Tuesday, June 18, 2013

My Food Revelation

When life gets complicated, we change.  We adapt. It's part of the beauty of being human.

When life here got crazy between kids and jobs and moves, we adapted.  Cooking has gotten so much more simplified.  At the beginning of our marriage, I would start making dinner around 3:00 and have it ready by 5:00.  It was vital for me to have two hours of uninterrupted time to get that meal on the table.  Seven years and four (nearly five) kids later, I laugh at that earlier version of myself.

Someday, I will again have that luxury, but I doubt it will be soon.  So, for now, we adapt to the resources we have.

In my case, the discovery of freezer to slow cooker cooking changed my life.  I have a round up of recipes and techniques here .  It's so simple, it's genius.  Get your ingredients together.  Get a bunch of gallon ziplocs and label them.  Fill the bags with meat, vegetables, and seasonings.  Freeze.  On your hectic mornings, pull a bag out of the freezer, stick it in the slow cooker and turn the slow cooker on.  Voila!  Dinner is the first thing you get to cross off your lengthy to-do list.

Yesterday I learned that if you have a basic recipe,  like Lemon Garlic "Dump" Chicken (It's better than it sounds, I swear!), you can add 2 cups of uncooked rice and 4 cups of liquid about three hours before serving and it becomes a whole new dish.

Freezer to slow cooker is flexible like that.  You can use the veggies you have, like last year I had a bumper crop of summer squash and green beans and was given a huge kohlrabie, so most of my freezer meals had some of those.  I could also get boneless chicken breasts for super cheap, so we ate a lot of chicken.

Most importantly, I could assemble about a dozen of these bags over nap time.

Quick, easy, cheap.  What's not to love?

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