A BIG announcement!
My tool for mastering multitasking.
Hi there,
Let’s start with the BIG announcement I teased in the subject header: Say hello to the Say Goodbye to Sunday Scaries Meal Prep Club! What’s that, you say? Well, Abigail and I had such a blast teaching last month’s virtual meal prep class that we’re doing it again, this time as a whole dang series—we’re hosting 4 delicious, informative, extremely fun (duh!) meal prep classes over the summer months. You’ll come away from the summer with 20+ flavorful recipes, the best meal prepping tips and tricks in the game, on demand recordings of each class so you can make them work for your schedule, and the confidence to meal prep like a pro. Each of the 4 classes is available a la carte, but we’re also offering them as a package with huge cost savings—a 30% discount, to be exact (deals, deals, deals!)—you can sign up for the package to join our little *club* of folx meal prepping with us on the regular.
Tickets sold fast for our first class together, so we decided to give newsletter subscribers (hey, that’s you!) an exclusive heads up about this series. Grab your spot and join our little meal prepping club:
Each class we teach comes with the most important (repeat: the most important) tool in my kitchen organization arsenal: a detailed “game plan”…
In essence, a game plan is a carefully considered order of operations you plan to execute while you cook. Meal prepping efficiently requires a lot of multitasking and excellent time management skills. If you’re looking to improve on either of those fronts, implementing a game plan is the way to do it.
Here’s How:
Select your recipes. This may mean you’re pulling recipes from online, a cookbook, or working with a general idea of a dish you plan to cook intuitively. To make things easier to follow, we’ll work with the following (color-coded) simple example menu throughout this how-to section:
Write down the general procedure you plan to follow for each recipe. If you’re working with recipes you pulled from a blog or a cookbook, this was already done for you by the recipe writer. Add a general estimate for how long each step will take you. This doesn’t have to be exact, it’s just to give you an idea of how long each step might take. For our example menu, here’s what that looks like:
Re-order your steps so you’re working on all your dishes simultaneously. Think about having something in your oven (or getting ready to go into your oven), on your stove top, and on your cutting board at most times as a way to ensure you’re using your kitchen time most efficiently. Let’s take a look at how that might come together for our example menu:
Cook through your game plan. Know that sometimes your timing estimates will be a bit off, and that’s okay. Move on to another step while you wait, or adjust your list to move a shorter step toward the end of your time. Use the game plan as a general guide, and pat yourself on the back when your meal is done in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise. That’s it, but here’s a final little pitch for using a game plan:
In the case of our example dinner, if you were to work on the chicken from start to finish before turning to the potatoes, and complete the potatoes before working on the kale, it would take you about an hour and a half to finish the meal. I realize this is a little unrealistic—many of us intuitively do some sort of multitasking while we cook. But taking the time to write out a game plan with time efficiency in mind is not only going to improve your timing for that specific meal or meal prep (in our example, it cut our time in half), it will also help you get a better understanding of timing and work flow in the kitchen in general. It will make you a better, faster, more confident cook. And after a while, you’ll have such a good, intuitive feel for what steps should happen and when that you won’t need to write a game plan down at all.
I’m speaking from experience, here; I spent the first few months of my time as a personal chef writing extremely detailed game plans before each client visit. Over time, the game plans got less thorough until eventually, I wasn’t writing them at all. The game plan made efficient multitasking second nature and made me a much better cook in the process.
If you still feel a bit iffy about implementing a game plan, we walk you through exactly how to use one in all our Say Goodbye to Sunday Scaries classes. It’s the reason we’re able to cook so much in such a short period of time. But don’t take my word for it—here’s a review from a past student with a very stocked fridge:
Alright, I think that about covers it for this week. As always, stay in touch—keep me posted on the goings on in your kitchen and let me know if you have any questions about Say Goodbye to Sunday Scaries. You can respond directly to this email, drop a comment below, or shoot me a DM on Instagram.
With love and a *tip* of my chef’s hat,
Erica
Want more? I’m so flattered! You can also follow me on Instagram or check out my blog where you can find my tip-laden e-book collection.