I feel like I might be able to squeeze in a few more cheesy cliches, but I'm sure by now you've either rage quit and closed my page, or you're hoping the real Anna will come back.
In all serious silliness, it really is good to be informed before going into the battlefield that is the kitchen.
Despite my own impatience, I am increasingly cooking from scratch, with some support from convenience packages. I'm not quite skilled enough to make everything from scratch yet, and some things I have determined are the same or cheaper in time and cost whether I make it myself or from a box.
Our pantry is perpetually stocked with canned veggies/beans, soup base, gravy base, canned tomatoes and sauces, pastas, and dry storage sides (think potatoes, mac n cheese, seasoned rice) for when I'm in a bind. My routine is to usually combine a pantry item or two with something else I made from fresh ingredients. Most of the time I have something going in the slow cooker or thawed from the freezer, and just whip up a side in the twenty minutes that our dogs are being fed and our own dinner time. Husband thinks I'm a wizard, but really I've just mastered good looking lazy cooking.
With my leg in the way, and plenty of "bad" days, I lean pretty heavily on my slow cooker on the daily since I can toss a handful of things in in the morning and have dinner make itself.
Since my "good" days are few and unexpected, I like to have a lot of ingredients available to me for batch cooking. When I can, I'll spend the day cooking bulk recipes. I then divide up the end results into weeknight meal portions for Husband and I that either reheat well in the microwave or take an hour in the oven. This has proven valuable with the increasing number of "bad" days my brain/body connection has had when I either don't want to leave the bed or physically just can't. Less days eating takeout means more cash in the budget, especially when this method is done right.
My first warning - Don't bother trying to make something unusual or new on a batch day. Always try new recipes on a day when you can make a standard dinner portion to beta test. I cried a lot for almost a year experimenting with big batches and discarding a lot of food to my dogs. Don't be me! Nowadays I'll typically cook a little extra of the new thing, freeze some leftovers, and then try it out a few days later for lunch to see how it fared. Much less waste and spoiled dogs that way.
My second warning - you want to start with something simple, I always recommend a loaded spaghetti sauce. Almost everyone has a favorite spaghetti sauce. The goal here is to cook enough add-ins down into the sauce to make it almost a meal in itself. Meat, tofu, and veggies need to be chopped and fully cooked into your sauce, then divided up into your freezer portions and stowed. This will thaw nicely in the microwave while you wait for your noodles, eggplant, garlic bread, or whatever you eat your sauce with is cooking. BAM. Dinner in fifteen minutes or less. Since the sauce should be almost a stew with delicious things in it, this is also great for making slightly smaller portions to take to work for microwave lunch, or even in a Lunch CrockPot.
