Cooking is a valuable life skill that everyone should have, but it can be hard for some to master it. Many people can’t afford to spend a lot of time in the kitchen even if they might enjoy it, and this is especially true in the case of college students. Here are 3 tips for making cooking easier and less time consuming if you’re a student:
Meal prep
Meal prepping has become increasingly more popular over the last few years, and for a good reason. It’s incredibly time saving and it can also help you save money and reduce food waste. Meal prepping is highly customizable, and you don’t have to prep all meals or all ingredients: just find something that works for you. For example, I like chopping my vegetables and making salad dressing in advance and keeping them in the fridge so that they’re ready to be thrown together whenever I need to eat something but don’t have time to cook.
If meal prepping sounds like a good idea to you, you should also look into meal planning, where you plan your meals for the entire week in advance. Again, this is highly customizable: for example, you can only plan what you eat for dinner or plan only for a couple of days at a time rather than a whole week.
Always have pasta on hand
I don’t know about you, but pasta is one of my favorite foods of all time. I love the fact that it comes together relatively easily and with little effort, so it’s a great dish to make when you don’t have that much energy but you’d still like to eat something filling.
Just like pasta, I think it’s a good idea to stock up on a few other versatile items like rice or potatoes, which also have a long shelf life. Frozen, pre-cooked alternatives like vegetables or even pizza are also good to have on hand for when you really don’t feel like cooking at all, or when you’re in a rush and need to throw a meal together in a pinch.
Freeze some of the things you’re cooking
Making bigger batches of food and freezing some of them is a great way of saving time. I love using this hack with things such as chocolate chip cookies, which you only need to take out of the freezer and pop into the oven for a quick, easy dessert.
Freezing fruits and vegetables is also a good way of saving time and money: if you have too many veggies and some of them are about to go bad, chop them up and place them in a zip-lock bag in the freezer. They’ll last for weeks in there and you can easily take some out and add them to various dishes whenever you need to.