If you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably a busy mom looking for time-saving ideas for a healthy kitchen in order to help your household run more smoothly. Food prep and kitchen work seems like it oftentimes take a lot of time. Especially if you cook from scratch and make an effort to lead a healthy life, cooking and keeping a healthy kitchen can sometimes seem like a time burden.

There’s a lot of convenience food out there, but most of it is not health-promoting. You’ll get calories and basic macro-nutrients (protein, carb, and fat) but it may not be of the best quality. As a mom of three small children running a home business, I don’t have the luxury of spending tons of time in the kitchen. But I also want our family to be healthy and for our children to eat real food. So today I’m sharing my nine best time-saving ideas for a healthy kitchen!

Meal Plan Your Dinners

The best of my time-saving ideas for a healthy kitchen is to meal plan your dinners. This is something I do every single week, even if it’s an unusual week where we’ll be eating at a restaurant more often than usual. Meal planning, while it might feel tedious at first, will ultimately ease your mental load. (And we all know how much of a mental load that moms carry!) Once you meal plan your dinners, you can see at a glance what’s on the docket each night.

Meal planning also allows you to make an accurate grocery shopping list for the week and saves you money. You will only buy what you need for that week’s meals and will be less likely to impulse-buy. I find it even easier to stay on track if I do a grocery pick-up order, because I’m not seeing random things that I might like to have.

Have a dedicated notebook or app for meal planning. I have a paper booklet that is clipped on the fridge. Each weekly layout has a block for each day and a column for a shopping list. I write in pencil in case I need to change anything. I personally don’t usually plan breakfasts and lunches, but you could do that if needed.

Make Simple Meals with Less Ingredients

When meal planning, recipes with delicious yet long ingredient lists will be tempting. But don’t think that in order to make tasty food, you need to make complicated recipes. Stick to meals that have less than 10 ingredients and ideally around 5 ingredients (not including salt and pepper). Also try to avoid recipes that contain more unusual ingredients. These tend to be more expensive, harder to find, and more likely to be wasted because they’ll only be utilized once.

A quick way to find simple meals is to do a search on Pinterest “recipes with 5 ingredients or less.” I have a Pinterest board with ideas to get you started! (Make sure to follow me there too.)

Use a Slow Cooker or Pressure Cooker

Two kitchen gadgets that take up a lot of room on the shelf but are totally worth the space are my Crock Pot and Instant Pot – aka slow cooker and pressure cooker. If you want to have food ready right at dinner time with the least amount of prep work, a Crock Pot is the way to go. The easiest idea is to throw in a beef or pork roast with potatoes and carrots, pour in about a cup of water or broth, and sprinkle your favorite spices on top. Cook it on low for 6-10 hours, depending on the size of the meat, and your family can sit down to a hot dinner at exactly the right time.

An Instant Pot, or pressure cooker, comes in handy when you haven’t thawed out meat. Yes, this can still happen even when meal planning! (It happens regularly to me.) If you’re cooking from a totally frozen state, you will have to allow at least an hour for it to cook (especially if it’s something larger like a whole chicken). But if your meat is already thawed, it can take 30 minutes or less.

Don’t Be a Short-Order Cook

This means that whatever is being served for dinner is what everyone is going to have! No special “kid food” for the children. It’s still hard for me to think about, but my kids won’t starve if they refuse to eat dinner and I don’t give them an alternative. Eventually they will decide eat!

If you have someone in your family with dietary restrictions, like being gluten-free or dairy-free, it is so much easier to serve everyone the same dish. With spaghetti and meat sauce, for example, it’s much simpler for everyone to eat gluten-free pasta instead of boiling a pot for gluten-free pasta and another for regular pasta. If it’s something like shredded cheese or sour cream as a topping, or croutons on a salad, then that is easy to let those with the dietary restriction avoid the food or use an alternative.

Make One-Pot Meals

This is another area where Pinterest comes in handy. Do a search for “healthy one pot meals” or “healthy sheet pan dinners.” One-pot meals do not just mean casseroles! Some examples of “one-pot” meals are:

• Sheet pan dinners
• Soups
• Stews
• Chili
• Pot pie
• Meat with baked potatoes (like meatloaf or whole chicken)

I love utilizing cast iron skillets because I can start the meal on the stovetop and then put it directly into the oven without transferring to another pan. This is how I do my chicken pot pie, for example.

