Cooking
Cooking is not one of my preferred skills in life – I get distracted very easily since I do not like cooking. When my kids were younger, the family “joke” at our house was that supper was ready when the smoke detector went off. Sadly, that was no joke – it was the truth. I would start something cooking on top of the stove then get distracted off reading a book, watching TV, doing something with the kids, life in general … and whatever was on the stove would boil over, burn or make noxious fumes.
I learned to bake cassserole dishes & roasts etc so we would not starve … lol … or be forced to eat baloney sandwiches forever.
Now that I am cooking for my daughter & grandson, I use our crockpot/slowcooker most of the time.
I read through the recipes here – Slow Cooker Main Dishes at allrecipes.com – a lot. Sometimes I have the ingredients and sometimes I do not. When I don’t, I make a grocery list and get them. But with a teen-age boy in the house, some of those ingredients may get eaten before they get used in a recipe … orange juice & milk come to mind first … lol … so I have learned to keep other ingredients on hand to make my meals.
In my crockpot planning pantry I tend to keep: Campbell’s Cream of soups … Lipton’s dry soup mixes … BBQ sauce … Alfredo sauce … Walden’s Farm Dressings … several varieties of dried beans … several varieties of pasta … Manwich sauce … tomato sauce …. spaghetti sauce … taco shells
In my crockpot planning freezer I tend to keep: chuck roast … ribs (my grandson prefers bone-in & my daughter & I prefer boneless) … beef stew meat … chicken breasts … sometimes chicken drumsticks … ham chunks … hamburger & turkey burger meat
I can combine these together in a lot of ways to make meals that are easy and allow me the freedom to be on the computer working or gaming or at my drawing table or running errands for hours at a time without “slaving over a hot stove”. It is healthier to eat freshly prepared foods. It is also cheaper. I like saving money to buy more art supplies or video games 