Now that school is in full swing for Seth and the boys, the responsibility for making most of our meals has fallen to me again. After Seth quit his job a few years ago to stay home with the boys, I sort of fell off the cooking wagon because it was his job to make our meals and now I’m finding it a little difficult to hop back on.
I finally have a pretty sweet kitchen that my stay at home self from 2009 would have killed for and I barely use it.
It’s a sad, sad state of affairs.
Anyway, having a regular 8-5 job means either planning meals in advance or serving up a microwaved can of soup in a moment of desperation. Not that anything like that ever happens around here……
Right after we moved into our new house, I filled our deep freezer with hotdishes in throw away tinfoil pans (so, so worth it to buy the throw away pans) as well as some bags of crockpot meals and pre-made taco and chili meat. They were all things like lasagna, tater tot hot dish, various chicken-tomato-pepper combinations, etc. Basically, things that I’m very comfortable making and know freeze well. If I didn’t already have something in the crockpot, Seth would throw a hotdish in the oven when he and the boys got home and supper would be ready by 6. Everyone was happy and well fed so we decided that it would be a good idea to keep doing once the first round of meals ran out.
Now for the warning: If you’re contemplating using a recipe that you’re not familiar with and the ingredients or ratio of ingredients seem off, don’t do it!
The recipes that I used came from a list that I found through a Pinterest link. Most of the recipes were not ones that I’ve made versions of before but that seemed exciting and cool to me for some reason so I ran to the grocery store with my list of ingredients, found some awesome sales on chicken and headed home to start my prep.
I set out everything that I would need,
made sure that I had the recipes pulled up and wrote the recipe names and cooking instructions on my ziplocs.
Can we just stop for a minute and talk about how my granite and back splash are different tones? The samples that we decided on when we were picking out our finishes looked so nice together but, because each piece of granite is different, the granite that we ended up with had a more “gold” tint to it than the piece that we looked at and it was the first thing that I noticed once it had all been installed.
Looking at it used to be akin to the feeling of the corner of a sock seam digging into my little toe. I’m used to it now and the shade differences don’t really bother me as much, but every once in a while, when the lighting is just right, I can still feel that seam digging in.
Anyway, the prep went very quickly, and before long, the meals were all safely stowed in the freezer. While I was adding the ingredients to each bag, I remember thinking that some of the ratios seemed a little off and that some of the flavor combinations were a little different, but I was in a hurry with a ton of other things to do, so I just plowed ahead and finished.
It seemed as though I could successfully check one thing off my never ending list of laundry, cooking and cleaning until the next weeknight when Seth texted me after getting home with the boys to say that supper smelled and looked like garbage. Apparently, the honey sesame chicken with broccoli had turned into black broccoli, chewy chicken and an inedible, too sweet, honey sauce that literally did smell like rotting garbage.
The next day I tried another meal and that one was a complete flop too. Hopefully, those were flukes and the rest are amazing and wonderful or we’ll have to go back to our old stand-bys and that would just be way too boring.
Feel free to share your favorite make ahead meals with me – my family will thank you!
