White Orchid Melody

This is my first Tuesday no longer working at the YMCA.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next 3 months!  Not that there isn’t plenty for me to do around the house, but it feels weird not having anything on the calendar. 

One thing I’m planning to do is start working on freezer meals.  I checked out some books at the library on freezer meal planning (which included some okay recipes, most were meat dishes).  I think alot of the meals I make are pretty simple anyway.  We eat a lot of pasta, so I will probably just make some large batches of sauce.  The process requires a bit of planning to be efficient.  You have to have some idea of what you want to eat the rest of the month.  This is tricky for me, as I tend to be “in the mood” for some particular something.  Deciding what I want to eat a month in advance is going to be tricky, but I guess it’s better than being exhausted and hungry and going out to dinner all the time.  At least if it is in the freezer and I’m completely done for the day, Brian can take it and put it in the oven.  One website I found suggested that if you are just cooking for two, you can cook extra and freeze half each time you do cook, rather than having marathon cooking sessions.   I’ll probably try it both ways.

With the one vehicle thing, I’ve been trying to figure out how to improve my Mondays.  I teach in the afternoon and then need to go grocery shopping.  And the traffic is just awful at that time of day.  By the time I get home, I’m hungry and too stressed and tired to cook.  But at the same time, I’d prefer to grocery shop on Monday, because then everything is fresh and ready to go for a marathon freezer cooking session on Tuesday.  Even with freezer meals, Monday presents a problem b/c I have to wait for the dish to cook/heat.  The solution: crock-pot.  That once a year item I use for cheese dip or punch at parties may be seeing the light of day.  If I can conjure up a crock pot meal for Mondays, one that would be ready when I get home, that would take some strain off of me. 

So, I’ll be experimenting with freezer and crock pot cooking (vegetarian style, of course).  If I come up with anything super fabulous, I’ll post it to Recipe Thursday!