Boost Your Dinner-Prep Efficiency For Quicker Meals

Making a proper dinner when your short on time is difficult, so the household mavens at RealSimple detail how to use five-minute windows to make short work of your dinner prep. For example:

b>Chop vegetables. “Onions, peppers, broccoli, zucchini, squash — they can all be chopped ahead,” says caterer Peter Callahan of Callahan Catering, in New York City. “Just cover them with a damp paper towel to keep the cut ends from drying out, then refrigerate.” If you won’t need the vegetables for up to 12 hours, pop them, towel and all, into a plastic bag. (Onions and other frequently used vegetables can be chopped, then frozen in plastic for 3 weeks.)

The article offers several different tips of this kind, but the overarching idea is simple: If you’ve got a few minutes here and there to prep different aspects of your dinner ahead of time, putting it all together can be a relatively quick and painless process. I’m never more impressed than by those kings and queens of the kitchen who can make an incredible meal over the course of a day putting seemingly no effort into it, but clearly these are the kind of things they’re doing. If you’re a master of the distributed, painless dinner prep, let’s hear your favourite timesavers in the comments. Photo by viZZZual.com.