Short Cuts to Home Cooked Meals

Everyone knows, it's healthier and cheaper to make your own dinner from scratch every day.  Meals for a large family easily come in under $20.  BUT - everyone also knows that making meals from scratch can be time consuming.  When you're hungry and in a hurry, that doesn't bode well for a home cooked meal.

Everything cut and measured for dinner.  Just dump and go.

If you're willing to invest a couple of hours over a weekend, you can easily get yourself ahead of the game, so that dinner is quick and easy, even when you get home from work and have to turn right back around and be out the door in an hour for soccer practice.

These are simple and easy tricks that I've been doing for years, long before the internet was a "thing". Now that our kids are grown and we have more time, I still find myself prepping for the week ahead of time because most nights, I really don't want to chop a bunch of vegetables.

Go shopping early on the weekend, and get your vegetables for the week.
By early, I mean early - before 9 am, if possible.  If you frequent farmer's markets, you know that earlier is better as far as finding the best produce.  The same goes for the grocery store.  Get out there early so that you can get your weekly shopping done and get on with your day.

Pre-Prep as much as you can.  This means you need to have some idea of what you'll be eating for dinner each night.  If you're not certain what you're going to eat each night, pre-prep the vegetables you tend to use over and over again.  Mince the garlic and store it in an airtight container.  Same goes for onions, celery, and bell peppers.  Each one gets stored in it's own container.

Cook once, eat twice.  This is my mantra.  There's a movement out there called "Once A Month Cooking".  Basically, you give up two days a month to prepare all of your meals for the month.  One day is for shopping, and the second day is for prepping, cooking, and freezing.  I remember when I did once a month cooking.  It was nice to have all the food ready to go, but I was exhausted at the end of my two days.

Peppers are cut, spices are measured.

On Sunday, roast two chickens.  (The oven is going to be on anyway.)  After dinner, pull the chicken off of both carcasses and put them into freezer containers in the serving you will use for a recipe.  The bones go into a stock pot - either to make soup for another night during the week, or to make broth to freeze and use later.

Are you making a lasagna or casserole for dinner?  Make two.  Serve one for dinner, and then freeze the other one for another night.

If I know what I'm making for dinner, I will cut all of the ingredients and assemble them together so that all I have to do is dump it into the pot and cook.  I've even gone so far as to measure all of the spices and put them together in a container to make assembly go faster and easier.  (I've been known to leave post it notes on the veggies so the husband or kids can start it.  See those peppers?  I left the ingredients and cooking instructions on a post-it note on top of the container.)

For my lunches, I'll assemble salads in a mason jar a couple of days in advance.  I've found through trial and error that you really don't want to assemble one of those salads more than three days out - they get a little wonky after that.

Crock pots are wonderful resources.  Put food in, 8 hours later, you have a meal.  But if you're like me, cutting food on my way out the door can be overwhelming.  Enter crock pot freezer meals.  Assemble all of the ingredients in a bag, and freeze.  Pull it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge the night before, toss it into the crock pot first thing in the morning, and dinner is DONE.

3 prepped meals, ready for the freezer.

You can follow my Freezer Cooking Pinterest page here. 
My Slow Cooker Pinterest Page is here.

For our dinner tonight, I pulled a package of pre-cooked shredded chicken and pre-cooked black beans out of the freezer.  I am going to mix them up into two separate pans of enchiladas.  One vegetarian and one meatatarian (without cheese).  I'm planning on having rice on the side.  Last night, while I had time, I mixed up the spices for everything into separate little mason jars.  I'll dump the spices directly from the mason jars into our protein mixtures.  Since we are gluten intolerant, we'll use corn tortillas.  I'll be serving this with a light salad of some kind.

What do you do to help speed up dinner preparation in your house?

Investment Cooking

Have you heard of this?  Some people call it Investment Cooking, others call it Freezer Cooking, others call it Once a Month Cooking.

Whatever you call it, the premise is the same. You invest some time & materials in cooking or preparing a large quantity of food at once. You stick it in your freezer, and when you are pressed for time, you can pull something out of the freezer and pop it in the oven or slow cooker and have a quick and easy dinner on the table with minimal effort on your part.

Over the past month, we've been through every extra casserole and every frozen dinner I had in my freezer.  Over the past couple of days, I've been working on some serious investment cooking for my freezer.

Last week, I went through my recipes for freezer cooking and casseroles. I put together a shopping list of items needed. Saturday I went grocery shopping. Sunday, I engaged in the chopping and slicing and dicing.

Monday after work, I picked up 40 pounds of chicken. That's right - 40 pounds.  Everything was in one box, and it was divided into 10 pound quantities.

Once I got home, I had to move fast.

10 pounds went into the slow cooker for 8 hours. This chicken is destined to be shredded and then packed into 2 cup quantities and put into the freezer to be tossed into recipes or salads at a later date.

I love my slow cooker!

The second 10 pounds, I froze in vacuum sealed packages - each package contained 1 chicken breast, and was frozen raw so that I can toss it into recipes at a later date.

Vacuum sealed and ready to freeze.

The last 20 pounds, I divided into slow cooker freezer meals.  Terriyaki Chicken, Cilantro Lime Chicken and Lemon Chicken were tossed into gallon size zipper bags. This is where all of Sundays' prep came in. The carrots, onions, bell peppers, etc. were already sliced.   It was a simple matter to measure and toss ingredients into the bags.  I'm not going to post the recipes here.  You can do a quick Google search for any of these recipes and come back with hundreds of recipes.

Terriyaki Chicken kits, ready to go in the freezer.

Since I was working with raw chicken, time was of the essence.  I did not want to leave the chicken out and have some sort of fearsome bacteria move into the chicken, but I also didn't have enough space in my refrigerator to hold this much chicken.

8 hours later, the chicken in the slow cooker was finished. It was after 9:00 when I finished, and I was tired. I put the chicken into a large 13 x 9 inch pan that has a lid.  It was here that I discovered a nifty little trick - chicken, still hot from the cooker shredded effortlessly with a wooden spoon. I'd like to tell you it was some great insight that lead me to this discovery.  But no.  I was attempting to shove the last of the chicken into the pan so that the lid would fit when I discovered how nicely that chicken fell apart under the spoon.  I added several cups of the chicken broth from the slow cooker to the tray of chicken. My hope was to keep the chicken moist until I have time to deal with it.

I crammed the lid on the chicken, stuffed it into the fridge and went to bed. When I got home from work today, I set 2 cups of shredded chicken aside for tonight's dinner.  I made that into pulled BBQ chicken.

The rest of the chicken, I measured out into 2 cup portions in freezer bags and froze them for later. I'm looking at more pulled chicken, chicken tacos, and chicken for soup and casseroles.

So, I now have 10 portions of cooked chicken. 10 portions of frozen raw chicken, and 10 frozen slow cooker meals.

One evenings worth of work, and I have some serious peace of mind.

A worthwhile investment of my time.