Cooking is not a chore; rather, it is one of our most effective ways of nourishing our bodies and influencing our health. Making a tasty and healthy home-cooked meal is not only a matter of picking the right ingredients and possessing the best culinary skills. Upgraded appliances, a clean kitchen, and proper lighting are some things that are often overlooked but can encourage you to make a good home-cooked meal.
Here are some tips on how to prepare a good home-cooked meal easily:
1. Upgrade Your Appliances
The complexity of meal prep can make you feel like picking up your phone and order in some food. The dicing, cutting, grating, pounding, name it all, can drain off your energy and enthusiasm. Upgrading your appliances can save you from such a situation. A range of appliances is meant to simplify your cooking process as you make a good home-cooked meal. These appliances include:
Food Processor
A food processor is a frequently overlooked appliance that makes chopping, dicing, mixing, and emulsifying food quick and simple. The best food processors can quickly and easily prepare large amounts of fruits and vegetables. They have an ergonomic design with sharp blades and powerful motors.
They are versatile appliances because you can also use them to blend your ingredients and make a puree. Other food processors have an attachment that can assist in grating things like cheese for the perfect lasagna or a pulse setting that aid in blending flour and butter for the ideal spongy cake. You can get a food processor from any appliance store and ease your cooking process as you make a good home-cooked meal.
Food Chopper
Food choppers are excellent when preparing food in small batches. Food choppers can do many of the choppings, slicing, and shredding activities that food processors are known for, but they take up less space in the kitchen. They aren’t as powerful as a food processor, so you can’t chop as much with them, but that’s also a benefit because you can swiftly prepare small batches of ingredients.
So, if you’re tired of getting teary over sliced onions, or fine-slicing garlic, a food processor will take care of those and many other chopping duties for you, reducing the amount of time it takes you to prepare a good home-cooked meal and simplifying the whole process.
Rice Cooker
If you have cooked rice several times before, you will understand how challenging it may be to cook it perfectly each time. Suppose the water to rice ratio is not appropriate, the stove temperature is not precisely adjusted, or you get too busy and forget to check on your boiling pot of rice. In that case, the rice will turn crunchy, soggy, or even worse, burnt.
Rice cookers handle all the labor-intensive work for you. Before turning it on to cook, simply add the rice and water. After that, let it simmer so that the grains are perfectly cooked. You don’t have to watch it to know when it’s done or immediately shut off the rice cooker. Once everything is done, it will simply switch to the mode of keeping it warm.
Rice cookers come with manuals showing the water to rice ratio, so you don’t have to stress about making mistakes anymore. Instead of using your normal pots when cooking rice, upgrade to a rice cooker and enjoy making a good home-cooked meal.
Propane Gas Stove
One of the essential kitchen appliances is the stove. We saute, fry, boil, and steam there, and by making a single easy switch, any of these culinary techniques can result in a good home-cooked meal. Gas stoves make your cooking easier and more effective compared to electric stoves. Also, propane performs better compared to normal natural gas.
One of the best features of propane stoves is a long central burner that fits grill or griddles pans and evenly heats them. Therefore, you can enjoy making your Sunday breakfast pancakes over the burner. Propane ovens also have convention ovens and sealed burners for simpler cleaning.
Broiling is made less smokey, hygienic, and orderly. Lastly, cooking using propane is less expensive. Propane stoves can have a 30% lower operating cost than electric stoves! Enough reason to cook more delicacies consistently.
2. Remodel Your Kitchen
Remodeling your kitchen is one of the ways that encourage you to make a good home-cooked meal and eases the entire cooking process. Study shows that people are happy to prepare meals at home when their kitchens are remodeled, encouraging them to lead healthier lifestyles.
Kitchen remodeling enhances energy efficiency and functionality, increases storage space, and improves your kitchen’s comfort and safety. Here are some of the remodels that make your kitchen a better place, making it easier to cook:
Install Hanging Open Shelves and a Pantry
Without ruining your vision of a sleek, modern kitchen or overcrowding your worktops, hanging open shelves can offer much-needed storage. Don’t overlook the pantry area either. The kitchen cabinets may appear like the most convenient place to store all of your food, but they are not designed for bulk purchases. Use a small area to build a pantry room so you can keep food there for extended periods.
Add a Kitchen Island
A kitchen island can be a good place to enjoy a good home-cooked meal. Adding a kitchen island can make more space for seating or setting down cooked food. Even better, you can convert it into a workstation with open shelves on the sides to accommodate your food chopper, cheese grater, cutting board, and other minor items you need for meal prep before you begin cooking.
Range Hood
In addition to reducing cooking odors, a range hood helps manage moisture when boiling water. When a lot of moisture gets trapped in the walls of kitchens, mold can grow there easily. The wetness can be eliminated using a range hood.
Before turning on your burners while using a gas stove, you should turn on your hood. Carbon monoxide, which is harmful to human health, is released during the initial combustion when a burner lights.
