Monday in the Kitchen

Back when Vince worked . . was that 99 years ago? It seems like it’s been that long since I had days to myself. Don’t give me a speech about being thankful he’s home . . I am but . . sometimes I need space.

Back in the days when I had the day to myself, I almost always cooked for the week on Monday. I really liked that because it freed up so much time. You know if a meal takes two hours to cook, you can cook four meals in probably three hours instead of spending two hours each day, plus cleanup. Also, having the meal cooked or prepped for cooking meant I wasn’t planning my day around getting the mail on the table on time.

I think it’s a combination of knowing there would be no husband, no dogs and no cats in the kitchen, plus just happy to be able to be back in the kitchen and things are starting to seem normal, but I wanted to be in the kitchen this morning early and I got so much done.

I started out putting most of an almost 5 pound roast in the slow cooker to make Mississippi Pot Roast.

Here’s what all I got done as far as meal prepping and this only took about two hours and I was doing laundry during that time too.

• Rice for fried rice cooked in the pressure cooker (blue bowl in the back)
• Chicken seasoned and stuffed with rosemary, lemon and onions to roast tomorrow (in the oblong pan in the back) (zipper bag to the right)
• Veggies cleaned and cut for roasting with the chicken. I’ll cut the potatoes in half tomorrow before adding them to the pan.
• Cabbage and carrots shredded for coleslaw (zipper bag in the middle)
• Salads made and vacuum sealed for the week. I didn’t seal the one for today (quart jar to the right)
• Coleslaw dressing made. (half pint jar)
• Green Goddess dressing made (pint in front – left of the coleslaw dressing)
• Veggies chopped for steak with stir fried veggies today (bowl in the front)
• The “steak” for today is really part of a sirloin tip roast (front left bowl)
• In the small bowls and jar between the steak and the rice are the eggs, ham and green onions for the fried rice.

Today we had #5 on this week’s menu – fried rice, stir fried steak and veggies and salad.

Fried rice never goes to waste around here so I started out with two cups of raw rice and it made a lot!

I almost took out a steak to cut up but took a chance on slicing off part of a roast and using that. I had an almost 5 pound roast and that’s just so much for the two of us. We would have had more leftovers than we would have eaten so using part of it for this dish was great. It was tender! Vince couldn’t believe it wasn’t a ribeye or a strip steak.

The best part . .

Lots of leftovers!

We will have the steak/veggies and fried rice one more time; Vince will snack on fried rice probably all week.

We’ll have the roast Wednesday and there will be leftovers to make roast beef sandwiches over the weekend.

We’ll have the roasted chicken tomorrow and will eat less than half of that. The rest will be used for a soup probably Thursday.

My cooking is pretty much done for the week. Now . . if I could get some good progress made on the puppy training! 🙂