Saving up for a lazy day

My due date for my baby is Oct 1st, which means that I'm about 7 months pregnant and will give birth in about 3 months. Who ever said women were pregnant for 9 months was just full of crap. Of course maybe they meant that after you KNOW you're pregnant, you have 9 more months to go from there... anyway.

I know how lazy I am about real cooking right now, before I have a baby to deal with. I recently did an inventory of our freezer because it was loaded yet I didn't feel like we had anything out there. Turns out most of the food out there was not quick food and therefore usually got dismissed as unacceptable for dinner tonight. We had ground beef, pork chops, steaks, tater tots, a whole turkey, a rack of ribs, and raw sausages (as opposed to brown and serve). "This is dumb," I says to myself. "Just cook more you lazy butt!"

So this weekend I did! We put the turkey in the fridge to thaw last Wednesday and I cooked it today. We love turkey and typically cook it for a non-holiday several times a year. Usually, we have some friends over and put on a whole feast and we all take leftovers home. I wasn't up for that this week, or rather my house was not prepared for that this week, so I'm trading some meat for a hashbrown casserole with a lady at work. I don't know how many pounds that huge turkey was, but we've got 9 beautiful containers of harvested turkey meat lined up in the fridge tonight. I've been known to take pictures of my stacked turkey meat in the fridge. And we've already eaten off it twice today! We'll eat on it all this week for lunch and dinner and when we start slowing down on it later this week, I'll package it up to freeze some to use in casseroles later. The big reason I don't cook casseroles more is that they usually call for X number of cups of cooked, diced chicken, which we never have just sitting around. This will solve that problem!

One of the nesting type preparations I'm hoping to accomplish before our little boy shows up, is to have a stack of frozen casseroles in the freezer that take zero brain power to cook, but merely a day's forethought. As in, move it from the freezer to the fridge on Monday night. Tuesday night bake for 30 minutes and eat. In essence, I'm saving up for a lazy day. Another thing I LOVE to eat but hardly ever do, is properly cook green beans. They really are about a thousand times better when they've been cooked with pork fat for 8 hours before you try to eat them. So today, after I wrestled the turkey into the cooker, I put on a pot of green beans to cook all day. Five cans of green beans with 5 slices of bacon in the pot. They sat around on low (or just warm while we were at church) for 8 hours straight. Then I let them cool and packaged them up to freeze. So now I have 5 cans worth (in 5 freezer bags) of really good green beans in the freezer, saved up for a lazy day! I bought a flat (12 cans) yesterday, so maybe I'll do that again next weekend. We'll see (don't hold your breath).

Also I put up some meatloaf this weekend. That sounds odd, but isn't really. I defrosted beef and sausage, mixed up all the raw ingredients, bagged it up again and froze it raw. This way, all the gross part (wrist deep in raw meats) is done! That's the part I always dread. Now all I have to do is defrost the meatloaf goo, form it into loaves and bake for 45 minutes! With 12 minutes of forethought, I can still have a clean kitchen and meatloaf in an hour! Two batches of meatloaf saved up for a lazy day! With green beans if I like!!

I'm so proud of me! I've cooked or prepared food a whole lot of this weekend and my kitchen is still clean at 9pm on Sunday night! Miracles never cease!!!

Now I just have to fold the rest of the laundry, pick out outfits for this week, and go to bed. Piece of cake!