This Week's Plan

This week, I'm going to make some food for the freezer, so I have things I can defrost and reheat. When I make soups, stews, sauces, and chilies, I try to double the recipe and freeze half in family-sized portions. If I do one or two dishes this way every weekend, I wind up with a wide variety of meals that I can just defrost and heat up. These meals are a great gap-filler for those nights we just don't want to eat whatever was planned. For example, last week, I baked a ham for Sunday. Although I had creative ways to use the ham, by Wednesday, we were all ready to swear off ham forever. So I needed a gap-filler. In that case, it was hot dogs. But if I'd had chili or spaghetti sauce in the freezer, we would have eaten much better that night.

So this week, I'm making a big pot of red sauce. I can freeze most of it and use it later for spaghetti, rigatoni, lasagna, chicken Parmesan, and even pizza. I'm also going to make a big pot of chili. Finally, I'm going to roast a chicken, and we'll get two meals out of that. So here's the plan:

Saturday: Spaghetti with Red Sauce & garlic bread
Sunday: Roast Chicken with Asparagus and Rice (my kids don't like
potatoes)
Monday: Green salad with chicken, apples, dried cranberries, and
pecans
Tuesday: Chili with rice
Wednesday: Chicken Tikka Masala
Thursday: Spaghetti, Chili, or whatever Rudy want to feed the
boys. I'll be out!

I'm going to do much of the prepping on Saturday and Sunday. I'll make the spaghetti sauce and chili on Saturday. I'll make the Tikka Masala from a Now We're Cooking recipe. I'll put the chicken in the marinade on Saturday and freeze it, then move it to the refrigerator for defrosting on Tuesday night. Then Wednesday, all I'll have to do is quickly cook the chicken in the sauce.

I'll post recipes later tonight.

And we have a very special guest post coming tomorrow. My friend Juliet, who is the best baker I know, has written up her recipe for Super Easy Pantry Snack Cake. My mouth was watering just reading it, and I know I'm going to try it for tomorrow night!