Food Things Currently Saving my Sanity

Treading water is a skill, too

Here are three very fun facts about rural a life I crash-landed into about eight months ago: 1) I live 40 minutes from a real grocery store, 2) I don’t have a dishwasher, and 3) I have to cook while simultaneously keeping two wild and precious creatures alive and away from toilets, mostly by myself.

As such, my planning, prepping, and cooking has changed to accommodate these current challenges, and also in a way that embraces my current advantages (like how lucky I am to be home all day and have time on most weekends).

Here are three things making my food life easier right now:

1) 1 Hour Freezer Prep

I’ve been a pretty accomplished freezer prepper for nearly a decade now. I began when I was in grad school and traveling to conferences constantly. It was always nice (and cheap) for me to get off a plane, come home, and eat my own cooking.

Back then, I had only the standard freezer on top of my fridge in my apartment and no children, so I would make a bunch of meals that could be reheated in one- or two-serving portions. It was a little finicky and time intensive, but I did it mostly by cooking through Ellie Krieger’s You Have it Made. (I wrote a review of it for fun on Amazon in 2017.)

After acquiring a chest freezer and being pregnant twice, I leveled up my freezer-meal game, stocking my freezer with months of food each time. For these purposes, I did a lot of cooking where I would make a double batch of something for dinner and freeze half. (More on freezer cookbooks to come probably!)

Now, even that method is too much and I have moved on to short, bulk prep sessions. More specifically, I am relying on this online course to prep a bunch of meals in one hour (this isn’t an affiliate link or anything and there are some free examples here if you’re curious but you have to sign up for a mailing list.)

Breakfast freezer prep

For a while, I thought I could just look at the recipes in each prep session and piece the rest together myself. And I probably could have. But having it all laid out when my brain is mush (often) is great.

Most of the meals have been solid and some have become family favorites. They lean a bit healthful and kid-friendly, perfect for us right now. And the prep sessions I’ve tried (about 5 so far) truly do take an hour. On top of that, clean up isn’t bad, and the ingredients are affordable and easy to find.

Not only do freezer meals make cooking easier when I need it, they cut down on dishes, which is a huge benefit for us at the moment. It’s like having takeout from your own freezer, which is especially helpful when takeout doesn’t exist in a 50-mile radius.

2) Meal Matrix

As an experienced and practiced pessimist, I have been known, on my more melancholy of days, to lament the fact that I can never possibly cook all the recipes I want to. I come by it honestly. My people are Slavic.

Is this a copyright violation? Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/madmen/comments/11gcq56/badass_betty/

This can put me in quite a pickle when it comes to meal planning. I want to cook everything and never the same thing. This approach, however, is conducive neither to efficiency nor feeding small and fierce opponents of variety. So I have adopted a meal matrix, and it has absolutely transformed my meal planning.

It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it is one I have needlessly flouted for a long time. Now, my meal planning and grocery list making is often done within an hour whereas it was not unheard of for me to spend an entire Saturday morning buried in the stacks hemming and hawing.

What is a meal matrix? It’s just assigning a food theme to a day (ie. Taco Tuesday). It gives me a rough template with just enough flexibility to appease my underlying recipe rogue and soothe my inner Toad.

Here’s my current matrix, always subject to change and never (okay, sometimes) subject to alliteration:

• Pasta Monday

• Fish Tuesday

• Breakfast for Dinner Wednesday

• Wildcard Thursday

• Pizza Friday

• Slow Cooker Saturday

• Soup Sunday

3) Bare Minimum Dinners by Jenna Helwig

This book has been an absolute workhorse for us since I received a galley of it three years ago right before having my first baby.

In the unexpected postpartum purgatory of about three months out—when I had finally exhausted my freezer stash but was still only sleeping in two-hour chunks—I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to feed myself.

I tried Hello Fresh. I tried making things up on the spot from premade products. Nothing was really working for me. Then, I remembered this galley and immediately bought the book.

All of the recipes in here are very minimalist in time, ingredients, or prep, and oftentimes all three. They contain some more trendy flavors and ingredients than their five-ingredient predecessors, and fewer things like canned soups and boxed stuffing (which, for the record, I do not think there is anything wrong with, either.)

For example, one recipe I made every week for Fish Tuesday until my husband asked I please stop, or at least take a break, was Chile-Lime Salmon, a simple combination of salmon, limes, olive oil, cherry tomatoes, and castelvetrano olives that requires no (zero!) chopping. There was also a beef/cabbage/harissa/yogurt skillet with pita chips that involved all my favorite things and basically no prep.

There are several more recipes from this book that have become staples, and some that I basically know by heart.

One time, I was pulled up on stage at an improv show and I said I liked cooking. They asked me my signature recipe and I didn’t have one because I used to never repeat recipes. This became the running joke, at my expense. It was very fun and I loved all the attention!! [It was the worst and I’m still scarred.]

What I’m getting at is that this book is really practical, much-used, and much-loved. It is great for all harried stages of life, or lazy nights. It is, for me, so good and so easy that I now repeat its recipes.

And maybe now I would get up on that stupid improv stage and proudly say “CHILE-LIME SALMON!” and be ironclad against any and all ad-libbed humiliation.

Or something.