The secret of my success in putting home cooked meals on the table is two fold.....crockpot and/or spending a morning during the weekend preparing casseroles or dishes that can be easily thrown in the oven for eating later in the week.
This is exactly what I do. I just finished up for the day. I made:
spaghetti sauce- Used lots of fresh veggies and ground turkey, put it in 1/2 gallon size ziplocks, lay them flat on a cookie sheet in the freezer and once they're frozen, you can stack them of line them up like books in your freezer. It takes 10 minutes to cook pasta and warm up the sauce in the microwave. Sprinkle a little parm on top and dinner in uder 20.
TIP- for working and breastfeeding moms. If you pump and freeze, this flat freezing methos works great with those breastmilk storage bags, saves you tons of space, I swear! My cow lady days are over, but I learned this freezing method from another working/pumping mom.
Beef Stew- Can be frozen in bags like above, or in tupperware so they can go with my husband when he has to work through the dinner hour. Beef Stew can be heated on the stove top in a few minutes once defrosted.
Chicken soup- Same as above
Crock pot "pre-mixes"- They are sort of like those crock pot meals in a bag you can buy at the grocery, but I make them myself and freeze them. I can toss a whole bag of pre-mixed ingrediants in the crock pot in the morning and have dinner waiting when I get home.
Chicken salad- I usually have chicken salad sandwiches with either salad or some kind of soup one night a week. Easy to spread it on hoagie rolls with some lettuce and tomatoe and heat up some soup. I have all kinds of frozen bags of homemade soup in my freezer at any given time because when I make it, I make a huge pot and freeze it in the "spaghetti sauce method" mentioned above.
MISC- Hard boiled a dozen eggs. These can be used in a salad, chopped up or you can make egg salad sandwiches. Just hard boil them, give them 20 mins to cool and refridgerate them. DOn't make more than you think you'll use, they are only good for 5 or 6 days in the fridge. You can also have this for breakfast, slice up the egg (omit the yolk if you're watching your cholesterall) with a slice of avacado on toast, excellent.
baked and shredded chicken. Used some to make chicken soup, some to make chicken salad and kept some to toss in a salad. If I'm going to make saad a meal for a night, I'll use lettuce, tomatoes, cukes, some shredded chicken and some kind of cheese, whatever is on sale at the deli that week. I will also sometimes make a ham and slice, cube and shred it to use in various meals as with the chicken.
TIP- if you plan to make something like a roast with cut veggies, cut and peel your carrots and potatoes ahead of time, store them in your fridge in a ziplock bag with some water.
TIP- make sure you have a good permanant marker to mark your bags and extensive brand trials have led me to the conclusion that the store brand zip bags work just as well as the name brand and cost half the money.
TIP- Plan your meals a month in advance, even if you don't shop and cook a month in advance, you can at least see what else is going on during one of your cooking mornings. I have all my meals made for this week, for example, but I also marked spaghetti, beef stew and chicken soup nights for the rest of January, since I already made and froze that stuff. Generally the last week of the month, I have very little to do because earlier in the month, I'll have made extra of this or that and froze it.
TIP- WHenever you make anything freezable, double the recipe and FREEZE half of it.
Let me know if any of this sounds appealing and I'll send recipes.
