Cora's Cottage

In our busy lives, it can be hard to find joy in the kitchen. Regardless of how much we love to cook or bake it can be hard to find it enjoyable when we’re rushing from one thing to the next and we never are able to savor the time we spend in the kitchen.

One way to help combat this is to prepare things in advance or bless our future selves. There are lots of ways to do this but one of my favorites is to batch my food preparation. Another way we can bless our future selves is by saving money on our kitchen bills and saving time at the grocery store. A simple way to do this is to buy things in bulk which often means we will need to portion out those items.

Honey

Last summer, I started buying my honey in bulk from a local producer. For us, this looks like buying honey at least a gallon at a time. However, when honey is left for an extended period of time it will often crystallize. Therefore, as soon as I come home with my gallon bucket of honey I split it out into quart canning jars.

Not only does putting the honey into canning jars make it more manageable when I am actually using it in my kitchen, but it also allows me to easily de-crystalize the honey as I need it without having to worry about heating up the plastic bucket it originally came in when I purchased it.

A bonus tip for when you’re measuring honey to help save you clean up time: measure in your dry ingredients. When you know a recipe will call for honey, start by measuring out all of your dry ingredients such as salt, sugar, flour, and baking soda. Once you have all of the dry ingredients in the bowl, take your measuring cup or spoon that you will need to measure out the honey and press it into the dry ingredients. In the impression you have created in the dry ingredients, pour in your honey. This method keeps your measuring utensil clean enough that you can wipe it down and place it back in the cupboard rather than having to wash out the sticky mess honey leaves behind.

Liver

Getting extra nutrients into your family can be difficult especially when it comes from things such as liver. My family is just like many others and doesn’t care for the taste of liver, so I have had to get creative about how to include it in my recipes.

The main way that I include liver into our diet on a regular basis is by grinding and portioning it out to add to ground meat recipes. To do this I start with the whole liver and thaw it out in the refrigerator.

When the liver is thawed, I will remove it and run it through the grinder. I just use the grinder attachment for my KitchenAid, but if you do not have a KitchenAid or the grinder attachment for your KitchenAid, small hand grinders can be found on Amazon for a reasonable price.

Once the liver is ground, use a square silicone mold placed on a cookie sheet to portion it out. In my particular silicone mold each square is approximately equivalent to one tablespoon. After the liver is spread out into the silicone molds I place them into the freezer.

After 24 hours, I remove the silicone molds with the liver from the freezer and pop out the liver cubes. I store the liver cubes in quart or gallon Ziploc bags in the freezer where I can quickly grab four to six cubes for each pound of ground meat that I use in a recipe.

When I started using this method my family didn’t even realize it until they saw me adding the liver to the recipes. While it doesn’t seem like a lot of liver to add to a recipe, it’s better than none which is what my family was consuming before. Not only does this add nutrients to my family’s diet but it does so in a way that allows me to use all of the liver without it going bad.

Onions

Our family loves onions and they get used in nearly every dish. That being said, if I were to chop an onion for every recipe that I needed as I needed it I would be chopping onions every day sometimes multiple times a day!

To get around this, I have started chopping onion into a large glass jar that I then store in the refrigerator. I have found a jar that will last us approximately a week before I have to chop onions again.

Occasionally, we will get to the end of the week and not all of the onion will have been used up. When this happens, I will portion out the onion into single-meal increments, place them in zip lock bags, and freeze them for future use.

This method works well because not only does it bless my future self this week but can bless my future self well into the future. When I go to use the frozen onion, I don’t need to thaw it therefore I don’t need to worry about planning too far ahead making it even easier to toss that onion into a recipe last minute.

Loose Leaf Teas

Herbal tea blends can be expensive, so if you drink them a lot it makes sense to mix your own blends. However, making it up one tea bag or ball at a time as you drink it is quite time consuming.

Instead of mixing your tea blends one tea bag at a time as you drink it, mix up several bags of tea at a time. In this method it is often best to buy your loose leaf teas in bulk from a supplier like Azure Standard or Mountain Rose Herbs.

Some of my favorite supplies for mixing my own loose leaf teas include a small silicone funnel, reusable tea bags, 2 quart Mason jars for storing my herbs, and bamboo kitchen organizers for storing the tea bags once they are mixed.

When I make tea this way it is very easy to grab a tea bag as I’m leaving the house to head out or in the mornings when I’m busy. It also doesn’t keep me from drinking tea throughout the day if I decide in the afternoon that I would like a cup of tea when my hands are full with the baby.

Cheese

There are multiple reasons for buying your cheese in the block form rather than shredded. If you choose to do this like we do, it can be time consuming to shred your cheese as you need it. Instead of doing this, I have started buying my cheese in bulk and shredding it all at one time before freezing it in small increments.

We get our bulk cheese from Azure Standard and shred it the day that we get it. We simply cut the blocks apart into small manageable pieces and run them through our KitchenAid grater attachment, but before we had this attachment we used a hand grater.

After the cheese is shredded, we will portion it out into one to two cup increments in zip lock bags before placing them into the freezer. As we need cheese we will remove one or two packages of cheese and allow them to thaw in the fridge.

Shredding cheese this way gives our family the health benefits of shredding it ourselves without having to shred cheese every time we need it for a meal. Not only does it save us the shred time during meal prep, but it saves us has having to repeatedly clean up the grater.

Cream Cheese

When I started my journey of buying many foods in bulk I quickly learned that a lot of things can be frozen that I didn’t realize could be frozen. One example of this is cream cheese.

I often buy cream cheese in a large block. When I received the block, I make sure that it is hard from the fridge before I slice it into 8 oz increments. This is often made simple because the packaging has lines on it noting how much cream cheese there is at each mark.

Once the cream cheese is cut I wrap it in parchment paper and then tinfoil before placing it in a zip lock bag to freeze. When I need cream cheese I simply remove it from the freezer and allow it to thaw in the refrigerator overnight.

Blessing your future self doesn’t just have to be preparing food in advance. It can also look like buying food in bulk to save money for a future trip or to limit your trips to the grocery store. Whatever blessing your future self in the kitchen looks like for you, it is valuable if you find it helps to bring you more joy and lower your stress.