Day 58 Time, Time, Time

Managing time is a challenge. I need to 1) decide what is for breakfast the night before and preferably have it in the crock pot or ready to put in the oven. 2) decide what's for lunch as we clean up breakfast 3) Fix the salad for dinner by lunch time, decide what we are eating and pull the meat to thaw, put it in the crock pot, etc. It helps to have a list on the fridge of the five or six dinners, posssible sides and desserts I would like to serve for the week. I don't have to follow an exact menu and each day can unfold with bumps and the unexpected but if I have thought ahead, the stress of "what do we eat?" is addressed only once a week instead fo five or six times a day. I need to establish a routine to water the sprouts every morning, mix the yogurt with breakfast clean up and the milk with dinner clean up so it can get cold overnight. It helps to decide in advance when to grind the wheat once a week to minimize the mess. Children need to be assigned these tasks as chores. With all these strategies employed cooking from scratch will be easier.

Breakfast: Venison patties, toast, and canned peaches. The freezer is full of venison from a large doe that my husband dropped at 400 yards last fall. Nebraska venison is corn fed and absolutely delicious - especially the chops. The meat is extremely lean and often mixed with pork or beef for more fat. Everything in our freezer could be bottled within one or two days if we had a power outage or the freezer quit. There are no corn dogs, french fries, fish sticks, tater tots, Marie Calenders pies, or frozen pizzas. All these prepared foods are expensive on a per serving basis compared to the exact same thing prepared at home. If the freezer stopped, preserving all prepared foods before spoiling would require some fast thinking.

Lunch to go: peanut butter and honey sandwiches/ ham and cheese and tuna in another lunch, celery sticks, and granola bars
Lunch to stay: chicken pockets from the freezer dated 2/23/10. Wonderful.
Dinner: Beef it pie filled with the leftover minestrone soup made from all dehydrated veggies. It was much more palatable with the pie crust. The children ate well.