6 Tips for Easy-to-Make Dinners
When developing better eating habits, busy people like you often struggle with dinner the most. It comes at the end of the day when the heading out and making your way in the world or taking care of home and family have equally drained your energy and time.
And sometimes the worst happens, and you are already hungry for dinner and start asking each other, “What do you want to do for dinner?” This is when the urgency created by hunger leads to fast food or other quick, convenient and usually unhealthy choices.
And the next day, the cycle continues. However, I’ve figured out how to solve this problem: Get your own cooking show! Treat your dinners like your own cooking show. You’ve seen how easy it looks to prepare meals on a cooking show, right? Everything is laid out in small prep bowls, and the chef already knows the planned dish.
Why not make your dinners just as easy? Here’s how to do it:
Write out a plan for dinner every night of the week (especially weeknights or whatever nights are often a trouble spot for planning).
Be specific by listing each dish and each component of each dish in the meal. The plan can also include details of who is preparing each meal if your schedule is variable and it will not always be the same person.
Generate a shopping list of specific items and ingredients to make each meal.
Go shopping at a time where you aren’t hungry or hurried.
Pre-prep as much of the food as possible: chop veggies, trim skin/fat from meats, wash lettuce, etc. (Purpose: to make your dinner prep like a cooking show where as much as possible is done ahead of time).
(Optional) Organize and store all the ingredients for each dinner with color-coded lids by buying different sets and choosing a day of the week for each color.
By pretending your dinners are a cooking show, you’ll be able to streamline the process of getting dinner ready by having a plan and executing the plan in step-by-step fashion. Breaking up anything seemingly complicated into a series of smaller, easy-to-follow steps “shrinks the change” and makes it seem less intimidating and more realistic to achieve.