Sheet-Pan Pineapple Chicken Fajitas Recipe photo by Christine Ma for Taste of Home
Sheet-Pan Pineapple Chicken Fajitas Recipe photo by Christine Ma for Taste of Home
Published on Jun. 27, 2025
From our kitchens to yours.
Everybody has to eat. It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures and also one of its biggest stressors. Weeknight cooking can get overwhelming pretty quickly. Shopping for groceries, storing food, prepping ingredients, cooking meals and cleaning dishes takes up a lot of time and mental energy.
If you’re anything like the Taste of Home editorial staff, then you love to cook delicious homemade meals despite juggling a lot of competing priorities. We get it! Since we spend literally all day thinking about food, I figured it would be a good idea to compile our top tips and tricks for getting dinner on the table in 30 minutes.
Some of these might be things you’re already doing, and some might be a new way to think about meal prep. Whether you’re brand new to cooking on your own or have been making family meals for decades, there’s truly something here for everyone.
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1. Organize Your Fridge
Organizing doesn’t mean that you need to go out and spend a lot of money on aesthetically pleasing containers (although if you want to, go ahead!). It’s as simple as putting a basic system in place. “I find that if there’s too much in there, ingredients and leftovers get lost and sometimes wasted,” says Test Kitchen manager Catherine Ward. She has it down to a science: “Fruits, greens and veggies on the bottom shelf, meats and cheeses on one side of the middle shelf and leftovers on the other. Top shelf is yogurt, eggs, pickled items and Asian sauces and condiments. All other condiments and butter are on the door.”
You can take it one step further and make sure containers have their label facing forward. It makes it so much easier to see everything at a glance. This way you’re not digging around to make sure you grabbed the plain yogurt instead of the vanilla, for example. Plus, when everything has a designated spot, you can quickly see what you’re running low on, or what you need to use up.
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2. Shop Smart
Going to the grocery store without a plan is like throwing a bunch of random clothing items in a suitcase and hoping you have some good outfits to wear on vacation. You’ll probably get by just fine, but chances are you’ll be wasting precious cargo space lugging around a bunch of clothes that you never wear. Imagine showing up for a beach vacation with a ton of sweatshirts!
It’s the same with buying food. Just 10 to 15 minutes of planning can save you energy and money while shopping. These are a few ways that our staff streamline the grocery-shopping process:
- “I meal plan on Saturdays.