Prepare Breakfasts Ahead of Time

This is not something I currently do because we take our mornings fairly slowly. But if you have to get the entire family out of the house every morning or most mornings, prepping breakfasts is a huge time and sanity saver. Once again, utilize Pinterest and search “healthy breakfast meal prep.” Some ideas you might find are:

• Overnight oats, soaked oatmeal, or baked oatmeal
• Egg casserole or quiche
• Ground sausage and potato skillet
• Prepped frozen smoothie bags (just add milk and protein powder)
• Yogurt and fruit parfaits (sprinkle granola on top in the morning)
• Boiled eggs, veggie slices, and fruit
• Chia pudding
• Homemade frozen waffles or pancakes with frozen sausages
• Frozen breakfast burritos
• Items prepped to make a breakfast charcuterie board (see picture below)

Use Healthy “Fast Food”

There is no shame in using shortcuts as a means to feed your family healthy options! Prepared healthy “fast food” may be a little pricier than doing it 100% from scratch, but it could be the difference between cooking at home and getting takeout. As I write this, we are definitely leaning more on this tip than usual due to our upcoming cross-country move with the military. I have limited kitchen utensils and less time than normal, so this is currently amongst my favorite time-saving ideas for a healthy kitchen. Some healthy fast foods might be:

• Pre-cut fresh vegetables and fruit
• Frozen or organic canned vegetables
• Pre-made sauces like marinara or pizza sauce
• Shredded cheese
• Pre-washed salad greens or salad kits
• Pre-seasoned cuts of meat
• Canned beans
• Flour mixes, like for pizza dough, biscuits, or pancakes
• Rotisserie chicken
• Pre-cooked sausage links

Grocery Shop in Bulk

Grocery shopping in bulk, like meal planning, takes time on the front end and saves time when you need it most. When you have your most-used ingredients in bulk, it is easier to whip up a recipe last-minute if needed. It will also save you time with in-store grocery shopping because you won’t have to go as frequently and won’t need to find as many items.

My two favorite ways to shop in bulk are at a wholesale club (like Costco, BJ’s, or Sam’s Club) and online. My two favorite online resources are the Azure Standard food co-op (referral link) and Vitacost. With Azure, you place the order online and then pick up your order at a specific time and place called a “drop.” With Vitacost, you order online and it’s simply delivered right to your door.

If you want to check out what Azure has to offer, I’ve made several Azure haul videos on my YouTube channel.

Cook Meals in Bulk and Freeze Extra

If you’re buying food in bulk, why not cook in bulk? If you’re already cooking for your family, it makes sense to make a double or triple batch. You can use this bulk food either as dinner for multiple days during the week, or lunches, or you can freeze the extra food for later.

Certain cooked foods will freeze better than others, like shredded meat, soups and stews, and casseroles that don’t contain pasta. Alternatively, you could freeze prepped uncooked meals and then pull them out when needed. Just search “healthy freezer meals” on Pinterest for recipe ideas. They can be cooked directly from frozen in an Instant Pot, or in the Crock Pot if defrosted first.

I like to make enough sourdough to make two loaves. I’ll bake one and then let the other loaf stay in the fridge until the next one is almost gone and we need a second loaf. That way it’s fresh!

Be Realistic with Your Schedule and Goals

It’s important to remember that time-saving ideas for a healthy kitchen can only go so far. Life happens, and it can happen a lot when you have little children. It’s important to build margin into your days, which for us means eating out usually once a week. Properly managing stress is an important part of a healthy life, and sometimes the benefits of getting takeout outweigh the downsides. For example, I know in the next several weeks that we’ll be eating out much more often because of our military move – and that’s okay! I’ll cook from scratch when I can and be stress-free about not having as many home cooked meals.

Ultimately we are called to have gratitude for the abundance of food that God has blessed us with! He has given us the task of stewarding our families well, and one way to do that daily is to offer nutritious and delicious meals. They don’t have to be perfect or pretty, but they should always be infused with love and care.

Are these tips helpful for you? What would be your 10th time-saving idea for a healthy kitchen? Share in the comments!