Well last Tuesday marked our 1 monthiversary and it simultaneous felt super short and as if we’d actually been married forever. We’re still working on ironing out the rhythm of day to day life and the challenges that working and living together for the first time pose.

The only real challenge is how much time is left at the end of the day. Chris can more or less set his own hours so he just bases them on my schedule. I have to be at work at 7 which means that I leave the house at 6 which means we wake up at 5. I then work 10 hours minimum, leave at 5:30, and get home around 6:30 at the absolute earliest. At first we would throw together a pre-planned dinner, eat, and find that it was time to sleep. Before 2 weeks had passed we decided to ditch the whole making dinner thing and use only crock pot meals. This has been working really well but a lot of times there is a lot of chopping of vegetables involved in the recipes and it becomes a lot in the mornings.

So Mom sent me a link to the blog of a woman who only cooks once a month. She does 1 big cooking day and makes meals that can be frozen and then defrosted as necessary. I can’t even imagine how intense that one day is. Anyway, she recently experimented with making meals that could be frozen and then tossed in the crock pot. She included 3 recipes and I tried 2 of them out this afternoon. I completely forgot that I could have done all the chopping in the food processor so I spent an hour or so watching TV and chopping veggies and then tossed them in zip lock baggies with spices, meat, and sauces. It was super easy, didn’t involve any actual cooking, and now I have 4 meals. (2 for this week, 2 for 2 weeks from now.) Our goal is to have 4 prepared meals a week, at least one of which must be a non-cooked salad, and the we eat leftovers for lunches, Friday, and any weekend meals that we’re around. This week we’ll have chicken salad sandwiches (I also made chicken salad today), BBQ chicken, curry chicken, and a pesto salad. The ideal plan if I can find enough recipes would be to cook every other week. So for 4 weeks we would have repeating meals every other week. At first it means I’ll need to cook 2 weekends in a row, this and next, but it could end up saving a ton of time without sacrificing a home cooked meal! I’m very pleased.
Each meal is enough for the 2 of us to eat for dinner and lunch the next day and I also made chicken broth from the chicken I used for the chicken salad and vegetable bits and pieces I’ve been saving. (When I cut off the head of a carrot or pepper I toss it in a zip lock bag in the freezer so I always have veggies on hand for stuff like that.) The problem with the chicken broth is I wanted to separate it into 2 cups per bag but all I had were 2 gallon bags so they look rather pathetic.

I’ve also heard that a full freezer saves energy, so this is basically a win-win-win situation! Hopefully everything turns out to be good!