Cooking at home doesn’t have to be a struggle! Here are our 5 tips to make cooking at home simpler & easier. It can be a great way to save money and enjoy delicious, healthy meals. At this stage in our life, with 3 small children, we try to cook at home as much as possible because going out is not always practical or affordable. We have come to find that our recipes are good, if not better than a restaurant. Cooking at home not only impacts our budget but our health as well, considering we cook with a lot less ingredients! Here are some tips to make cooking at home simpler.

Here are our top tips to make cooking at home easier:

1. Always make a meal plan. You’re much more likely to cook at home when you have a plan. It also makes it easier to have the decisions done for you so you aren’t trying to decide at the end of the day, because let’s be honest, decision fatigue is real. We have a ton of recipes on our blog to help make that easier. If you haven’t already, download our FREE weekly meal planner to help keep you on track!
2. Thaw your meat at the beginning of the week. This has been a game changer for us! We use to always forget to thaw our meat and then it’d be close to dinner and we would be too tired to figure something else out. After we make our menu, we thaw all our meat, at least 3 days worth to start! For the last two months we’ve been getting our meat from Butcher Box and we have no complaints. You definitely can’t beat the quality of Butcher Box since we are getting grass-fed meats, pasture-raised chickens and wild-caught seafood. Currently we are doing the large custom box and it seems like we have more than enough each month. Actually, we’ve had to push our next billing date out longer which is not terrible! Right now you can get FREE chicken tenders in every box when you sign up! We highly recommend the tenders!
3. Double whatever you can. Whenever you can, double a recipe to either enjoy the next night as well or freeze for another time! I know a lot of people don’t love leftovers, but with 3 kids I’ll eat anything leftover if that means it makes a meal easier for me haha! Things that freeze great are soups, skillet meals, cookie dough, bread, etc. I freeze EVERYTHING! I love Souper Cubes for freezing, they’re portioned out freezer trays that are great for stacking. They make freezing and thawing so simple and I use mine ALL THE TIME! You can use the code daddioskitchen for 10% off!
4. Keep a stocked pantry. We use most of the same ingredients for our recipes so keeping a stock of those items is super helpful. For example, we frequently rotate through the same spices so keeping those on hand and buying them in bulk really helps. I used to buy all sorts of pantry items just in case we used them at some point and then I realized they never got used. So now we buy the majority of the same stock and we’re good to go since we rotate through most of the same recipes! We get most of our ingredients from Costco, Thrive Market (you can 30% off your first order and a FREE gift worth up to $60!), Aldi, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s!
5. Get your kids involved (if you have them)! I know it can take longer, but the lessons are invaluable. It teaches them skills they would not otherwise learn and gives you time together. We don’t always involve ours because sometimes it’s just too overwhelming, but when we do they love helping! I let them use these knifes and this little chopper. If I don’t have much for them to do, I try to let them cut cucumbers or something easy which usually results in them snacking on them!

There are lots of great tips out there to make cooking at home easier, but we’ve found these to be our top five favorites! Let us know in the comments if you have any favorites or great tips to share!