Back from Vacation

If you haven't ever taken a whole week of your vacation time off from work at once, you really don't know what you're missing...For the past eight or so years, I've taken off a day here or a couple of days there, often combining them with a weekend to increase the impact of the time off. But this year, I really needed a longer break.

I love my work, but I was getting tired, especially after having used nearly all of the vacation time I took earlier this year to catch up on work around the home. But last week, my husband and I took five days off from work (including the Labor Day holiday), and we actually managed to be away from our home for nearly nine consecutive days. It was so refreshing!

First, we went up north to visit my father and to do some projects at his house. My husband painted the back deck, and I went to work in the kitchen. I did several make-ahead-and-freeze meals using two wonderful cookbooks I ordered earlier this year from Amazon--Don't Panic Dinner's in the Freezer, and Once-A-Month Cooking. I'll try to post some of the recipes that worked out the best in the coming week or so. In the meantime, I'll just take a minute to give a small testimony about the difference this type of cooking method is making in my life.

As I've mentioned before, I work full time outside of the home and I have a long commute to and from work most days of the week. (I'm blessed to have an employer who allows me to work from home a day or two most weeks.) So I don't have a lot of time during your average weekday to do very much cooking or housework. I try to fit in a few tasks very early in the morning before I leave for work at 7 a.m. Later, after the drive home in the evening and some time spent either swimming or walking for exercise, it's often 8 or 8:30 p.m. when we're sitting down to dinner. Then, because the alarm goes off at 5:30 each weekday, I need to be slowing down so that I can get enough sleep for the next day.

All that to say, I make the most of my weekends for housework and cooking, and I try really hard to do things in an efficient way...As an aside, I'm always looking for good ideas for streamlining housework. My husband is a great help in this area, but I think we can all learn from each other's experiences. If I find a great tip, I'll add it to this blog. But if you have one to share, please let me know.

Anyway, in terms of cooking, I've grown accustomed to spending a good portion of my afternoon on either Saturday or Sunday (usually Sunday) in the kitchen preparing meals for the week ahead. Before I found these cookbooks, though, my efforts were generally focused on just that week ahead. Now, I'm doing things a little better. I'm also thinking in terms of making food that can easily be frozen for future use, and these two cookbooks I've found have helped me a great deal.

Now, when I make a shepherd's pie, for example, I make two shepherd's pies and add one to my freezer. I've always done that with meatloaf, and I have a great barbecued beef recipe that I used as well, but with these cookbooks (and their wonderful authors who have put so much time into testing every recipe), I've been able to expand my frozen meal repertoire. Up at Dad's house now, for example, I have waiting in his freezer not only a shepherd's pie and a meatloaf, but also honey baked pork chops, a hash brown casserole, and a basic meatball recipe. The next time we visit, I'll thaw one or two of these frozen entrees for us to use, thereby saving me time.

And when we came home on Sunday night from our nine days away, I pulled out basil stuffed chicken breasts to thaw in the refrigerator for dinner after work on Monday, plus a container of beef stew that we'll have for dinner tonight. Then I'll plan this weekend to make a couple more entrees to freeze for future use.

If you haven't tried this method of pre-cooking and freezing, I'd highly recommend it. And I think that this would also work well for single people who want to maximize their kitchen time. I could envision breaking down a single recipe into individual portions to freeze and later thaw for use. And I've also found that it enabled me to share a meal with a friend recovering from major surgery.

Normally, after a long trip, we'd be eating soup and sandwiches this week, plus maybe scrambled eggs and whatever else I could throw together without a trip to the grocery store...Oh, and that's another thing about my schedule. I really don't have time to shop during the week. So if we can live on what we have in the freezer and pantry until this coming Saturday, that's another benefit to make-ahead meals.

Before I forget to mention it, we went up to the North Shore area of Minnesota for the latter half of our vacation last week. Though the fall colors weren't at their peak this early, it was still beautiful, and we enjoyed hiking the state parks, seeing waterfalls and enjoying the harbor in Duluth. We are so blessed here in Minnesota to have a major inland shore area so close. It's almost like seeing the ocean when you can look across Lake Superior and see nothing but water for a few hundred miles.

Meal Planning

I've been working hard this year to plan ahead when it comes to meal time at our house. I love the idea of coming home to something homemade and ready in the slow cooker, or something that can easily be reheated in the microwave, or quickly cooked in a wok, broiled, or grilled.

So last weekend I took some bone-in chicken breasts, a beef roast, and a 3-lb. package of ground beef out of our freezer. We had the chicken breasts barbecued on Monday night. I started them when I first got home from work and they were ready to eat in a couple of hours. (The leftovers have been good lunches for my husband this week.) Then last night we had leftovers from our spicy stir-fried chicken and vegetables over rice meal that I made on Sunday. And tonight we'll have roast beef.

I seasoned the meat (generously) last night before dinner with dried onion flakes, coarsely ground pepper, and garlic salt, and then put it into the slow cooker to chill in the fridge overnight. This morning, I left my husband a note to put the slow cooker on the counter and plug it in before he left for the day. He leaves a few hours after I do, which helps when the recipe only calls for 7-8 hours of cooking at medium temperature and my workday plus commute time has me gone for 10 hours.

So, when I get home tonight the meat will be done. I'll carve it with my electric knife and serve it with microwaved corn on the cob (2 minutes per ear on high), microwave baked potatoes, and fresh sliced tomatoes (from my little container garden). I'll probably also make a quick gravy with the meat juices and a little flour, because my husband loves gravy.

The best thing about a meal like this is that there is enough meat (even with my husband's appetite for roast beef) for at least one more meal. So we'll probably have leftover roast beef again in the near future--within a couple of days or I'll freeze it for future use.

Thursday night will be an easier meal for us--bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, raw veggies, and watermelon for dessert. I made a large package of bacon last weekend, making more than we needed at the time so that I could just deal with the grease mess one time instead of twice. So I'll re-crisp some of that leftover bacon in the oven for our sandwiches on Thursday night, and I'll divide the rest of it for two recipes that I want to make on Friday with the ground beef that I've been thawing in the fridge.

I've been missing my mother's recipe for calico beans, so that will be Friday night's dinner. (I'll have more time to make dinner that night because I'm working from home that day--no commute time.) And then over the weekend, probably on Sunday afternoon, I'll make a new recipe that I recently found for baked jambalaya. Hopefully, the jambalaya recipe will be a success, because I'm planning to make enough of it to have as leftovers the following week.