Feeding a lot of people is part of my job. As a mother in a home with 10 kids, I have to buy and cook most things in bulk. I’m a big believer in homemade meals, for their nutrition, their lower cost, and their good taste. (See more about this in my store saving post.)
That doesn’t mean it’s always doable. With the craziness of life with kids, no matter how many you have, homecooked meals are not always possible. Especially when you have a baby. And I have fed my family cereal for dinner on many busy days.
But most of the time I make at least part of our meal from scratch. As my life has gotten more complicated, I’ve found some great tools and come up with some tricks to help me do this in a simpler way.
4 Cooking Hacks for Simpler Homecooked food
1) Cook it on a cookie sheet
When I’m cooking for my crowd, taking the time to roll and cut and mold into single servings feels like it takes forever! So a lot of the time I skip that step and just put the whole thing on a cookie sheet, then cut it apart when I’m done. Who has time to scoop 36 muffins? I just put the batter on a cookie sheet and cut it in squares when I’m done. Who wants to build 24 breadsticks? I just roll the dough out in my cookie sheet, add the butter and seasoning all at once, and cut them into sticks when it’s done baking. When it’s not less prep time, spreading thinner across a cookie sheet instead of a deeper pan makes it cook faster.
Cookie sheet cooking hack saves me time when cooking food like:
- pizza
- cornbread
- biscuit squares
- muffin squares
- breadsticks
- toast
2) Build your own dinner plate
This one saves me time when cooking and a headache when serving. I don’t do casseroles. Instead I cook the ingredients and let the kids put it together how they like it on their plate. If it’s a salad, I only put the lettuce and carrot together, then I leave the other ingredients in their own containers or on the cutting board for the kids to build as they like it. By leaving most ingredients separate I get to serve the food sooner, and have less complaints about “I don’t like that.”
Letting them build their own plates is a cooking hack for food like:
- chef salad
- tacos
- tostadas
- shepherds pie
- cowboy casserole
- sandwiches
3) Simplify it if you can
There is something to be said about the depth of flavor that comes from letting ingredients cook together in the same dish. But that’s not really in my time budget. We just need it ready and good enough asap. We like to eat lasagna, but we never bake it. Instead, I cook rotini noodles and just add the sauce and cheeses right in the pot on the stove. Our scalloped potatoes are just potatoes cooked in the instant pot and sliced up with cheese sauce on top. They taste good enough to me.
Another way to simplify meals is to use some premade ingredients. The term “Semi-Homemade” comes to mind. (Isn’t that the name of a cooking show?) For example, we used premade pasta sauce to put on our spaghetti. Sometimes if time is tight I use precooked canned beans to make refried beans. We just do what we can when we can.
Simplifying cooking is a hack with foods like:
- mac’n’cheese
- rotini lasagna
- scalloped potatoes
- chili
- spaghetti
- molletes
4) Get some good cooking tools
You may not need kitchen equipment as big as mine, but you’ll get the idea. When dealing with large amounts of food, you need big pots, big bowls, big measurers, and big pans.
When we made a batch of any kind of homemade bread, we use at least 6 cups of flour to get enough food for one meal. This applies to pancakes, biscuits, rolls, cornbread, etc. Our 8 quart mixer fits this job just right. With a 4 cup liquid measurer, I can measure liquid twice instead of 3 or 4 times. 👍
The 2 gallon pot pictured above gets used almost daily for pastas, soups, sauces, potatoes, etc. That automatic stirrer makes homemade sauces possible. (I found it on Amazon.) Without it I just wouldn’t have the time. Cheese sauce gets made the most around here, but we also like white sauce, chicken gravy, and beef gravy.
Other tools that come in really handy are a big slow cooker, a big instant pot, a rice cooker, a giant whisk, a food processor, and some good knifes for cutting lots of fruit and vegetables.
Please don’t go run out and buy a bunch of new things you don’t need. We’ve been collecting kitchen gadgets over our 20+ years of marriage to have as many as we do. I just want to share with you the things that help in my kitchen, and give ideas for what might be helpful in yours.
I hope my cooking hacks can help make your cooking and your adventure a little easier. Thanks for reading my post.
