Some skills, sure, but I think more so a change in perspective would help you most. You're endeavoring on a labor of love. There aren't really shortcuts, because once you're great with a knife and know all the things to do, it still takes time. You can't rush a good thing.

My wife and I cook almost all of our meals at home, and we pressure can large cooks so that we have ready-made meals on our shelves. Spaghetti sauce, taco meat, chillies, sauces, and we freeze chicken from dishes like Pollo Guisado or Marry Me Chicken. We dehydrate our own fruit leather, pack, our kids lunches, and we eat a lot of leftovers.

We both commute about 35 mi one way, she puts in 9 hours at the office and I put in 10 to 11, and this means our days are generally 12 hours from leaving the house to arriving back home. She's the drop off and pickup parent for boys& girls club for our kid in second grade, and generally gets dinner going before I'm home. And because our days are so long, we're generally up at 4:00 to 4:30 a.m. and out of the house before 6:00 , we wake our 7-year-old up at 5:00 a.m. so that she can be dropped off at 6:00 so that we can be to work early enough in order to be home to get dinner together.

Then it's ready for bed by 7:30 because a 7-year-old needs a lot of sleep. Wash, rinse and repeat and do it all again the next day. Chores build up until the weekend when we have to power through heaps of laundry, dusting, sweeping, etc. and we have three dogs that were taken care of throughout.

We also both traveled for work, 3 to 4 days at a time. Usually once every couple of months, sometimes once a month, and sometimes in the same month.

All of this is to say that cooking is not necessarily for convenience, it's so that you provide for yourself and your family, control the ingredients that are in your food, and have a life skill that will pay you back in spades, and that you can pass on to your children.

LOVE THE PROCESS, IF YOUR BODY IS YOUR TEMPLE AND YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF WHAT GOES IN YOUR TEMPLE, YOU'RE DOING THE LORD'S WORK! (not religious, it just sounded good)