Ensure that the range hood is big enough to capture the moisture and fumes from the back, front, and burners. A range hood will make your kitchen airier when preparing a good home-cooked meal.
Water filter
A water filter is ideal for removing bad taste or odor, retaining minerals, and reducing impurities. Cooking using filtered water enables you to achieve good results consistently while baking. Filtered water also cleans your ingredients more efficiently.
3. Relocate Your Sink
Relocating your sink enhances functionality. For instance, the relocation could significantly improve productivity and comfort if it is situated outside the usual work triangle (sink, cooker, refrigerator). Other drawbacks can include poor lighting or better space management. Sink relocation can also enhance the room’s aesthetics making cooking a blissful affair.
Finding room to move the vent pipe and ensuring enough space to give the drain pipe enough pitch are the two most challenging problems when changing kitchen plumbing for a makeover. You can easily move your sink with a plumber who is an expert in residential plumbing service.
4. Install New Light Fixtures
You should never overlook the importance of appropriate lighting in your kitchen, regardless of how well-lit your entire home is or how wonderful the rooms appear. You need proper brightness to ensure that the exact components and quantities are used for each meal.
You need enough light for your cooking process and routine kitchen cleaning and dishwashing to avoid missing a stain. Here are the main types of lights appropriate for your kitchen:
Task Lights
Task lights illuminate the cleaning, food preparation, and cooking areas. You can work safely and with less eye strain if there is precise lighting focused on these areas. Many fantastic options provide appropriate lighting for these spaces, including hanging lights, recessed lights above the island or in the pantry, and LED light strips beneath the cabinets.
Ambient Lights
As the name suggests, ambient lights are meant to create a good ambiance in your kitchen space as you make a good home-cooked meal. Treat the kitchen as if it were an extension of the living room to help you create a great ambiance that seamlessly blends in with the entire house.
To create such an environment, you should consider combining aesthetics and functionality. An electrical contractor or handyman should help you select and install the best light fixtures for your kitchen’s more diffused, direct, and warmer lighting.
Accent Lights
Accent lights are frequently used to draw attention to specific items, such as artwork and valuables. Track or wall lights are the best options for this purpose. In addition, you can put a light inside a glass cabinet to highlight the contents. It can also be used to highlight specific features of your kitchen space.
Decorative Lights
Decorative lights are frequently used to complete the aesthetic of a space. When choosing the appropriate decorative lights, you should pick a light that complements the area without dominating it. Pendant lights are a great choice of decorative lights for the kitchen island.
5. Keep Your Kitchen Clean
A messy and untidy kitchen makes your process of making a good home-cooked meal hectic. it’s easier to manage a clean kitchen when splatters and spills occur. Insects and rodents are also less likely to be drawn to it. Additionally, you can prevent germs and foodborne diseases. Here are some of the areas and things you should always keep clean for easier cooking:
Utensils and Storage Containers
Utensils and storage containers must be thoroughly cleaned with a detergent-based cleaning solution after each use. With clean utensils, it’s easier and faster to prepare a delicacy as you will have ready kitchenware and appliances for use.
Kitchen Counters
Kitchen counters are essential in placing your fruits, vegetables, and other ingredients during meal prep. Dirty and cluttered kitchen counters can cause inconveniences while preparing meals, ruining your cooking experience.
Fruits and Vegetables
As soon as you return home from the grocery shop, wash all your fruits and veggies with a veggie cleaner that helps eliminate pesticides, germs, and waxes. Cleaning them is a food safety precaution but a better way of preparing them for storage.
It’s so much easier to make a good home-cooked meal when the fruits and veggies are clean since you can easily locate them and only need to wash them briefly before meal preparation.
Stoves and Ovens
When they are clean, stoves run more efficiently. After using the gas burners and electric coils, wipe off any food spills from the surrounding area. For difficult-to-remove food buildup, use a toothbrush to clean them up.
For the oven, spray an oven cleaner or scrape the inside with water-based cleaner and vinegar. Cooking in a clean area makes the culinary process much easier and more efficient.
Windows
One of the key elements of a house is a window, which facilitates ventilation, lets in sunlight, and adds to the overall comfort of space by circulating fresh air. Windows need to be cleaned daily or at least twice weekly since dirty windows are an unpleasant sight.
The dirty windows also prevent the sun from adequately lighting up the space, making it hard to prepare and make meals. Therefore, window cleaning is probably one of the most crucial jobs contributing to a kitchen space’s practicality, functionality, and aesthetic appeal.
When it comes to making a good home-cooked meal, modified appliances to make your chopping and slicing easier and a remodeled kitchen with a kitchen island for dining play a crucial. In addition, proper lighting fixtures with a glass ball light for ambiance and a clean kitchen with clean utensils and containers make all the difference. All these features are a worthwhile investment of your time, money, and energy as you’ll get to perform all your culinary tasks and cleaning activities more efficiently in your kitchen space.