Crimeny, it's hard to get dinner on the table of a weeknight!
I've been mining Pinterest for weeks for a solution: meals you prepare ahead and freeze, crockpot meals, crockpot meals you prepare ahead and freeze. I've tried a couple of crock pot meals. They're okay. But mainly, they're not the healthiest things in the world, often high in sodium or very cheesy. And, honestly, most of them are not all that yummy either. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, though. I've never been good with a crockpot . . . except for Rotel dip. But how hard can a slow cooker meal be when the instructions are usually "dump all of this stuff into the pot, set it on low, wait six hours."
And frozen meals seem like a good idea, but the thaw time means it takes just as long to get food on the table.
What The Working Family wants are healthy, vegetable rich meals that we can get onto the table in about 30 minutes, tops.
Anyway, in discussing our mealtime woes, The Working Dad and I noticed something about the meals we tend to cook the most. They tend to involve the same or nearly the same basics: diced onions, diced bell pepper, diced celery, and (most of the time) diced chicken. (Those three vegetables -- onion, bell pepper, and celery -- are called "The Trinity" in Cajun cooking, but that's just a coincidence, except for one dish.) The great thing about onions, bell peppers, and celery is that they can go easily into a pasta sauce, fajitas, Asian stir-fry, and shrimp creole, which are all family faves.
So here's the plan: every Sunday evening, we're going to dice up onions, peppers, celery and chicken and store it in the fridge ready for a week's use. We'll plan the week's menu around our standard fare and post it in the kitchen. That way, we always know what's for dinner. (Finding the right menu posting method has, itself, been quite a Pinterestian odyssey.)
Then all that will need to be done is for the first person to the kitchen to throw the staple ingredients, appropriate spices, and few additional ingredients for whatever's for dinner that night into the pan and get it going. There should be virtually zero prep time (like opening a bag of frozen broccoli, or a jar of pasta sauce, or a can of beans), so it should be simple, right? I hope so. I'll report back after a few weeks to let you know how it's worked out. (And, ideally, this plan will slot neatly into the as yet un-blogged Mommy Finally Loses The Baby Weight Plan.)
Hey, if it works, maybe I'll take some photos of our meals and post my own Weeknight Meals Made Easy pin onto Pinterest, thus simplifying the lives of harried mommies everywhere!
Happy Sunday, Friends!
