Once a Week Cooking

Ever since I started my new job back in January, my free time has been increasingly limited and I've been quite exhausted after work. For the first few weeks it was tortuous to come home and have to get something together for dinner and more often than I care to admit I just gave up and we either ate out or dinner consisted of milk and cereal. One week got so bad that cereal was even my go to lunch option. Not healthy. Not at all.

To do something about this I decided to try cooking a weeks worth of lunches and dinners over the weekend when I had much more free time and energy. I started slow only doing 2 recipes at a time on Sunday but now I can easily make 4-5 meals plus a tasty treat.

In all I spend about 4-5 hours cooking but it has varied based on what I'm cooking. There are really easy ways to shorten that time too like having one recipe use the crock pot and having another be a stove top only recipe.

Another benefit is that all of the prep work is consolidated. Instead of getting everything ready to chop vegetables each day, I just get it out once chop everything and then I only wash it once too.
A few tips I've picked up on as I've done this the last few weeks:

• Read all of your recipes before starting and get a feel for what order to work in.
• Start by getting out all of your dry ingredients so you don't keep going back to the same cabinets half a dozen times.
• Rinse off utensils and cookware after using so food doesn't dry on
• Have some fun music or a podcast going!

Food for the week.

Here's a brief example of what and how I cooked a few weekends ago.  I made 4 dishes: egg salad, And Noodles, Stuffed Shells, and Tacos.

I started by cooking pasta and quick soaking beans. While that was on the stove I mixed up the sauce for And Noodles and preheated the oven. After the noodles were done they went into the sauce and then into the oven.

Using the same pasta pot I started cooking the shells. I also started the eggs to hard boil. Then I got the cheese filling ready for the shells. By the time the shells were stuffed and ready to go in the oven, it was time to take out the And Noodles so I only had to preheat the oven once instead of twice. I chopped up the vegetables for the tacos and egg salad while the beans finished cooking and then used the pot from boiling eggs to make some brown rice for the tacos.

At this point all that was left was letting the food cool before I packed it into individually sized portions in tupperware. Since I'd ben rinsing dishes off as I went and the dishwasher was empty all I had to do was load it and the kitchen was clean.


It's gotten a lot easier for me over the last few weeks as I've perfected my routines and it also helps if you do all of the grocery shopping a day or two prior since Sundays at the grocery store are always crowded.

Buy Now or Wait

I’m having a bit of crazy about our kitchen storage closet.  Right now it’s the space under the stairs (aka HP’s first bedroom) but it has absolutely no shelving or place to sit anything so everything sits on the floor.  This is what it looks like right now:

Caution: Disaster Zone!

Really the biggest irritation is the big stack of extra pots that we don’t use.  We’ve got quite a collection of stuff that came with the apartment that we don’t use and are thus storing in one of our three downstairs closets.

They had metal wire shelving for sale at the grocery store which looked like it would fit in the closet.  Shelving like that would get everything off the floor and better organized, but I’m not sure it’s worth the several hundred SAR price tag.  We would probably be able to find something cheaper at Ikea if we wanted to go down and look, but it might just be better to accept that it won’t be quite as orderly as I might want since we’ll only be here another three or so months.  It seems silly to buy something like shelving at this point and have to go through the hassle of trying to sell it in August or dumping it in the trash, which repulses me.

I can’t wait to get out of this mindset.   Knowing that I can’t take things with me as I’ve moved around the past few years has been a huge deterrent for acquiring more stuff.  This has been a blessing and a curse, and though I don’t want to go get tons of stuff for the sake of buying, my peace of mind would be much improved by not having to convince myself everytime I find something we actually need or could use.

This reminds me a lot of the home selling market.  Small maintenance issues get ignored or pushed to the back burner over several or many years and then when it’s time to sell the house, suddenly all of these minor inconveniences get fixed, improved, or renovated.  After all the hard work, time, and money the family moves out and someone new gets to enjoy the fruits of your labor.  Maybe this doesn’t happen as much in real life, but HGTV makes it seem like an everyday occurrence.

Getting this space better organized would certainly make life a bit easier for the next few months, but does the added benefit outweigh the cost?