Making dinner for your family is easy. Making dinner for your family every single night is a challenge. Alas, there’s just no getting around it. You need to feed your loved ones, and it’s not as if you can order takeout food every night — even if you wanted to, that’d cause too much damage to your bank balance. 

While it’s unlikely that you’ll ever make dinner time completely automated and easy, it’s certainly within your control to make things easier. In this post, we’ll run through some handy tips that’ll remove many of the headaches that can accompany your evenings when it comes to cooking for your clan. 

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Make a Plan

A little bit of planning can do wonders in all aspects of your life. Coming up with a plan takes next to no time at all, yet it can make a big difference to your ability to prepare food for your family. Each Sunday, write out what you’ll make for dinner on each night of the forthcoming week. That way, you’ll know just what you’re making, and you’ll know what ingredients you need to pick up from the store. 

Look Up Straightforward Recipes

You want your family to eat well, sure, but you don’t want to spend forever in the kitchen. From time to time, you can spend 4+ hours making a world-class meal for your loved ones, but you can’t do that every evening. To ensure you can feed your family healthy dishes and keep your time in the kitchen to a minimum, be sure to look up some easy-to-make recipes. If you know how to make instant pot Korean short ribs, for instance, you’ll always have something delicious to serve your partner and children. There are a bunch of healthy and quick recipes out there online, so make sure you have a few saved. 

Learn How to Use Varied Ingredients

We mentioned earlier how it was a good idea to put together a plan of all the things you will cook throughout the week, so you can make sure you pick up the right ingredients from the store. But there will come a time when, for whatever reason, you just don’t have a couple of the ingredients that you need. It’s at that point that you can begin to feel a little stressed, since you do, of course, have to give your family something to eat. You might use this as an opportunity to order takeout, but if money is tight, then that might not be a welcome option. One good skill to have in the kitchen is knowing how to use ingredients that you do have to create a dish. That way, you’ll always be able to pull something together, even if it’s not a standout meal. 

Recruit Cooking/Cleaning Help

It’s difficult doing everything on your own. As they say, many hands make light work! You can make the task of providing your family with food more straightforward by recruiting help wherever possible. How you do this will depend on the dynamics of your family — if you have teenage children, for example, then they could perhaps help with prepping vegetables, and they can certainly help with cleaning up. You might be in charge of the cooking process as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that you need to do all of it. Plus, this gives you a chance to instill some good lessons/skills in your children. 

Embrace the Process 

Everything’s more challenging if we view it as a chore. If you view cooking dinner as something that you have to do, then it’ll be much more likely that you feel pretty miserable. Instead, reframe the act in your mind. You can view it as something that you get to do. There’ll come a time in the future when you don’t have to cook meals for your kids each night, so learn how to appreciate it now. Plus, there are other ways to embrace the process, too. You could play your favorite music or have a glass of wine when you’re cooking. Anything that’ll help to put you in a fun mood, basically. 

Don’t Strive for Perfection 

Finally, you can make preparing dinner much more straightforward by going easy on yourself. You don’t need to produce the perfect dinner each night. In fact, you don’t need to provide the perfect meal on any night. If you’re giving your family a meal, then you’ve done your job. Everything else, such as an awesome taste, is a bonus.