Rebecca, Day 37: Meal Planning

I have been wanting to simplify meal times for a while now. The reason? If we start making dinner at 6 p.m., anything particularly nice to eat (or, rather, more complex than a simple pasta dish, salad, or sandwich) won't be ready till close to 7 p.m.

If we start our preschooler on his bedtime routine around 7:30, that means that life after a full day of work can consist of:

1. day care pick up
2. food prep and cooking while struggling to occupy toddler (often resorting to playing videos for him)
3. eating
4. starting bed time routine
   

In other words, no quality after-work time with my child until the stories and snuggles that put him to sleep. Considering my priorities, the situation is really disagreeable to me.

Enter my new gadget: the slow cooker I requested for my birthday earlier this month. That plus recipes from A Year of Slow Cooking and a couple vegetarian slow cooker books have been making quite the difference.

Slow cooker recipes require advanced planning. I'm sure some people who use slow cookers a lot get to the point where they can just throw stuff in it and hope it comes out well; but I need to follow recipes. Therefore, I need to shop with specific recipes in mind, and think about what will make sense for that week.

We've been prepping the ingredients for our slow-cooked meals after our son is asleep, refrigerating them, and then beginning the slow cooking process in the morning. This means that at 6 p.m., we're not starting the process of cooking; we're sitting down to eat a nice, warm, high-quality meal.

And what a huge difference this makes! It may not save tons of time--prepping a good slow cooker recipe takes as much time as prepping any recipe, and I've always felt that food prep work is the long boring part--but it is reorganizing our time in a way that makes sense for our family.

And I'm really happy about that.

Note: I've also checked out a couple library books on pressure cooking. We got a pressure cooker for our wedding in 2000 that we've used, maybe, twice? If I can get comfortable using it, I think we could use this pressure cooker to similar advantage. We'd prep food in advance, but instead of having it cook all day, throw the ingredients when we get home and see it ready to eat in only a few minutes. So far, I'm more drawn to the idea of food ready to eat as soon as we get home, freeing up the evening for walks and playing and other fun stuff--but I think the pressure cooker may have its place, too.