What: No Knitting?

Last night, I made it home on time and my husband had a wonderful teriyaki stir fry waiting for me complete with brown rice. It was very yummy. Over the past few months, he has been doing all of the cooking. Last year at this time, we seemed to always have little arguments over what was for dinner and who would be doing the cooking. For a couple of months, I spent my Saturday mornings filling the freezer with nutritious dinners. After a while, we had more than we could finish, so I stopped creating more. I was only planning to stop for a little while so that we could eat up some of the old dishes before they needed to be discarded. However, I never seemed to get back into that habit. Since then, he has been throwing something together. I have taken a couple of minutes here and there to cut up meat and freeze it in homemade marinades so that it would be tender, delicious and nutritious when he cooks it, but that isn't quite as much of a contribution as I would like to put into it.

When I coupled this with my mom's upcoming hand surgery, I decided that I would get the cookbook out, again, and create some freezer meals for both her and myself. She is a stay at home mom with just 1 of 5 kids left at home and feels like she is not doing her part if she cannot get dinner on the table for my dad and brother. I know that being told not to use her dominant hand will make it nearly impossible for her to cook and my dad really doesn't mind bringing home a dish to heat up. He told her recently that he would just go to Dinners Ready or Costco and pick up some casseroles so that she would not have to worry about cooking. She didn't really like the idea as she mostly buys organic. I didn't know that they had been considering this when I called to see if she would buy the groceries and then I would do the work. Its really not much more difficult to make an extra set of dishes, following the same recipe, as all the cooking can be completed at the same time and the actual layering of ingredients doesn't take that long.

So, instead of knitting last night, I was planning meals. I wrote up a grocery list, checked to see what I already had on hand, and then headed off to the new PCC that opened near my house earlier this month. I bought a large bag of produce, some dairy, several spices and other bulk items and some canned goods. I figure there will be 19 4-serving meals when I get finished and bought everything except the meat for $120. I plan to visit Costco for meat either tonight or tomorrow. If I spend another $80 for the meat called for in the recipes, I expect that it will make each serving around $2.50 each. That is pretty good considering that these will be all organic, fresh ingredients with no preservatives or chemicals. (Foods that are processed and/or contain chemicals tend to be much less expensive, but also make me feel sluggish and sick.) I am very excited to get these meals done so that we will have some wonderfully quick, healthy meals for our future dinners.

Snow!

Yesterday, it snowed! It began snowing in the early afternoon as I was out running errands. I was driving down I-5. There was no precipitation of any kind. Then, I crossed a bridge and the snow just started! I was surprised, and being Seattle, everyone was braking to slow from 55 to 30mph. It wasn't even sticking, yet! I arrived home safely, and decided that I would still go down to Village Yarn & Tea to visit with my knitting friends. Two of the them made it. We had a great time sipping tea in the warm store, while watching the snow cover the trees across the street from the store. It wasn't even too bad to drive home in!
After I was home, I still enjoyed watching it fall while I did my weekly dinner cooking. I made 4 dishes which usually net us 2 dinners per dish. Needless to say that gives us lots of food that is already to go. (I just lift a dish out the night before and dh reheats it the next night.) We get better nutrition and I don't have to worry about cooking when I'm tired from working all day. This really helps us avoid the fast food/take-out trap. Lately, I've been enjoying cooking from the book Meals in Minutes by Sue Gregg. We've had chili, pasta, rice, chicken, and soup. I haven't even had to make changes to any of the meals. We like them exactly how she has written the recipe.