Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:47 — 24.5MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS

Today let’s answer the question: how can I make a quick and healthy dinner for my family? I’m going to share with you three super practical ways that you can start making faster and healthier dinners today.

The three secrets that we’re going to dive into are:

Effectively planning ahead
How to find truly fast recipes
Simple ways to start cooking faster today

If you are tired of the dinnertime frenzy and ready to feel good about what you feed your family, then this post is for you.

3 Secrets to Making a Quick and Healthy Dinner for a Family

Tell me if this sounds familiar: It’s dinner time and you’re staring at your partner asking each other, what should we have for dinner tonight? If you have little kids you’re probably coming up against bedtime and if you have older kids you’re struggling to get something healthy on the table between soccer practice and dance.

I get it, because I’ve been there. Once we had kids, we realized that we could no longer be planning last minute when we got home. We both worked full time and we’d pick our son up from the nanny at six o’clock and then we’d be asking ourselves what are we gonna have for dinner tonight?

We quickly realized couldn’t be spending time walking down the street for groceries, then making dinner, and still make it to bedt on time.

And we certainly couldn’t afford to keep ordering in every night that we hadn’t effectively planned.

So the steps that I’m going to share with you today are some that I have perfected over time. Listen, we still have dinnertime scramble in my house, but it is few and far between and I attribute it to these three secrets that I’m sharing with you today.

Dinner in our house isn’t always gourmet, but we do almost always a clear plan for what we’re going to have for dinner.

Prefer to watch?

Secret #1: Effectively Planning Ahead

Now listen, I get that meal planning isn’t how you want to spend your time. I understand that it doesn’t feel sexy to have to decide seven days ahead of time what you’re going to want to have for dinner.

Most folks that I meet who say “I’m meal planning now” go and write down on a calendar every breakfast and lunch and dinner. They have a plan for every specific thing.

The problem that I have with this is twofold:

TOur brains don’t work this way. We are humans who are full of cravings and whose schedule is always changing, especially once we have kids and it’s not realistic to decide ahead of time exactly what we’re having at every single meal.
When folks meal plan this way they often think that they need to be cooking for every single meal or that they need something new and innovative for all of these different eating events in their life. And I have seen firsthand that this is not only super challenging, but it can actually get quite expensive too.

Building a Simple Meal Plan that Works

The method of meal planning that I’ve settled on and that I use in planning meals for my Clean Plates, Happy Parents membership group is actually pretty straightforward. It’s kind of unsexy and it’s very, very simple.

Step 1: Be super realistic in your meal planning. I like to take a look at my calendar and say like how many meals do we actually need this week? I don’t decide exactly what we are going to eat every night based on what we have going on. Rather, I take a macro perspective of what do we have going on this week? How many meals are we not going to be home for?

Step 2: Use a simple template to plan 3 quick and healthy dinners. My template just has breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are no days associated with it and I fill in the meals for the week. My goal is always to have 1 simple breakfast, 1 make ahead lunch for me, and 3 quicky and healthy dinners.

You can get a free blank template just like this one by signing up for my email list! Sign-up below and I’ll send it to your inbox. No need to reinvent the wheel!

Now you might be thinking “we’re going to eat at home more than three nights”. Yeah, probably.

How do I handle that? Well, I have found that when I plan more than three dinners, either for myself or for my clients, they struggle to make all of the meals. So three nights is a sweet spot where even if you miss a couple of nights at the beginning of the week unexpectedly, you still have time to use the ingredients before they go bad.

It also allows for space for either leftovers, easy takeout, a freezer meal, or doing something super simple like a snack dinner.

As you can see, there are all kinds of options to fill in those other nights! But by holding myself to three dinners per week, I find that it’s more realistic and less intimidating.

So if you are guilty of planning seven dinners in a week and then wasting ingredients, try the three dinner method instead! Once you do, head on over to Facebook or Instagram and let me know how it goes.

Secret #2: How to Find Truly Quick Recipes

Now that you’re sold on planning ahead, you’re going to need to know how to find truly quick recipes.

Picture this with me: You get Blue Apron box or you pick out a recipe that says it takes 20 minutes. You start following the instructions and you suddenly find that you were supposed to have a bunch of stuff chopped in order to order to make this. Your chopping skills are not fantastic yet because you haven’t spent it a lot of time building them. And an hour later you have whining kids. You’re checking your watch and cursing the recipe because it took you way longer than you anticipated and now everyone’s hungry and you’re relying on peanut butter and Jelly for dinner.

We’ve all been there.

The thing is is that I have found that picking truly fast recipes that you know will be quick is key. And to do that you’re going to need to be able to recognize them beyond the “Prep Time” that’s listed.

So how do you do that? Because I love you, I’m going to share my secret formula.

Step 1: Look for a recipe that has no more than 7 to 10 ingredients.

