Dinners

Thanks primarily to an extra freezer, my parents, and my in-laws I took about 2 months off from cooking after G was born. I cooked a lot of things ahead of time, and both sets of grandparents took over while they were here (and made some extras to freeze as well). Once they left, Andrew started clearing out the freezer day by day, and it all lasted until a few weeks ago.

So I'm back on kitchen duty. I had a pretty good system before, but it needs a few adjustments now that we have the little man.

Since we got married I've learned that I need to cook 4 dinners a week. The pattern that works best is a grocery store trip on Saturday morning, cooking on Saturday and Sunday, eat leftovers on Monday, cook Tuesday and Wednesday, eat leftovers on Thursday, and go out to dinner on Friday. The only problem with this is that I hate eating leftovers, but it has to happen.

Somehow, whenever I go out of town without Andrew, this all goes out the window and I worry he won't have enough to eat. I will leave for 3 days and cook him enough food for a whole week. Then I get all disappointed when there is still food left when I get back, even though he's taken his lunch every day to work and eaten at home every night.

Now that we have Grayson, I'm learning to love the slow cooker and that the "hands on" time of a recipe is very important. Last night I made mushroom pot pies, and although they were ok, they took FOREVER to make. The other day I started to make a pasta dish and G got hungry, so Andrew had to sub in partway through. In two weeks I will go back to work and I'm sure the slow cooker will become our primary dinner mechanism, so I will be looking for recipes!