1 Mother 2 Another

I do enjoy cooking, but I don’t love
the weekly rut of meal-planning, shopping, and making
“do” in the kitchen. In a dream world, we’d hire
a personal chef to make dinners (and pack school lunches!) for us.
The only catch? I would get to tell the chef exactly what to make,
and be insanely micro-managing on the whole shopping/organic/good
produce thing.


I know, I can dream, right?


Weeknight dinners are always a little catchy: some nights I’m
teaching and leaving my mom to feed my kids – not exactly
cool to leave her with the whole “hey, what’s for
dinner? I don’t know, I’m leaving, you figure it
out” taste in her mouth. So on those nights I need to cook
the meal in advance. Then on nights I’m home I can make a
meal from scratch – but I’d much rather have extra time
for hanging with my kids.


So I’m a big fan of make-ahead meals; I usually try to double
one meal each week and freeze one for future use. I own several
great cook-and-freeze cookbooks, but I find myself returning to one
over and over – href="http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Make-Ahead-Freeze-Cookbook-Series/dp/1558327568/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&keywords=not%20your%20mother%27s%20make%20ahead%20and%20freeze&linkCode=ur2&qid=1362022929&sr=8-1&tag=1mother2anoth-20"
target="_blank">Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead And Freeze
Meals Cookbook.

I’m all for shortcuts, but
“open a soup packet” or “can of creamed something
soup” or whatever is not in my repertoire – I just
can’t go for all the preservatives and questionable
chemicals. Thankfully, this cookbook is written by a woman after my
own heart, and she has a whole section on make-ahead
“cheats” like a homemade cream-of-celery base, or an
easy gravy, to make and freeze for future cassesroles. She’s
also pretty darn creative, so while you do find hearty, satisfying
meals full of cheese and pasta, that’s not all there is in
the book. Thanks to her, I now buy a full roasted chicken from
Whole Foods (another one of my regular cheats), cut it up one
night, use the leftovers another night, then put the whole carcass
into the slow cooker for chicken stock for future recipes that
night.


That’s my kind of shortcut.


She’s big on “prep ahead” meals – put some
meat in a Ziploc with a marinade, stick it in the freezer, then
defrost and fry/bake/grill when you need it. Healthful,
well-balanced recipes that help me do a lot of work just a little
bit of the time, then coast on the bounty of that labor. I’ve
got a fair amount of foods in the freezer to give to sick friends
or pull out on a night I’m working, no problem.


Gives a whole new meaning to the words “frozen
dinner”.