Kitchen Experiment Part 2: Cooking Day!

Grab a drink and put your feet up, this entry is a long one. First, here's our menu:

• Easy Spaghetti Sauce
• Meatball Sub Casserole
• Orecchiette with Tuna
• Sweet Mustard Grilled Pork
• Steak Milanesa
• Chicken Naranja
• Chicken Dijon
• Barbequed Chicken Sandwiches
• Mini Cheese Meatloaves
• Gnocchi with Turkey Ragu
• Poppyseed Chicken
• "Craig & Debbie's Easy Fixins" - which I call "Hamburger Salsa Skillet"

I omitted two of the recipes from this two-week cycle: Chicken Italiano, because it contains spinach, to which Levi is allergic, and Tilapia Filets because neither Levi nor I eat fish.

STEP 1: Clear your work space of any extraneous decor or appliances. Assemble your ingredients. (Milk, cheese, meats, etc. are still in the fridge until needed)...Check!

A couple notes on this step: first, since I have the Kindle edition of the cookbook but no Kindle, that's my laptop screen on the right (one nice thing about having the book digitally is that I was able to blow up the font size to make it easy to read from several feet away). Second, I pre-measured the flour, sugar, etc. - anything normally kept in a large, bulky container, so that I didn't have THAT taking up precious counter space as well.

STEP 2: Start chopping! As I mentioned, the book guides you neatly through all the steps in assembly-line fashion, so first I chopped all the onions I would need for all the recipes, then the peppers, the celery, etc. Then, when you start cooking/assembling, the recipes indicate measurements instead of quanties, i.e. one cup of onion rather than 1 onion.

Here are all my veggies! Aren't they pretty?

Oh, and you see this?
That is an entire fruit's worth of freshly grated lemon zest. It took me 20 minutes, at least, because I didn't have the proper tool and had to make do with the extra-fine side of an ordinary grater. And...after I had prepped and stored all 12 of my entrees, it was still sitting there. I *freaked* and started frantically searching through my recipes to figure out how I had missed it, only to discover...it was for the Tilapia. That I didn't make. D'oh!

Anyway! Once the veggies are all prepped, you start in on the meats. Which, in this case, mostly meant dividing and cutting up a million raw chicken breasts. Some you cube, some you cut into strips, a few just needed to be halved. I hate handling raw chicken anyway, so this was definitely my least favorite part of the process. Bleah. BUT, I got through it, and moved on to step 3...assembly! (The process up to this point has taken me about 4 hours. I think I spent about an hour just on the chicken.)

STEP 3: Cook/assemble/freeze. If I recall correctly, the meals were assembled pretty much in the order listed above. The spaghetti sauce had to simmer for a while, so my first completed meal was the Orecchiette with Tuna (side note: orecchiette is a fancy shaped pasta that, at my local grocery store, cost 3X as much as the box of store-brand mini shells. Guess which I bought?). For this dish, I had to heat some sauce, veggies and the tuna in a smallish saucepan, then transfer the cooked dish to a quart-size freezer bag. There is apparently a learning curve to pouring stuff out of a pan, into a plastic bag, because I made a MESS. Sauce *everywhere!* It's okay, though, I was able to scrape most of it off the counter and into the bag anyway.

Just kidding.

Anyway, once I got the tuna debacle cleaned up, the rest of the meals came together pretty smoothly. Any entree that was designated as serving more than 4, I split and froze as two meals, which in the end gave me not 12, but 20 entrees! Here's my freezer at about the halfway point:

8 entrees, 14 meals. 4 entrees/6 meals to go!

All told, I worked from about 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. made it through 10 of the 12 meals, and finished up the last two the next night after the kids went to bed. Whew!!

Kitchen Experiment: Part 1

(Two cooking-related posts in a row?!)

Levi and I (and the kids, by default) are trying a kitchen experiment.

Levi and I are not very imaginative when it comes to menu planning - our weekly table tends to be spaghetti, pizza, mac n cheese, parmesan chicken, spaghetti... - and invariably when I've been motivated to change things up, I fail to have the proper ingredients on hand and either have to run to the store in the middle of cooking, or, more likely, slam cupboards in frustration and run to McDonalds.

So, after doing some reading online, we (I) decided to give "once a month cooking" (OAMC) a try. The basic concept being, you prep a bunch of dinners all at once and stick them in the freezer, so that all you have to do is reheat on the stove, or pop it in the oven/slowcooker/on the grill.

After reviewing MANY OAMC books on Amazon, I purchased Once A Month Cooking: Family Favorites (Kindle edition, $10!).


This book is great for OAMC newbies because it does all the thinking for you - you just pick a 2- or 4-week "menu cycle" and it gives you a complete shopping list, recipes and assembly line-style preparation instructions. A lot of the other books are more focused on helping you save money shopping by building your own menu around your grocery store's sales, but I didn't feel like doing that much work. I wanted this to be SIMPLE.

(One of the other reasons I picked this particular book is because ALL of the Menu Cycles were available for free download on their website, www.once-a-monthcooking.com. I knew that I was going to be cooking stuff that my family would actually eat - or at least try!)

Serendipitously, around the first of this month our cupboards were looking pretty bare and we were due for a major shopping trip anyway, so I decided on a menu cycle, cross-checked the pantry and shopping lists against what we actually had on hand, added the miscellaneous household stuff that we always needed (cereal, milk, diapers, etc.), and headed out shopping.

The total bill for "Two Week Cycle D" came to just over $130 - at a projected 72 "servings" (the recipes ranged from 4 to 20(!) servings per dish), the per-serving cost was under $2. I've never paid THAT much attention to how much it costs to cook for my family, but that sounds pretty good to me.

Next up (with pictures, finally!) - Part 2: OAMC Meal Prep Day.

My Favorite Peanut Butter Bars

I know it sounds crazy for a school lunch menu to contain the "best" anything, but when I was in high school, the cafeteria made the best peanut butter bars (sidebar: always, always served on Pizza day, for some reason)...and somehow, shortly before graduation, Levi talked the cooks into giving him the recipe. I generally remember to make them about once a year, and just made a batch this morning to munch on during the football game.

And after keeping it my little secret for more than 10 years...I'm sharing it with you.

The ingredients:

• 3 1/3 c flour (that's three-and-one-third)
  
• 1 1/3 c sugar
• 1 1/2 c brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 2 jumbo or 3 large eggs
• 1 1/3 c shortening
• 1 Tbsp vanilla
• 2 c peanut butter

Preheat oven to 325. Spray a 9x13 cake pan (or two, if you have them) with nonstick spray.

Combine all ingredients except flour in a large mixing bowl. (Personally, I like to use half creamy and half crunchy peanut butter, but I rarely have both on hand.)

Stir in flour, one cup at a time. Mixture will be stiff and almost crumbly.

Press half the dough into 9x13 pan. I find it easiest to use my hands. You want to really press the mixture together into a solid sheet, eliminating as many cracks and crumbles as possible.

Bake in preheated oven 10 minutes - no more. Remove from oven before appearing fully cooked. Cut into bars with a sharp knife while still warm. Cut slowly, or they'll crumble!

Allow to cool before serving. Cover pan with lid or foil, or transfer to airtight container.

Makes TWO 9x13 pans, 18-24 bars each. Yum!