Sometimes I feel like my wife and I spend more time planning meals than cooking them. It’s a weekly brainstorming session where we somehow forget every dish we’ve ever enjoyed and have to come up with brand new dinner ideas from scratch.
Then we are busy during the week and we don’t feel like cooking because it takes too long or we miss an essential ingredient. It’s a vicious circle of expensive takeaway food combined with unused groceries.
Not anymore! We swore to organize it culinary. Here are three great tools we use to help us keep the kitchen in order without spending a lot of time on it.
Nice and quick and easy
If you’ve ever been on a cooking blog, you know that most recipes start with about 15 paragraphs of the chef’s personal backstory before getting to the actual step-by-step instructions.
Enter Yummy, which collects great recipes from the nearly endless collection of cooking sites on the web. It conveniently creates a landing page of sorts for each recipe, telling you how long it will take to make, the ingredients you’ll need, and even offers to find nearby grocery stores to have those ingredients delivered. Once you’ve decided to commit to a particular recipe, you’ll be taken to the original cooking blog.
tasty’s Quick and easy part is a must for finding recipes that use only a handful of ingredients, but take a handful of minutes to make, or both. You will find enough to keep the stove warm day in and day out.
And if you’re running out of ideas from Yummly, Epicurious has: a great quick and easy section also.
Allrecipes Dinner Spinner
If you often find yourself screaming inside, “I don’t care what it is, just give me some food!” Then the Allrecipes Dinner Spinner deserves a spot on your phone. It’s a fun tool that generates recipes for you based on the type of dish, the ingredients you have on hand, and the cooking time.
You can manually choose to include one, two or all three categories or leave them all unchecked for a truly random outcome. You then shake your phone to spin each row like a roulette wheel. It’s an easy way to conjure up dinner ideas, especially if you don’t know what to cook or don’t want to think about cooking at all.
The Cookie Rookie
Don’t be fooled by the name: The Cookie Rookie is about much more than baked goods. It’s a great site if you’re a little serious about learning how to cook, but still looking for easy, quick recipes.
There’s plenty here that can be made in under 30 minutes with just a handful of ingredients, along with helpful categories like “Slow Cooker,” “One Pot,” “5 Ingredients or Less,” “Kid Friendly,” and more.
Each recipe includes clear instructions, step-by-step photos, ideas for related side dishes, and handy printable cards that automatically adjust ingredient measurements based on the number of people you’re cooking for.
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