Handy Tips for Cooking at Home

Handy Tips for Cooking at Home

So, you’ve decided to start cooking more at home. Great! Preparing your own meals in your home kitchen is almost always healthier and cheaper than paying for frozen food or eating out.

However, it’s not always easy adjusting to home cooking if you haven’t done it for a while (or at all).

Check out a few of the following handy tips for making cooking at home a little easier for you!

1.    Buy staple ingredients in bulk

A handy way to save money and make cooking at home a little easier is to make sure you buy staple ingredients in bulk. These are the ingredients you constantly use in most of your weekly recipes, such as uncooked rice and other pantry items, or whatever other item is a common feature of your favourite dishes.

This will help you save money at the grocery store, since bulk items are usually better value for money than smaller sized products. It also means saving money on petrol since you’ll be making fewer shopping trips to stock up on cooking essentials.

2.    Subscribe to a meal-kit service

If you enjoy home cooking and the benefits of it, but want to make it more convenient for you, then a meal-kit delivery service could be the perfect option for you. This means you’d get a box filled with portioned ingredients for delicious and healthy recipes that you can customise each week so that you get the exact meal plan you want.

This means you won’t have to worry about buying ingredients at the supermarket and portioning them at home for a recipe. With a meal-kit service, you get everything you need delivered fresh to your door, so you also don’t need to waste any time getting behind the stove.

3.     Involve family and friends

If you can, involving other people in your home cooking is one of the best ways to make it more enjoyable. Unlike chefs in a professional kitchen, you can have your partner, best friend, your mother, or child alongside you to help out and make things fun.

Sharing a glass of wine with mum while she teaches you some essential cooking skills is a great way to bond and get some extra expert help with dinner. Even organising a ‘make your own’ pizza night with friends is a fun excuse to get together with a shared love of food.

4.    Create a compost bin

If you are going to be cooking at home, then you are going to produce a certain amount of food waste. Minimising food waste in your home kitchen is a topic that deserves its own article. Still, composting is one of the best ways you can make sure that unused food scraps don’t go entirely to waste in landfill, and you’ll be reducing your carbon footprint in the process.

Making a compost bin and using it is easy. Even if you don’t have your own garden and don’t feel like starting one, you can always give away your compost (or sell it) to others who will get good use out of it.

5.    Use your leftovers

Another home cooking tip (that also helps reduce food waste) is to embrace your leftovers. This doesn’t just mean saving uneaten food to be reheated the next day; it can also mean deliberately preparing more than you can eat so that you have leftovers you can easily rely on throughout the week.

If you don’t have the time or creative energy to cook unique dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day, then relying on leftovers between more elaborate meals is perfectly normal. Plenty of people choose to take tubs of leftovers to the office as their work lunch, and they save a lot of money by doing it.

Soon, you’ll be cooing like a pro!