Vegan life hacks for those with busy lives

So I, like us all, have a busy life. In this day and age, who doesn't? A misconception I had before I went vegan is that there would be no time to be vegan. That is not true. If there's time to cook, which we all have to do, there's time to be vegan. It is true that being vegan does involve being in the kitchen a lot but so does any lifestyle. There are some life hacks for busy vegans that could easily be incorporated into any lifestyle.
1. Salads don't take much time to prep at all. All you have to do is cut up some veggies and boom, you have a salad. Smoothies are the exact same way.
2. Cook a lot at once. I like to try to yield leftovers when I cook to save me some time later. This works really well for things that won't spoil easily such as pastas and quinoa but it does work for a lot of things if you eat them within a few days. Along those same lines, to save time making school or work lunches, you could also have your dinner leftovers be tomorrow's lunch.
3. Clean up as you go. Cleaning the kitchen is never fun and can easily be the most time consuming part. Once you put something in the oven or it can otherwise be left alone for a short time, that's a good time to get most of the cleanup done. Bonus: this also allows you to serve your food in a clean kitchen if presentation matters to you.
4. Add items to the grocery list as you think of them and take the list with you on grocery store day. I used to always sit down on Sunday right before going to the grocery store and try to remember absolutely everything I need and I'd usually forget something. Because of this, I'm trying to get into the habit of adding things to the list as I run out of them and then I'll have already done 85% of the work.
5. Finally, try to come up with a series of recipes you want to try during the week and write the ingredients on that grocery list, and as you come across recipes you want to try, forward them to next week. This allows you to have whatever you need the first time and not go back and forth every two seconds. When I need certain ingredients for a recipe, I group those together and put a box around them (for example, when I tried cauliflower wings, I needed cauliflower, garlic powder, and rice flour. Rather than putting them into their separate categories on my list, I put them together and drew a box around them to remind me these were for a recipe). Along those same lines, get to know the layout of your grocery store and what's where so you can write the items on your grocery list in order of when you come across them instead of aisle hopping.
6. If you need to make any ingredient substitutions, which you sometimes will to make a recipe vegan, know what you can substitute and how to substitute it. There's nothing worse than not knowing that. This allows me to instead of searching for vegan recipes to simply pull up any recipe and make it vegan. If you want me to do a post about ingredient substitutions to make a recipe vegan, let me know and I will gladly get one up for you.
These are some life hacks I use to save time cooking and meal prepping that I hope will be helpful to you. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or ask on Instagram and I am available to answer them.

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