What's For Dinner?
I recently realized that I seem to spend less time preparing and cooking dinner than many of my friends, even though I often have more time to do it than they do. I've been trying to figure out why that is, and I think I have a couple different ideas.
1. My mom. My brother always wanted Mom to play with him after school, and then he would suddenly get hungry and want dinner right away. Mom had to figure out things that could get on the table very quickly, so this is a familiar concept for me.
2. I clean dishes as I go. Sometimes this means preparing a big sink of hot soapy water, sometimes it means washing while something is cooking. Usually at the end of dinner most of the prep dishes are already cleaned.
3. I choose recipes that I am fairly confident I can finish in the time allotted. Sometimes I miss, but I often don't start dinner until I get the call that ehs is on the way home.
4. I sometimes use canned or packaged vegetables and proteins, especially tofu, seitan, tempeh, quorn, beans, and in the winter, tomatoes. I also use frozen pre-made raviolis, and my food processor. Sometimes I will prep the next night's dinner when ehs is washing the dishes after dinner, marinading tofu, making hummus, etc.
5. I keep a lot of staples in the house that can become a lot of different meals, including fast grains like jasmine rice, pre-made polenta rolls, quinoa, couscous, and pastas. I also keep fast proteins like almonds, walnuts and yogurt in case those seem more appropriate to the meal.
I still have leftovers for lunch the next day, we've been eating leftovers all weekend actually. And we're still eating balanced meals, with grains, proteins, and lots of veggies. We get a variety of grains and proteins, and have some basic veggies that tend to be in many things, but we rotate those too as much as possible.
I get a lot of my recipes from Peter Berley's Fresh Food Fast, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Real Simple. Real Simple is especially great at paring a meal down to its basic components for the sake of time, but still having things that taste good. I find their "Fake It, Don't Make It" section particularly amusing, although I don't often make the recipes shown. Last month I was impressed by the concept of rolling chocolate chips into store-bought crescent roll dough before baking to make chocolate croissants. This month it was making "Ice Cream Cake" by layering and freezing ice cream sandwiches with homemade whipped cream.
Everyone knows I love food, especially real food. We do read a lot of labels, and try as much as possible to make sure that the things we bring in the house are real food without extra weirdness. But you can follow the eat real food rule without sacrificing too much time. You just have to sacrifice being an overachiever on a weeknight. ^_^
1. My mom. My brother always wanted Mom to play with him after school, and then he would suddenly get hungry and want dinner right away. Mom had to figure out things that could get on the table very quickly, so this is a familiar concept for me.
2. I clean dishes as I go. Sometimes this means preparing a big sink of hot soapy water, sometimes it means washing while something is cooking. Usually at the end of dinner most of the prep dishes are already cleaned.
3. I choose recipes that I am fairly confident I can finish in the time allotted. Sometimes I miss, but I often don't start dinner until I get the call that ehs is on the way home.
4. I sometimes use canned or packaged vegetables and proteins, especially tofu, seitan, tempeh, quorn, beans, and in the winter, tomatoes. I also use frozen pre-made raviolis, and my food processor. Sometimes I will prep the next night's dinner when ehs is washing the dishes after dinner, marinading tofu, making hummus, etc.
5. I keep a lot of staples in the house that can become a lot of different meals, including fast grains like jasmine rice, pre-made polenta rolls, quinoa, couscous, and pastas. I also keep fast proteins like almonds, walnuts and yogurt in case those seem more appropriate to the meal.
I still have leftovers for lunch the next day, we've been eating leftovers all weekend actually. And we're still eating balanced meals, with grains, proteins, and lots of veggies. We get a variety of grains and proteins, and have some basic veggies that tend to be in many things, but we rotate those too as much as possible.
I get a lot of my recipes from Peter Berley's Fresh Food Fast, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Real Simple. Real Simple is especially great at paring a meal down to its basic components for the sake of time, but still having things that taste good. I find their "Fake It, Don't Make It" section particularly amusing, although I don't often make the recipes shown. Last month I was impressed by the concept of rolling chocolate chips into store-bought crescent roll dough before baking to make chocolate croissants. This month it was making "Ice Cream Cake" by layering and freezing ice cream sandwiches with homemade whipped cream.
Everyone knows I love food, especially real food. We do read a lot of labels, and try as much as possible to make sure that the things we bring in the house are real food without extra weirdness. But you can follow the eat real food rule without sacrificing too much time. You just have to sacrifice being an overachiever on a weeknight. ^_^
Labels: food
posted by cep at
9:14 AM
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