BLT Chicken Salad

Here are a few shortcut strategies to save time in the kitchen while preparing meals for you and others in your household.

1.       Plan ahead. Planning can be a huge time saver when it comes to putting food on the table. If you know what you want for dinner the next night, and you have meat in the freezer, thaw in the fridge the day before. When preparing the meal, plan to start with tasks such as marinating a protein, or bringing water to boil, or preheating the oven first. That way you don’t have to wait for those things while you’re cooking.

2.       Buy shortcuts where possible. For example, jarred minced garlic is fairly inexpensive and can go a long way while reducing time for meal prep. Bagged salad, shredded cheese, store-bought salad dressings, and rotisserie chicken are a few others. Sometimes these can be more pricey than if we prepare our own, but sometimes it’s also important to weigh cost vs. time.

3.       Leave the peelings on. Not only do vegetables provide more nutrients with the peelings, it saves you a lot of time in the kitchen. Keep peelings on potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini or whatever other vegetables you cook with often.

4.       Stretch your leftovers. If you’re making taco meat one night for a casserole dish, cook up some extra to do tacos or nachos the next night. With proteins often taking more time to cook, this can be a huge time saver to cook large batches to use with multiple meals throughout the week. Also can do with other items such as pasta or rice. Cook once, eat twice!

5.       Microwaving is not cheating. Use your microwave when possible to heat things up such as vegetables for steaming. Not only can this reduce meal prep time, but helps to limit the heat in the kitchen in these hot summer months. One of my favorite quick meals for lunch lately is cooking a sweet potato in the microwave for 5-6 minutes, then cut in half and top with black beans or chickpeas and Greek yogurt or sour cream. It’s so good!

6.       Invest in a food chopper and/or mandolin. You can chop, slice and dice veggies in half the time or less.

7.       Keep a short list of quick meals you enjoy. This can help when planning meals for the week, especially if you know what nights you may have a shorter time to prepare food. Or if plans change, you have ideas for a back-up plan that doesn’t involve an overpriced takeout dinner.

Nothing screams summer more to me than a nice cold, crunchy BLT. This BLT chicken salad twist has some shortcuts to enjoy a quick, tasty meal!!