I ALWAYS forget to start the rice ahead of time. Never fails and tacks on an infuriating extra 20-30 minutes.

We once made a fantastic pancetta-wrapped rack of lamb with a fresh thyme-pistachio pesto, and getting individual thyme leaves off the sprig (so as not to waste any of our precious thyme) felt like a massive waste of time. Since then we've saved time by using dried thyme, even though we prefer to eat fresh thyme.

Any suggestions?

After moving to San Francisco where many rentals don't have dishwashers, I've found that cleanup takes much longer than I'm used to.
Other than that, my biggest timing error is that I tend to start dinner without carefully reading recipes first (I'll meal plan at the beginning of the week but by the time Thursday comes around I may not remember all of the details), which sometimes means I start cooking at 6 and eat at 8:30. When "simmer for 20 minutes" and "cover and simmer for an hour" are buried in a paragraph of text, I don't always seem them until it's too late.

With a toddler vying for my attention, prep time always takes longer than it should. I got into the nice habit of prepping some things such as chopped onions and other veggies on Sunday afternoons/evenings and placing them into plastic bags/tupperware containers so they would be ready to go during thework week but the lazier summer months got me out of that routine.

Chopping always seems to take forever, especially if there are multiple onions involved. Then what REALLY sucks up all my time is cleanup. Fortunately my husband is willing to help with that.

The two things that use up the most of my dinner making time are inability to decide what's for dinner and defrosting the meat once the decision has been made. I have tried menu planning many times. It helps, but our crazy life always goobers up the plans.

A trick that I learned from Rachel Ray (yeah, I know.): plan our your meals and prep everything when you get home.

It seems really time-intensive BEFORE you actually do it, but I print or photocopy every recipe I plan to make for the week and when I get home I check what needs to be done. This usually amounts to about 20 minutes of washing and chopping vegetables and then putting them in containers, but it is SO WORTH IT. When dinnertime rolls around, I just have to open a container and dump out the contents.

If I'm being extra thorough, I'll put reminders in my phone to take things out of the freezer to thaw.

I find that cleaning fresh mushrooms takes me a while. Perhaps I should invest in a mushroom brush.

For me it is the grocery shopping since I cook by whim and inspiration. Meal planning for a week seems like an impossible task.

1) When baking, I always forget to take the butter out ahead of time to soften.

2) I forget to thaw meet ahead of time.

3) Dishes.

Other things may actually take more time, but these are the thing I notice slowing me down most. Dishes are definitely a lengthy step given I don't have a dishwasher :-(

I always get slowed down by:

1. Forgetting to take the butter out of the freezer and waiting for it to thaw.
2. Defrosting meat.
3. Preheating the oven.
4. Cleaning dishes--especially time consuming when the dishwasher first must be emptied out before it can be filled up again.
5. Prepping veggies.
6. Walking to the store to buy that one ingredient that I thought I had enough of.

The clean-up, every time, without fail. I love everything about cooking but the cleaning. I think it's because while my kitchen is a good size for an apartment, it's still an apartment-sized kitchen, and therefore looks messy quickly. So I sneer at the mess and vote to watch a couple hours of television before I return to divide and conquer.

I am always and forever forgetting to defrost my meat or to set things out to come to room-temp.

Waiting for sauces, custards, etc to thicken always seems to take forever, too. I get so impatient just stirring and stirring endlessly. But I guess that's the nature of cooking: waiting for the science/magic to kick in.

Prepping takes me the longest. I enjoy knife-work and usually listen to podcasts as I cook, so time scurries by without my noticing. "How is it already 10 o'clock?!"

The other thing that gets me is doing more than one major dish or component at a time. I often think, "Oh, I'll do the salad while the soup is simmering", but it's a rare soup that actually simmers untouched for 20+ minutes. And somehow the prep work for a salad (the mincing of garlic for the vinaigrette, the washing of the lettuce, the toasting of the croutons...) always steals more time than I anticipate. My partner always jokes that I'm the only person who takes over an hour to make a salad. If I'm feeling really robust, I'll start a baking project, too.... and I might as well kiss the next three hours goodbye.

I spend most of the time chopping. Which makes me think I should invest on a magical chopping tool...

Portlandy, on your use of thyme, why don't you just hold the twig and pull along the stem the "wrong" way. The leaves come off in one go.

