The Trick to Successful One Pot Meals: Preparation

When you're looking for ways to save time in the kitchen, making a whole meal in one pot has to top the list.  You just have to grab a big pot, grab your ingredients, and go, right? But wait. This is where the idea and the implementation collide.

You've got your pot sitting on the stove, alright, but then you're looking at a pile of ingredients that seem to have taken over the kitchen. Suddenly, you realize that your one pot meal is going to be a lot more work than you planned.

There's the chicken that needs to be cut up and the vegetables that need to be cleaned, peeled, and chopped. The recipe calls for cooked rice and there sits the box of rice, uncooked. You think about searching for another one pot recipe, but by the time you interrupt what you're doing to dig through recipes, you are going to find yourself frustrated as the clock ticks away, resulting in yet another call to the pizza delivery place.

How do we stop this madness? It's really not with magic at all; it's all about planning and preparation. Here are a few simple ways to plan ahead so your easy one pot meals actually end up being as easy as they should be.

Protein

Cooked chicken torn into strips in preparation for a dish. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No matter what protein you're using in your one pot meal, get the basic preparation done well before hauling out the pot. If the recipe calls for boneless, skinless chicken, get the bones and skin pulled off the chicken as soon as you bring it home from the grocery store. If the recipe calls for cubed chicken or beef, cut it up ahead of time. Another tip to remember is slightly frozen meat cuts up easier than fresh meat. Put the chicken or meat in the freezer for a half hour and then cube it if you wish. You may want to freeze it after you cut it up to keep it fresher longer. Another bonus is that frozen cubed meat thaws faster than frozen whole meat.
If you really want to speed up your protein prep work, check the recipe to see if it calls for browning the chicken, beef, or ground meat. You may wish to do this step beforehand and store the cooled meat in the refrigerator or freezer to be used when you're ready to put the meal together. In this case, remember, the pan drippings (the brown bits on the bottom of the pot) may be a part of the flavor element for the recipe, so keep this in mind. But, if speed is most important, this step may be the best choice.

Beans are another protein we use a lot in one pot meals. As simple as it sounds, if you use canned beans, open the cans you're going to use that week, drain and rinse them, and store the beans in containers in the refrigerator. Now when you're mixing your one pot meal together, you just open and dump out the beans, removing the need to even grab the colander during your mealtime preparations.

Produce

One of the most time consuming parts of preparation for any meal, whether it's a one pot meal or not, is getting the vegetables cleaned and cut up. In restaurants, the chefs can concentrate on getting the dish cooked to perfection because all the ingredients are sitting there nicely prepared and waiting. Most of us don't have the luxury of having a sous chef busy in our kitchen working to make our life easier! So, we have to plan ahead.

The best way to make sure we can put our meals together quickly is to have all the produce prepared ahead of time. And, the best way to do that is to do the prep work when we bring home the produce - or pick it from the garden! If you wait until dinnertime, chances are time will get short and you'll find yourself chopping celery when you should already have it in the pot.

Take a look at the recipes you plan to make this week. Do the dishes call for things like onions, celery, green pepper, spinach, carrots, parsley, lemon juice and zest, or other produce? Get ahead of the game by washing, peeling, slicing, dicing, squeezing, or otherwise preparing these fresh ingredients. Then, when a recipe calls for a diced onion, you can reach for a Tupperware container of diced onion and throw it in. No cutting boards, no knives, and no clean up to worry about. Planning ahead is the key.

Pasta, Etc.

Many one pot recipes call for some sort of grain or seed ingredient, whether it's pasta, rice, quinoa, bread, or another fiber. Even these food items can be included in your preparation planning. If the recipe calls for cooked rice or quinoa, for instance, you can stock your refrigerator or freezer with plenty so you are ready to grab it and go.

Cover of One-Pot Meals (Great Taste, Low Fat)

If the recipe calls for raw pasta to be added in the pot with the other ingredients, this makes it easy. But if it needs to be cooked first, you can make the pasta ahead of time according to package directions, but be sure to leave it slightly under-cooked so your don't end up with mushy pasta after it cooks in the dish. Put the drained, cooled cooked pasta in a food storage container and drizzle olive oil over it to prevent it from sticking to itself, then keep it in the refrigerator. You can even use cooked pasta in a recipe that calls for uncooked pasta - just reduce the liquid in the recipe and throw the cooked pasta in during the last minutes of cooking time, just enough to heat it up.

Some favorite one pot meals call for dumplings or biscuits dropped on top. It is easy to whip together a simple dumpling or biscuit dough, but do it in advance. Divide the dough into pieces the size you need for your recipe and wrap them up in plastic and put them in the freezer. They will keep for quite some time and be ready to grab to plop on top of your delicious soup or stew when you need them.

Putting meals together quick and easy calls for more than a simple recipe; you need to know how to work smarter in the kitchen. Planning and preparation go a long way to getting meals on the table in a hurry. Use your time wisely to make cooking from scratch more simple, efficient, and delicious!