It was probably about 10 years ago that I was cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner every day! Blog readers would comment on how much time I spent in the kitchen and, to me, what I was doing seemed normal. These days, I may spend an hour a day, on average, in the kitchen.
Yesterday we had an outstanding dinner and Vince kept saying how good it was and I almost felt guilty because it was so quick to fix.
It started with a frozen salmon wellington from Aldi. I love having things like this, either purchased or homemade dishes, in the freezer. Yesterday I had planned to fix taco salad for dinner but it was raining and chilly and I felt like we should have a hot meal but I kept cross stitching and thinking . . I should go see what I can cook. I was leaning towards meatloaf since the ground meat was already defrosted but then remembered this salmon wellington in the freezer.
It had to bake about an hour. We were having baked purple sweet potatoes. They’re huge (from Azure) so I was baking one and we were sharing it. I washed it and wrapped it in foil and stuck it in the oven for about 25 minutes before putting the salmon in. I think the salmon needed to bake about 50 minutes. I went ahead and cleaned the corn.
Earlier I had stirred up the dough for the Barley Malt Pull Apart Rolls. Stirring the dough up took less than 10 minutes. I set it aside to rise. When I put the salmon in the oven, I cut and shaped the rolls and left them to rise. That took less than 10 minutes.
When the salmon had about 15 minutes left to cook, I went back upstairs, put the rolls in the oven, set the table, put the corn on to boil, got out the butter, brown sugar, blue cheese dressing, fixed our drinks and by then, everything was ready. Simple as that!
The sweet potato was wrapped in foil – no dishes to wash. The pans with the salmon and the rolls were lined with parchment paper – hardly any washing required. The water for the corn was dumped and little scrubbing was needed. No greasy mess on the stove. Other than the metal pans used for the rolls and salmon, everything went into the dishwasher.
I do try to fix good meals but I rarely cook meals that take hours and hours to prepare and produce dozens of dirty dishes.
Today we’re having leftover roast beef sandwiches with the leftover rolls and pasta salad. Another super quick meal!
Tee says
I had never bought or served premade meals like this until I started shopping at Aldi. Now I occasionally make something premade from Aldi when I’m busy or forgot to defrost anything. I prefer to make more of a homemade meal and freeze a dinner’s worth to use later. You have to be careful on the sodium content on the premade meals and more so with Aldi, the sugar content. Everything I buy there tastes too sweet. I normally offset it by making coleslaw or a vinegar based side. Just bought their red bag chicken, which is $7.99 now! I cringe at the salt in it. We don’t eat it often and I usually eat a half a sandwich. It’s pretty easy to cook for lunch and I add a green salad to call it complete. I missed this Wellington. The deliveries have been so erratic at my 2 Aldi’s that I know now to not expect anything in their ad, especially their “Aldi finds”.
judy.blog@gmail.com says
I don’t worry so much about sodium since we eat those premade meals maybe once a month or less. Now that I’m not drinking soda and we rarely eat out, I just don’t even think about it. If we started eating that kind of stuff more, I’d have to pay attention. I did see the red bag chicken the other day and didn’t get it. It seems like we always have leftovers we’re needing to eat and I try to make foods that will give us good sandwich leftovers. Today it was roast beef. Tomorrow we’re having roasted chicken and I’ll make chicken salad with the leftovers so we’ll have something fairly healthy for weekend sandwiches.