Second that.. chopping stuff always takes the most time. I usually prep extra whenever I need to cut up stuff and refrigerate or freeze for other meals. I find it saves much time overall with fairly little planning.

I'm with EvaToad. I don't know what it is, but everything takes me forever in the kitchen. I don't mind it, if I'm doing something ahead of time, but trying to make dinner on a Sunday took me forever last night. Chopping, prepping are my biggests wastes of time, I guess.

Clean up. Namely, washing the dishes. It is the part both my boyfriend and I hate the most.

Quiche - so tasty and rewarding after - but I have to make or thaw crust, cut up vegetables and or meats, cook them, make an egg mixture, bake them, trying not to ruin the crust or make the eggs dry - it takes hrs to make a decent from scratch quiche - and lasagna - I refuse to use no bake so that takes me hours of prep as well

Doing dishes and cleanup definitely takes the most time. Also, I find that because I have a small NYC apt with limited counter space, I end up being less efficient when I cook because instead of laying everything out neatly before I start cooking, and have a space where I put dirty utensils, garbage etc., everything ends up piled on top of each other and I spend a lot of time fumbling around trying to make space.

That, and chopping veggies.

Definitely dishes. I have a little DVD player parked next to the sink and often will watch a movie to help pass the time if I have a big job to do...like is awaiting me as I type.

I did a podcast for a while about multitasking in the kitchen: www.cookinginrealtime.com. I recorded each podcast in real time, while cooking a whole dinner. It was really interesting to see what took more time and what took less, and how much I spent running back and forth. I'm reasonably fast with a knife, so that wasn't too bad. I was also able to do a lot of cleanup while waiting for things to brown, etc--you can train your ears to listen for cues, rather than hover over the stove. But washing salad greens and other veg is always a bit of a drag--for that reason, I often try to wash lettuce and herbs as soon as I get home from the store, then have them ready to grab for meals all week. They hold up if you put a paper towel in the bag.

portlandy: You can also use whole sprigs, then pick the stems out before you serve. Although I'm not sure that would work with your lamb rack recipe, if they were under the prosciutto.

brandiego: I read a totally fascinating thing on the CIA blog about how submerging mushrooms in water isn't actually the disaster you think, all very scientifically tested. Here's the link:

http://cookingissues.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/crowded-wet-mushrooms-a-beautiful-thing/

Er, and I also just brush mine a teensy bit with my fingers, to get any big bits of dirt off. I'm trusting that the growing medium is sterile enough. Hasn't hurt me yet.

kay_jay: Sauce thickening can happen a lot faster if you just put the heat up more. Not all the way, but most recipes tell you to keep it super-low just as a safety measure. But I usually do gravies and things with a heavy simmer on.

(Er, I mean the blog for the French Culinary Institute...but the link's the same.)

I used to lament the fact that chopping ingredients took me so long - I remember that for my chicken noodle soup, I always had to chop up the carrots, celery and onion before I started cooking anything or else whatever was in the pot would burn while I cut the next thing. But my knife skills have gotten so much better than now I can do it fast!

The biggest time waster is thinking of what to make. If my husband or roommate come up with a suggestion, I can whip it together pretty quick. Sometimes I can come up with meal ideas but those nights when I'm lost, it'll be 8pm before I finally get into the kitchen and whip something together.

I do a lot of multitasking while I cook but if I forget to soften the butter at room temperature or defrost meat, that puts a wrench into my time table. In those cases, I make use of the microwave to help me out in a pinch.

However if I forget to preheat the oven while chopping veggies or something similar, I'll shake my head and move along.

With the extra time that I have to wait, I'll bring homework in the kitchen with me or read while I wait for the food to finish cooking if i don't have anything left to do.

I also "clean" as I go along. I can't stand a messy kitchen. By clean, I mean put the spices away when I'm done with them, put things back in the fridge, put the dirty dishes in the sink. My husband does the dishes after dinner.

I also have to admit...I learned from Rachel Ray about putting veggies/herbs in a container with a paper towel. That has really extended the life of my produce.

The biggest time suckers for me are pre-heating the oven, and starting a recipe without reading or remembering all of it. I'll miss a long cooking time, or labor intensive steps.

