I recently saw an article called 5 Kitchen Rules to Eating Right, and I thought How can I expand on that list?

The 5 rules listed in that article were:

1. Season to Taste
2. Utilize the advice of others
3. Create your own recipes
4. Shop for the best
5. Utilize your local farms

I agree with all of those (further description is provided in the article itself) and thought I’d add my own list of 5 tips that we also implement:

1. Make enough for leftovers. That way you can bring a good meal to work with you for lunch without having to worry about running out to spend too much money on junk that doesn’t even taste very good.
2. Make use of the crock pot. Letting something slow cook throughout the day is an easy way to have dinner ready when you get home without a lot of fuss, and if your crock pot is big enough it can provide a few meals worth of food. That beats the heck out of getting home from a run at 7:30 or 8:00 at night and then having to start cooking.
3. Make your own stock. Whenever I grill or roast a whole chicken, we’ll toss the bones into the crockpot along with whatever veggies aren’t looking so good in the fridge and that we wouldn’t really want to eat anymore and make a good stock that night, and then we turn that stock into soup the next day. 1 meal quickly turns into 2 different meals with plenty of leftovers. If we haven’t roasted a bird in a while and waited too long to eat the vegetables in the fridge, a vegetable stock beats merely adding to the compost pile.
4. Make your own bread. Why spend $3 or $4 for a loaf of bread that you have to go out to get? We have a dough recipe that we spend 15 minutes stirring up on the weekend (it’s left wet so no kneading required, just a few minutes of stirring.) Then, whenever we want a loaf of bread, we just cut a hunk of dough out, let it warm up and rise on a pan, and then bake it for a half hour. So, when making a loaf, you are looking at 5 minutes of work and about an hour total time and you have fresh bread whenever you want it for about 15 cents a loaf, if that.
5. Make your own croutons. We’ll often make an extra loaf ahead of time and let it get stale; all our croutons for our salads are always home made and much tastier that the junk you can buy at the store. It’s like small pieces of garlic bread for making our dinner salads that much tastier.

Granted, my tips pretty much all relate and build upon one another, and there are only 2 people in our household currently so it isn’t a gigantic production to produce extra food for lunches. If you have kids or roommates, then you may not have quite as much left as we tend to.

Still, it’s good advice and what we do in our kitchen.

What are your tips? Add them here, and if enough get dropped perhaps I’ll compile them into a report. When you are done, click through to the ProGrade Blog and leave your tips there, as well; they’re choosing the best tip they receive to get any of their products for free.