Why We Have a Weekly Kitchen Day – Batching Kitchen Tasks
Running a simple home is not easy – it takes time and energy to keep up with things. One of our biggest tasks is food. We make almost everything from scratch, and seldom eat out, so we spend a great deal of time in the kitchen. We spend a lot of time on food prep and clean-up. Having a weekly kitchen day, makes the rest of the week run much more smoothly.
If you’ve read my post about keeping a simple weekly rhythm, you know that I believe in the value of ordering our days. Blocking out time to focus on specific tasks is very efficient.
If you’re a stay-at-home mom like I am, you might sometimes feel like there is no end to your to-do list; no sense of accomplishment at the end of your day.
You may look around your home before you collapse into bed, and realize it doesn’t look any different than it did when you started. And yet you were busy all day long. Tomorrow you will get up and do it all over again.
Our weekly Kitchen Day falls on Monday.
Monday is the perfect day for us to spend in the kitchen. Our weekends can be a little chaotic and unscheduled, so Monday is a great day to get back on track.
Tuesday is our general cleaning day, which is so much faster when the kitchen has already been taken care of!
Here are some of the tasks we focus on, on Kitchen Day.
We don’t do all of them every week, but we pick and choose what most needs to be done and what we have time to fit in.
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Our Weekly Kitchen Day Tasks
- clean out and organize the fridge
- use up leftovers
- make soup
- clean out the freezer
- wipe down the outside of the fridge and stove
- tidy up the pantry
- bring up items from downstairs to refill the pantry
- make a grocery list
- make a meal plan for the rest of the week
- wipe down cupboards
- clean out a cupboard or a drawer
- sweep and wash the floors
- wipe down walls as needed
- make ketchup and/or mayonnaise
- make Kombucha
- do any preserving that needs to be done
- tidy up the cold room
- clear off the countertops and wipe them down
- organize recipes
- scrub the sink
(Our simple recipe for homemade cleaning powder can be found here).
- bring up meat from the freezer to defrost in the fridge
- make any herbal remedies that we need, or DIY products like toothpaste or hair spray.
Check out this beautiful Healing Herbal Teas book for lots of herbal tea recipes!
- take extra mason jars downstairs (I have a cupboard for these that tends to fill up, as we eat our home-canned foods we have lots of empty jars)
- bulk food prep
Some weeks we get a lot done, and other weeks we just tackle the basics. But it feels good knowing there is a day set aside for these tasks.
Why we have a weekly kitchen day
When you block out time for certain tasks, you don’t stress about them the rest of the week, because you know its day is coming. You can block them out of your perpetual to-do list, because you know you will get to them on Monday.
Some weeks we might have appointments, or other things going on, and we don’t get to any of it. That’s ok, because Monday will come around again next week.
It’s not about becoming a slave to your schedule, it’s about freeing up your mind.
Having a weekly rhythm means I don’t have the stress of worrying about a thousand different tasks every day. Whatever thing that pops into my head that needs to get done, gets mentally filed into whatever day it belongs in.
Does it have to do with bill paying/budgeting/scheduling? Office Day.
Is it an errand? Errand Day.
An outdoor/gardening task? Gardening Day.
Cobwebs in the corner? File it on Cleaning Day.
You get the idea.
(You can read my simple weekly rhythm post here).
Having a weekly rhythm frees up my mind and removes a lot of stress from my life.
Do you have a certain day of the week you assign to kitchen tasks? What do you do on that day?