I also have a tiny apt. kitchen, and sometimes I have to spend a couple minutes clearing space for the next step in the recipe.

Definitely chopping. My husband and I cook together though so the extra time is just more time to catch up - not a waste at all.

Definitely chopping!! We are a household of just two, and as a result our meals are usually one-dish items such as curries, pastas, stews, stir-fry, etc. This means every dish involves lots of veggie chopping, protein chopping, starch chopping (curse you, potatoes!!) And you would think that with all this chopping I would get pretty fast with a knife ... but no :(
I am intrigued by the above-mentioned idea of chopping all veggies when you get home from shopping, but i am thinking that this won't really "save" time so much as just re-arrange the chopping time to a more convenient moment. That would certainly be a stress-saver though!

Another stress-saver for us has been weekly menu planning. Dinner is the only real cooking we do (breakfast is protein powder and lunch is leftovers) Sitting down once a week and writing out a menu of dinners for each night, along with a corresponding grocery list, has REALLY helped us out a lot - no pressure when we get home from work to try and figure out what to make, just look on the menu and go! Also this helps us to maximize any extra time we do have, by planning to cook the more elaborate or experimental dinners on nights when we know we do have said extra time (say on Friday or on a day when work is at home), saving the simple and familiar dishes for nights when we know we'll just be tired and hungry. So i guess it's not so much about time-saving, but efficient use of time.

Chopping definitely takes the most time. I'm a slow perfectionist, so if we need to make dinner quickly, my husband--a fast imperfectionist--does the chopping.

Last night we did our weekly grocery shopping AND roasted a chicken after a full workday. You can do more than you think on a weekday evening.

The chopping. Dear god, the chopping. Emeril's "30 minutes" for his vegetarian chili balloons into hours and hours of slicing and dicing. It's worth it, but it was SUCH a nasty surprise the first time I made it.

Defrosting meat!!! I hate it. My husband calls me a "vegetarian by convenience" because I loathe preparing meals where I have to dethaw meat. (Poor guy is a meat n potatoes man, too...so we've worked out a deal where I'll make a meat-type of dinner as long as he dethaws and preps it)

For this one reason I keep trying to make myself plan weekly meals but I'm just not that organized. When I shop for groceries I get the basics for meals, but I when it comes to dinner that day I make whatever I feel like eating. Since I never know when I feel like making a meal with meat in it I cant leave it in the fridge.

Everything else goes by fast for me--chopping, rice, boiling, dishes (I never do these right after dinner, so it doesnt seem as bad) and I'm pretty good at multitasking, just hate dethawing the MEAT! Ugh!!

Oops--should be defrost or thaw meat. Not dethaw meat! ;)

Organize. That'll help with a lot of time issues. Also, clean as you go. My mom taught me this growing up and I still do it! By the time dinner is done, all you really have to wash are plates, utensils, and your pots and pans unless you just put the food into whatever container you're storing leftovers in and scrub before eating. If it's something stuck on your pan, soak it while you eat. Having a dishwasher-the human kind-helps too!

Think ahead-take meat out of freezer and put it in fridge the night before. Just takes a couple of minutes.

Chopping-get a good, sharp knife and learn cutting skills. If you can't take a class, YouTube has videos, and a lot of food bloggers have advice. The more you do it, the faster you'll become.

I live alone and have no dishwasher, human or machine, so I motivate myself by taking dessert out of the freezer and thaw it while I bust suds!

I love to chop vegetables, I find it deeply, deeply relaxing. I think it's worth investing in very good knives, keeping them sharp and if you have access to such a thing, taking a class in knife skills. I've learned it from watching TV shows, but if that's not a way to learn for you, then take a class.

I HATE (and that's a word I rarely use) cleanup. HATE.

Mine are 2 like many have said- remembering to defrost something first and foremost and the biggie- dishes. I loathe dishes and after cooking a meal the last thing I want to do is trudge back in the kitchen and start scrubbing pans. That alone is enough of a reason some nights for me to beg to order a pizza!

Cleanup. :(

I have no idea what takes up all our time but something steals it! We take FOREVER to prepare meals and it's very tedious. I think it's because we chat while we cook so things aren't always the most efficient. Plus it's usally late by the time we get around to it, so we're tired and slower anyway. I really want to become more efficient so that we eat earlier and spend less time cooking.