The minute the garage door slides up at the end of my work day, my husband begins salivating. Rushing to the cupboard, he pulls out place mats, plates and silverware. He thinks I can just come home from a day of work and magically present him with supper within 20-30 minutes of entering the house.
As annoyed as I might be at his assumption with its pressure to perform and his starving look as he holds out his plate, he assumes correctly. Thanks to the freezer, microwave and planned-overs, as his mother called them, I am a magician in the kitchen. All it takes is a lot of pre-cooking – just like his mom used to do.
During her years as an empty-nester, she cooked enough food at one meal for several other meals. When we visited with our children, she reached into her chock-full freezer and pulled out several tiny plastic packages of frozen vegetables, meat and rice to make a a quick meal for us.
Working 40 hours a week and having children who live at least a couple hours of driving time away from us leaves me little time and energy to be a gourmand.
Having passed the half century mark, the quest to maintain good health demands that we not grab fast food which raises our food budget along with our cholesterol and blood pressure all in the name of saving time. Instead, we create our own fast foods beginning with vegetables. If I would grow them in the garden, I’d do his momma proud.
I don’t. I stock the freezer with sale priced vegetables and microwave them as an integral part of our fast food meal.
Sometimes I find a good price for hamburger and purchase several pounds. Those evenings my husband and I spend time quality time together in the kitchen. With an audio book playing in the background, he makes up hamburger balls, flattens them between a couple of carefully chosen bowls and plates and stacks them between double layers of wax paper for the freezer.
It’s his lunch. He prepares it. He eats it and cleans up the mess. I do not argue.
While he makes hamburger patties, I brown three to five pounds of meat in the eight-quart pan with seasonings, onions and celery.
Once the hamburger has browned, I drain the fat, spread the seasoned meat to cool on heavy brown papers sacks – which absorb additional fat – before I make up meal-sized plastic packages for the freezer – ready to put together a quick meal for the old folks at home.
It’s better than soup stock. I use the prepared meat in casseroles, goulash, spaghetti or enchiladas. Also, portions of prepared macaroni made goulash that night, old-fashioned macaroni and cheese another night and macaroni salad over the weekend.
Chicken gets a similar treatment – cook up several pounds, divide into meal sized portions and conquer the short order supper at home. One big cooking session provides the base for many meals.
While the meat sautés, I use another portion of the ground meat to make up a large pan of meatloaf and mark it off into two-person sized meat loaves before baking it. The segmented meatloaf comes out of the oven ready to slide into sandwich bags to store in the freezer until I need it to perform my nightly magic act of presenting my hopeful husband with supper in minutes.
Nothing to it. I do it all the time.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)