Weekend Cooking Frenzy
When you’ve had a busy day at work, it can be frustrating to have to come home and prepare a dinner as well when all you want to do is relax. So, what’s a girl to do in order to avoid frozen dinners or worse yet, fast food? Use your weekends off to prepare all your meals for the upcoming week.
We’ve all been there at least once and if you’re like me, more times than we wish to admit. We go to the grocery store and spend a ton of money so that there will be food in the house. We then make a promise to cook each and every night since the food is already there and ready to be consumed. But, guess what happens? We come home from work late and are tired. Everyone else is tired no one wants to cook. Much of the time, we resort to takeout food or something quick and convenient even when we have a freezer full of food that can provide us with a good home cooked meal.
A great way to stop this happening is to pick a day at the weekend and have a cooking party – (yes I said ‘party’) with some planning and help from the family, this won’t take long. Decide on the menu for the week, defrost the food on a Friday ready to get to work on Saturday morning. Make sure you decide on the menu early so that you have all the ingredients to hand.
Start with the meats as these take the longest to cook. Choose a few different meats so that you aren’t eating the same thing all week long although even that can be made into a few combinations! Side dishes can also be prepared – even with the meat cooked we don’t always fancy cooking the rest of the dinner so having these prepared can also save time.
Cooking all the food means that you need enough containers to hold it all, split everything into portions according to your menu and each day take what you need out of the freezer and heat it up for dinner. Ideas for quick meals are stew, curry, pasta sauce, the type of meals that can quickly be heated and only need some rice or pasta to go with them. For a quick early week meal, prepare strips of chicken and sliced vegetables for a quick and healthy stir fry or delicious fajitas.
If you can get yourself into a routine, cooking on the weekend not only saves time but also saves money otherwise wasted on takeouts. If your food makes more meals than you could eat in a week, freeze several of them for another time. Simply thaw each meal the day you plan to serve it. Yes, you will have to make an investment in dinner size containers, but it pays off the more you use them. Once you see how much easier it makes you busy work days it will be well worth the initial cost.
