The REAL Fast Food: Time Crunch Kitchen by Anna

([image: Julia’s kitchen.  Image credit: Betty Rosbottom)

I am so excited to have Anna from blog.fitfunner.com share a post on my blog today.  Please stop by her BLOG, she has great reviews on fun and educational games for kids, as well as great tips on healthy eating habits. 

Hi all:

Anna here, and I’m excited this week to be guest posting on Do It All Working Mom.  I’ve been a big admirer of how efficient Caroline is, on so many different levels.  Accordingly, as a kind of tribute to Caroline’s efficiency, this post introduces Time Crunch Kitchens. 

What is a Time Crunch Kitchen?  Ever come home after work, with a hungry family who need to eat and then quickly get out to sports practice, or do their homework, or head out to a church event?  Ever wake up, start the morning rush of getting the kids ready for school, go into your kitchen, and wonder what to make them for a healthy breakfast?  Do you go through the grocery store, putting expensive processed foods that you really aren’t happy about into your shopping cart, but know that you just don’t have the time to make a meal from scratch?  If you are a single parent, do you find yourself wanting to feed your kids healthy meals, but are just too tired after work to spend a lot of time cooking and preparing fancy meals? Or how about the nights when you never make it home for supper at all before having to shuttle kids to after-school and evening activities?

A Time Crunch Kitchen is a way of dealing with these problems.  The whole idea of the Time Crunch Kitchen is recognizing that in today’s world, time is at a premium.  If we want our family to eat healthy meals, and avoid expensive processed foods, then we have to deal with the fact that we don’t always have the time we want when we need it.

Fortunately for us, we have tools that we can use to solve these problems.  I’ve collected these tools together into a system that I call Time Crunch Kitchen.  There are just Four Steps to creating a Time Crunch Kitchen, and it’s really easy to get started. Let’s review them quickly in this post (I’ll go into them more in detail in future posts):

1.     Think Ahead.

Save money and time by planning ahead (just a bit) and looking at how your family eats.  Once a month, take a look at when and how your family eats.  Write down (this is important!) any patterns or habits you see: do you have a lot of after-school activities this month that would create evenings where you’d need a meal ready quickly?  Are your kids really slow movers in the mornings, which might mean now that we’re back-to-school you’d need to get healthy breakfast food into them really quickly? Once you’ve written down your family’s eating patterns for the month, think about what you’d like to feed them, and what they’d like to eat.  This process can lead to generating menus, either on a weekly basis or a monthly basis.  Having menus is a really powerful tool for you, since you can time shift food preparation.  This is a BIG part of the Time Crunch Kitchen.  If you know what you’d like to make, then you can use concepts like Freezer Cooking or Go-To Meals to get control over food prep timing and lower your stress in the Time Crunch moment.

2.     Organize your Kitchen.

Kitchens can be the nerve center of a home.  It is where the family comes together to eat, talk, laugh, cry, do homework, pay bills, and make family decisions.  But we often don’t see kitchens as a place that needs to be organized efficiently for food preparation and delivery.  Next time that you are able to do so, go to a successful and busy restaurant and ask to watch how the kitchen operates. Some of y’all may work in the food industry, so you know where I am headed.  A professional kitchen is organized to do one thing well: take in food orders and get them out as quickly and as appetizingly as possible.  The pots and pans are stored in easily accessible places, as are the cooking utensils.  Plates, cups, and glasses are stored in places where just cooked food can be placed on them quickly and then handed off to the customers.  The entire flow of the kitchen is designed to eliminate wondering where to find that spoon that you need, or a bowl for the soup.

You can see where I am going.  Why not take some time to organize your kitchen and make it more efficient for making and serving food?  Review the organization with your family so that they put things back where you are expecting to find them.  Take an hour or two twice a year (I sometimes suggest Memorial Day and Labor Day) to re-organize your kitchen, and get rid of stuff that you just don’t need (like that plastic container with no top!).  Having a time-efficient kitchen means that you can save time -- maybe a few minutes or maybe a lot more -- each time that you prepare a meal.  That can really make a difference when you have five minutes in the morning before the bus shows up, and you don’t have to spend that time looking for something in which to put the kids’ oatmeal! Hooray!

3.     Recipes: Collect and Organize

Even though you’ve made a commitment to being more organized about food preparation, you’ll still need recipes to guide you through the process.  Fortunately, there are a number of great tools out there to help you find healthy recipes and great tips for making healthy food for your family.  Check out Pinterest for tons of recipes, and play some Fitfunner (shameless self-promotion alert!  ;)  ) to get some tips on how to implement Time Crunch Kitchen ideas.  Keep a file of recipes that you like in a box or on your computer.  Follow blogs like Do It All Working Mom to get wonderful ideas delivered to your email inbox.  Just file the recipes, and keep them a bit organized, so that you can find the recipe you want when you are planning and preparing.

4.     Ingredients

The last step is to be organized about how you handle food ingredients; including buying, storing, and preparing them.  With the menus from Step 1, you can make out shopping lists.  I’m a huge fan of shopping lists, because they can cut your food costs a lot, and also help you to buy healthier foods.  Once you have a shopping list you can look for sales, and freeze or otherwise store raw ingredients until you want to use them.  Finally, with the recipes from Step 2, and knowing your menus from Step 1, you can time shift food preparation in ways that save you time when you need to get food out quickly to your hungry family.  One technique that I like is called Freezer Cooking.  Another is called Go-To Meals, where you pre-design meals that you’ll prepare when you have very little, or even no time, to prepare.

Those are the Four Steps, in brief.  At this point, I’m going to sign off.  I plan to come back to Time Crunch Kitchens, the Four Steps, and expand on the ideas that I’ve mentioned briefly.  If you have thoughts or feelings on Time Crunch Kitchens, and would like to suggest some future focus topics, please feel free to put them in the Comments!

As always, I finish by inviting you to check out Fitfunner (at www.fitfunner.com), the online home for playing your way to raising healthier kids.  At Fitfunner we mix fun and facts to engage you, entertain you, and most importantly help you help your kids! Please let us know your thoughts about Fitfunner by email to me at anna (at) fitfunner (dot) com – I love to hear your feedback! And finally, I’d like to thank Caroline at Do It All Working Mom for hosting for this post!

Signed,

Anna

Thank you so much Anna for these great tips. Organization and planning is key if you want to eat healthy!

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