Big Cooking Days

So I've been trying something the last few weeks: big weekend cooking days.

Basically on Sunday my goal is to get either the cooking or just the prep done for several meals through the week.  A typical week's dinners look like this:  Sunday-Wednesday: stuff at home, Thursday: leftovers, Friday: out, Saturday: ?  What I find is that the tolerance for cooking dips exponentially the farther into the week we get, so I try to head that off at the pass, hence the Big Cooking Day.

Lately I've been trying to start off the Big Cooking Day with a slow cooker recipe.  My mom gave me a good creamy Italian chicken recipe that P and I both like, and that yields lots of leftovers.  I grabbed a recipe book at work the other week and tried beans.  I liked them, but they didn't really go over well with P, so that one'll not make a reappearance.  Then last week I found this blog entry and wanted to try her recipes, thinking that I'll get double out of my Big Cooking Day if I can freeze half!  I tried the Barbecue Chicken recipe, and we loooooved it!  I am especially excited because P actually ate bell peppers and zucchini and didn't complain.  He even tipped the bowl up at the end to drink the rest of the sauce.  WINNING!!  I followed the recipe closely, but substituted 15oz can of tomato sauce instead of 8oz, and I didn't use the tapioca.  I'm sure that made my sauce runnier, but it didn't bother either of us.  When I try it again, I may even use more chicken.  For us, the half of the recipe that I didn't freeze was only enough for 1 night's dinner for P and me and a bit for Z, with no leftovers at all.  We used it as a stand-alone meal.  I think if I added another pound or so of chicken, it'd still fit well into the crockpot, and we'd have leftovers for Thursday night.  I could also easily add another sweet potato or 3, because they turned out hella YUMMY.

This past Big Cooking Day, I rounded off my activities by baking my favorite blueberry oatmeal muffins (substituting regular milk for buttermilk, and no nuts, and chop the blueberries in a processor before adding) and making my favorite maple marinade for some salmon.  P made garlic corn and we had it and the salmon for dinner that night and the barbecue chicken on Monday.  We'll probably do frozen pizza tonight, then I'll pick up some fresh carrots at the Farmer's Market on Wednesday and we'll do quinoa (no water, substitute the stock every time it calls for water) and P will grill some chicken, then we'll have the rest of that and the remainder of the corn for leftovers on Thursday.

I really like the Big Cooking Days on Sunday.  I'm still refining the planning and trying to make the most of it, but who can argue with a slow cooker going all day, baking, and grilling - exploiting all my options!  The quinoa would actually also be a good one to add on Sundays... I'd probably have kept cooking, but I ran out of clean measuring utensils.