This weekend's work

Some weekends I am really on top of things and get a lot of good food prep done.  This was one of those weekends.  I will recap for the sake of offering suggestions and encouragement to others and to remind myself of what things work for me.

The first good news is that the gluten free mix I make myself and store worked wonderfully in our standby pancake recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook that is a tradition in our family.  This good news goes perfectly with the other good news which is that I found and used the griddle attachment to our stove top which has been sitting in the garage since we moved in two years ago.  (You know some of those pancakes went to the freezer for after school snacks during the week)  To continue with the gluten-free theme, my daughter made a batch of iced cookies that just really hit the spot, and now we are both so excited to continue experimenting with our homemade flour mix in other dessert items.

So I got out my biggest pot, bought a 105oz (or so) can of tomatoes, an almost ridiculous amount of tomato paste, and 4 pounds of ground beef.  I stirred a pot of tomato sauce for a few hours on Saturday to achieve 4 portions of meat sauce for the freezer. Some for lasagna and some for spaghetti dinner.  I'm really excited about those.  That was a lot of meat sauce.

Another exciting adventure was making yogurt with one of my daughters Friday night.  It was a success and we are all enjoying the yummy yogurt even though it is not very thick.  I hear this is a common issue in homemade yogurt. Still working on that one.

To continue, I boiled and shredded a chicken breast to be dressed up and used for lunches, stocked up on fruits, veggies, and a few obligatory salty snack foods for the kids' lunches this week. 

I found a few recipes for the crockpot and made one of them.  It was a sesame chicken recipe that turned out kind of plain.  No one is going to ask for it again, but in a bind I could use it.

That's a lot of cooking and food handling.  Throw in a trip to Costco and Safeway, and we should be good for a while!  Tonight, Monday, there will be leftovers from the not-so-great sesame chicken plus some leftovers from the lunch restaurant we ate at.