedule the required amount of time each day to cook.

3. Market shopping and daily planning

This is my preferred method as I am a more spontaneous cook. It does mean knowing some recipes well. I have on rotation about 7 different recipes – yep, that’s it, and then if I want to experiment, I can do that on a day off.

I will go to the market or health food shop and buy 

whatever is in season, but not in excess, so right now that would look like 

for 2 of us

500g mushrooms

3 zucchini

800g tomatoes 

7 carrots 

2 lettuces 

Bunch silverbeet or spinach 

2 handful green beans

4 potatoes

2 sweet potatoes and ¼ pumpkin from the garden

2 bunches herbs 

2 beetroot 

7 onions 

2 bulbs garlic 

2 cucumber 

2 red capsicums

1 leek 

7 lemons

A block of tofu or tempeh

Then in the pantry 

I have my spices 

Mung beans

Moong dhal 

Chickpeas

Quinoa 

Black rice 

Basmati rice 

Brown rice 

Tahini

Nuts and seeds 

Just small amounts of them

Then each night before I go to bed I think 

what will we have for dinner  - I ask Mak of course 

and I soak what is needed.

If it is hot weather, I put what is soaked in the fridge.

I make enough for dinner so we can eat the same again for lunch the next day.

I schedule 30 minutes each night to cook when I am working 

and an hour on the weekends.

So, for example, tomorrow we are going to have roast veg quinoa and tahini sauce and a salad to go with it at lunch.

I will soak the quinoa the night before.

In the morning, while I am making my cup of tea, I will cut up the vegetables and put them in the fridge. When it comes time to cook, I roast the veg, make the tahini sauce, wash the salad ingredients and cut that up and cook the quinoa.

I then put the salad ingredients in 2 containers for lunch the next day, then portion out our dinner, devour it with gusto – girl, I love my food. 

Then let the leftover quinoa and roast veg cool down and pop it in the containers with the salad for lunch the next day.

Another meal idea we have is, we love curry. 

One day I will make dhal, rice and salad.

I will soak the moong dhal and brown rice the night before. 

I will make the salad in the morning, while I am making my cup of tea,

cook the dhal and rice in the evening. I put spinach and sometimes celery in it.

Then we eat that with salad.

For lunch the next day, I will have the leftover salad and cook some tofu in the morning to go with it.

The leftover dhal and rice I will save for the next night.

The next night, I make a curry to go with the dhal and rice.

Any leftover curry I freeze to pull out of the freezer for those really busy days.

On the weekend, I do put an hour aside where I make - 

fridge staples that I may have run out of – I usually only make one thing a week. It could be: 

Pepita sprinkle (go to episode #3 for this recipe) 

Hummus (go to episode #4 for this recipe)

Cashew cheese (listen to the end of this episode for this recipe) 

In addition, 

Every meal I make, I ensure I have complete protein so we are full and happy. Go to the show notes to download the complete protein chart.

There are 3 ways to cook if you have limited time.

I hope you found that useful and that you can implement one of those ways into your lifestyle.

If you want more help with meal planning and preparing ahead of time, the VIP program is a fabulous place to start.  Check it out in the show notes. You get to work with me 1:1 for 5 x 1.5 hour cooking and nutrition sessions.

Now it’s time for the recipe and the FCT 

Recipe 

Every fridge needs a pot of this in it, it is versatile.

Ingredients

2 cups cashew nuts 

¼ cup filtered water

2 vegan probiotic capsules

2 tbsp nutritional yeast

1 tsp salt 

4 spring onions (scallions) or some fresh dill 

Nut bag or piece of muslin

Method

Soak the nuts for 6 hours in filtered water, then discard the water. Place the nuts, fresh filtered water, nutritional yeast and a few pinches of salt in a blender. Blend until completely smooth.  

Place the cashew mix in a bowl or glass Pyrex and break open the probiotic capsule and stir into the cheese with a non-metallic utensil. Cover it with a damp muslin, Chux or thin tea towel. 

Leave the cashew cheese somewhere away from the light in the kitchen for 6 to 12 hours to ferment. You will know when it has fermented as it will no longer taste like nuts. It will have a springiness to it and you can see that it looks a bit more alive than just a water and nut mixture. 

When it is ready, mix in the spring onion or dill.  Store in the fridge. It will last ten days or so in the fridge and freezes for 3 months.

FCT 

Freezing dips, cheeses and hummus etc. 

They freeze really well for up to 3 months. 

If you make a batch of cheese, keep one in the fridge, then freeze two portions. Do the same when you make hummus, when you run out you can go to the freezer and take another one out. It’s like having a shop in your freezer.