Cooking Day

Another cooking day down.  I got up at 4am and cooked and cleaned until a little after 6pm, with taking quite a bit of time out throughout the day to take care of the boys, talk to Isaac’s speech therapist, cut some wood with the miter saw to support the bottom shelf in the freezer, drive to and from a play date, etc. – so the whole day certainly wasn’t spent cooking, but it’s a good thing that I started early in the morning, because it was such a busy day that it still took me all day long to finish with everything else going on.  But it was definitely worth it.  I had 45 main dishes prepared by the end of the day, including our favorite fried rice recipe, teriyaki chicken, some casseroles, some roasts, enchiladas, maple mustard chicken (better than it sounds), and different varieties of “jammy chicken” with sauces made with different flavors of jams.  We’ve tried the fried rice, teriyaki, roasts, and enchiladas before, and the others are new this month.  And I figured out a better way to freeze the crock pot recipes – before I would just put them in gallon freezer bags, so when we’d put them frozen into the crock pot the crock pot lid wouldn’t close all the way (one day the lid actually fell off the crock pot).  So this time I put them in the freezer bags, but then I put them into tupperware containers in the freezer, which I removed after they were frozen, so they froze in a shape that will fit inside the crock pot all the way.  Anyway, this new stress-free dinner system is turning out kind of fun, and I shouldn’t have to do another big cooking day for quite a while now.