Keeping the number of ingredients low naturally keeps the amount of work down because you have less pieces to maeuver. The more ingredients, the more steps you’ll need to take to get those ingredients into the meal.

So often, the challenge in making a fast dinner is actually in the chopping and prepping part of things, not in the actual cooking. Because you can’t make meat cook any faster, but you can reduce the number of onions and garlic and carrots you spend time chopping.

Here are some great examples:

Shrimp with Green Sauce: Less than 6 ingredients and tons of flavor. Pair with a veggie and/or grain on the side for a complete meal.
15-Minute Cauliflower Fried Rice: 8 ingredients and only 3 steps in the instructions. I bet you could use coconut oil in a pinch here if you didn’t have sesame oil on hand.
Grilled Balsamic Steak with Tomatoes and Arugula: 6 ingredients total (some are used a couple of times). The only thing to note is that you’ll want to marinate the steak the night before, which requires a little forethought but makes the recipe even faster and more flavorful on your cooking day.

Step 2: Look for Recipes that Don’t have Details Instructions in the Ingredient List

What the heck does that mean? Take a look at these two recipes:

As you can see above, the “simple” recipe has far fewer steps embedded into the ingredients list than the “complex” one

This is a great example of what I mean when I say “look for recipes that don’t have detailed instructions in the ingredient list”. Remember, the more steps that you have to take before even getting started with the recipe, the longer it will take to cook.

Just to be clear, it’s not that the recipe writers are trying to mislead you. It’s just that we all chop at different speeds. And those of us who do it for a living will be much faster than others who are doing it less often.

Side note: there is also no shame in getting help from the grocery store. Some of my favorite ways to do this are to buy:

Buy pre-chopped onions or garlic
Use frozen veggies
Find ways to cut down on the chopping requirements for recipes in your own way.

So if the recipe is very complex and you see you’re going to have to do a lot of pre-work, feel free to buy pre-chopped where possible.

Step 3: Stop Relying on Recipes

I know that the prospect of cooking without recipes can be really scary for some of us. In fact, before I went to my culinary program was convinced that I’d never cook without a recipe.

But the more you embrace the art of simple dinners, the more easily you can put random things together and call it dinner.

One staple in our house is “snack dinner” where we just throw a bunch of things on a cheese board and call it good:

Some other examples of recipe-free things that I serve are:

Pasta with frozen veggies and maybe some meat and jarred pasta sauce
Chicken with frozen veggies, with curry paste and coconut milk
A can of black beans, frozen brown rice, salsa, and avocado

Just the act of not having to reference a recipe will save you time!

Ready to make some meals without recipes? All you need is this super simple meal formula (or one that works for your family):

Wholesome carb: brown rice, sweet potato, Quinoa, millet, whole grain bread.
Protein: beans, eggs, beef, chicken, fish.
Healthy fat: avocado, olive oil, healthy dressing (like Primal Palate or Tessamae’s)
Sauce for flavor: hot sauce, soy sauce and sesame oil, curry paste in coconut milk, salsa, tomato sauce

Secret #3: Cook Faster

I know, I make it sound so simple. But seriously, if you want to make those Blue Apron meals in 30 minutes or just want to make any recipe faster, you’re going to have to master a few kitchen skills.

Skill 1: Chopping Faster

You do not work in a French restaurant. I do not work in a French restaurant. Given that, it actually doesn’t matter what your onions and your garlic and all of those things look like.

Here’s what matters:

Getting comfortable chopping safely so that you don’t chop any fingers.
Being confident in chopping small and large pieces so that you can do it quickly and efficiently.
You should have enough control to ensure you cut things into even sizes so that they cook evenly.

I have a whole post on “5 Tips to Chop Faster” if you’re interested in hearing more.

Skill 2: Practice Good Setup Techniques

The second hack for cooking faster is to practice good setup techniques.

I have found time and again that you will cook faster if you set up your cooking station effectively.

Here’s what it looks like:

A large cutting board that isn’t slipping away: I love this one but a damp towel under any cutting board will help with slippage
A sharp chef’s knife: This is my favorite
A garbage bowl
A clean kitchen towel

Skill 3: Clean as you go

True story, this is what I look like in the kitchen:

So if I can clean as I go then I know that you can too.

Here are some easy ways to do that:

Work into your garbage bowl
Wipe your work area often so that you’re not dropping things all over the ground
Work directly into the dishwasher so that you aren’t creating a pile and more work for yourself later

Quick and Healthy Dinner Recipes

Ok, ready to get cooking? Here are some quick and healthy dinner recipes that are tried and tested in our kitchen:

And don’t forget to plan your meals ahead!

Try this: pick 3 dinners that you can serve your family this week. Then put them on the printable meal planning sheet.

Sign-up for the email list below to get my Easy Meal Planner sent directly to your inbox!

This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.