Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Dinner prep

Every evening, homemakers everywhere try to find an efficient way to have a good healthy economical homemade dinner on the table.  That in and of itself is a challenge, but when that homemaker also works outside of the house full-time (like me, for instance), it is even more challenging.  With a bit of planning, it can happen.

Since I first started back to work a few months ago, I struggled to make that happen every night. There have been many a night of quick scrambled egg dinners.  Slowly but surely, I have gotten back in to the groove and now things are coming together more often than not.  Using tonight as an example, here is my loose and evolving system.

Every weekend before we go grocery shopping, I try to think of several dinners that I want to make during the week and I try to make sure that there is enough stuff to double them and put whole dinners or partial dinners into the freezer.  Last night, I looked at the list of potential dinners on the white board and decided we would have spaghetti with meat sauce.  So this morning I pulled out a frozen brick of ground beef to thaw.  When I got home, I cooked the whole thing and a whole lot of spaghetti.  I buy the organic ground beef from Costco, which comes in 1.34 pound bricks.  Which actually turns out to be just about right for two plus meals for us.  After the beef was cooked, I put half into the freezer again - it will become part of crockpot chili another day (probably next week).  I added some jarred spaghetti sauce to the meat still in the pan and spiced it up a bit.  Then added all of the cooked spaghetti.  After dinner we had enough leftover for me to put that in a casserole pan - I threw that in the freezer too.  With a little cottage cheese and mozzarella on top (now on the grocery list) this will be a delicious spaghetti bake for the future.

Earlier in the week, I made a big crock-pot of refried beans - honestly they were the best refried beans we ever had - and I now have a whole bunch in the freezer and some in the fridge to be part of Mexican Friday night .  This week, Mexican Friday night will be a new recipe for shredded Mexican beef - another crock-pot recipe - with some flour tortillas and salsa from Uncle Julio's   I will be put the leftovers into burritos - which will go into the freezer for later of course. :) 

1 comment:

E said...

I totally need to hire someone like you to teach me how to do all this stuff. I am slowly catching on, but it has taken YEARS! I'm glad that you are sharing your insider know how :)