Meal Planning-Cooking Day | Efficient WAHM

Meal Planning-Cooking Day Tips

Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Mary Lutz in Archives, Time Management

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photo credit: semihundido
Your freezer cooking day has arrived! Today, you are going to prepare a month’s worth of meals, enabling you to have more free time for the next 30 days. Here are some helpful hints to get you through your big day:

Get up early and start out by gathering and cleaning your small appliances, such as your crock-pot(s), mixer, food processor, blender, rice steamer, etc. These small appliances can really help you speed up the cooking process.

Clear off as much cupboard space as possible. You’ll need lots of cupboard space to cook, chop, and so forth. And yes, those slow cookers will come in handy, but is it possible to set them up on a table in the dining room or laundry room to save on cupboard space?

Next, start preparing the meats, as these take the longest to cook. Investing in more than one slow cooker can ease this process. Between your oven and a couple of slow cookers, you’ll be able to roast several chickens, pot roasts, pork roasts, and hams throughout the day.

While your meat is cooking, start chopping your vegetables. It’s a good idea to look through all your recipes ahead of time and tally how much of each item you’ll need. For instance, let’s say you looked over your recipes and you need 7 cups of chopped onion total. It will be a lot easier to chop all the onion at once and have it ready to use then to keep going back to chopping onions throughout the cooking process.

Save time by maintaining the “do it once” attitude all day – when you start browning your ground beef, brown all the ground beef you’ll need that day.

Once your veggies are chopped, start preparing any miscellaneous items, such as sauces, pasta, and rice.

After your meat has been cooked, start dividing it up into the portion sizes you will need for your meals. For example, if you are planning to have chicken fajitas twice that month and need two separate one pound portions of white meat, separate them from the rest of chicken and place them into freezer containers or freezer bags. When the designated fajita night rolls around, you can thaw a portion and simply add fajita seasoning and fresh veggies.

If you are planning to make barbecue pork sandwiches, shred your cooked pork roast and divide it into portions, just as you did with the chicken. Then, add your barbecue sauce and freeze your portions. When it’s time to make the sandwiches, simply thaw out a portion overnight and the next day you can put it into the slow cooker and let it simmer all day.

Now, it is time to start assembling your casserole-type meals. You are not going to actually cook your casseroles, just put them together (no one wants to eat a twice-baked casserole, anyway!).

For instance, if you were going to make 3 lasagnas for the month, you would take out your lasagna pans and line them with enough foil so that you can bring the foil up over the sides and cover the lasagna when you are done assembling it. Once you have lined your pan, you’ll start assembling the lasagnas as you normally would, wrap them in the foil and freeze.

Once your final meal has been prepared, bagged, labeled and put into the freezer, take a long hot bath and call for pizza delivery! You deserve it.