Saturday's Cooking

Ruth and I did an inventory of the fridge Saturday and decided we didn't need to make any salads for this week.  We still had Coleslaw Forever (hardly even touched from the week before), a large four cup container of Warm Winter Vegetable Salad, and a large four cup container of Current Quinoa Salad.  So we made main courses instead.

I'm planning on going on a holiday in April.  Lord willing, I'll be flying out mid month to Japan with my daughter and my parents.  We'll be taking a cruise with several stops in Japan before going across the Pacific and doing the Alaska cruise, ending up in Vancouver at month's end.  I'm excited and apprehensive about this.  What am I doing booking a cruise when I'm unemployed?  Can I afford this?  How will Bram and Nicole manage while I'm gone?  How will Bram get to his car pool every morning?  All of those kinds of questions.

Some of those questions are easily answered.  Leslie W. has generously offered to drop Bram off to his car pool and pick him up again.  Bram's writing  final exams the first week I'm gone and then he's off school until he starts his summer job, so it's only one week that he needs coverage for.

And Ruth and I have made up a menu for the weeks that I'm gone and I'm trying to have meals made up and ready for all of those days.  This also means that I need to have the freezer cleaned out so that there's room for all of those meals.

Saturday Ruth and I made double sets of meals; one set for this week to eat and one meal to go in the freezer for when I'm gone.  So far I've already got lasagna (three different variations - see the previous post), a roast, borscht and the makings for pea soup in the freezer.  Saturday we made Jambalaya, Fish burgers, Sloppy Joes, and a Spinach Quiche.  This means that I've got over half of the meals already made for when I'm gone.  However when we made the meals, Ruth wasn't on a wheat-free diet, so she won't be able to eat the quiche.  I will freeze some of the chicken soup I'm making for supper tonight as well, so that's one more meal.  Most of the remaining meals on the menu are ones that I don't need to have made in advance but that Bram, Nicole or Ruth can make that night.  We have pizza, wonton soup, oven fried chicken, perogy casserole, taco salad, hamburger helper and stir fry on for other nights - none of which I need to have made up in advance.  So here I am, just short of a month before I leave and I have three week's worth of meals planned and made up.

I'll post some recipes for some of these meals though, because they are really good and it's nice to have the recipes on-line; it's easier to find them there than to search through various sheets of paper and cookbooks to find where they were originally.