Originally posted by: djheater
Originally posted by: Bryophyte
there is no comparison to homemade.
Agreed, and one of the primary criticisms I have of the menus I've so far encountered is that they rely heavily on prepared and processed foods, like velveeta or prego sauce...
If I'm going to the trouble I generally go all the way with organic and minimally processed ingredients.
Yuck, velveeta isn't food.
If you do one of these programs, you might just want to plan your own menus. Learn what can freeze (like you don't usually want to freeze mashed potatoes), how far certain ingredients need to be cooked prior to freezing so that when you throw them in the oven (or microwave or whatever) everything in the pan is done at the same time, and how long things last in the freezer versus how often you'll want to eat it. Also, frozen veggies are great to throw in meals you plan on freezing because you add them at the last minute without cooking or prep. Homemade chicken pot pie freezes easily and has meat and veggies in it so you can just throw it in the oven and ignore it for an hour, and still cover most of your bases if you don't have time to make a salad that night.
One thing we usually do is make extra of anything we have for dinner that can be put in the freezer in individual portions for my spouse to take to work for lunch. We'll make up a few or a dozen extra homemade burritos when we're making it for dinner (storebought frozen burritos are NASTY) and put whatever is left over from other meals into microwavable containers. Sometimes I'll put enough away for a whole dinner later. It takes about the same amount of time to make one meal's worth of something as it does to make two or three meals' worth.
Other things you can do to speed up dinner prep is to precook the time consuming ingredients that can be used in different meals. For instance, you can buy enough ground beef or ground pork or chicken for several meals and precook it and freeze it in freezer bags/containers. Frozen, cooked meat defrosts in minutes, so you probably save at least half an hour if you don't have to defrost raw meat and cook it. I also make up extra pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce and freeze it so I can dig it out and make pizza or pasta without needing to spend time making it later. Pizza dough takes very little time with a stand mixer, thaw the sauce in the microwave, dig out frozen shredded mozzarella and toppings, assemble it. You could probably freeze it before baking, though I haven't tried it.
Ok, enough babbling.
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