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!!