I loved reading about all that you did last week to get ahead for breakfast! When I extend a challenge, you all really do jump right in. Thanks for making this so much fun! I’m sure your family thanks you too. But who really benefits the most from getting ahead? You and I. Yes indeed. The pay off for our efforts is that we make our kitchen work so much easier. Sweet!
Feel free to continue getting ahead with breakfast foods. (Yes, you have my permission.) Our Getting Ahead eCourse and eBook can help. Now we’re moving on to the evening meal, the Getting Ahead for Dinner Challenge. Feel free to call this a Supper Challenge if you prefer. I grew up calling it supper, but now I call it dinner, but that’s a post I already wrote a few years ago. :)
Who’s with me?! Let’s Do This!
What’s involved in this challenge? Anything that will help you put a healthy meal on the table in the evening a little bit faster or with a little less effort.
Some Getting Ahead for Dinner ideas:
- Use your crock pot (here are all of our Healthy Crock Pot recipes.)
- Cook meat ahead of time so that you can throw it into rice or pasta later
- Make a Cheesy Beef and Rice casserole ahead of time to warm up at meal time
- Freeze Chicken Fried Steak Strips for easy-to-grab meals
- Put extra casseroles in the freezer for easy meals later on
- Start making a dinner time menu plan for the week (here are our Main Dish recipes)
And those are just a few ideas. There are so many tasks you can do ahead of time to make your dinnertimes easier. (Lesson one and two – well all the lessons really – in the Let’s Do This! eCourse will give you more guidance.)
I’m planning to get a few casseroles made this weekend to help with busy days the next couple of weeks. It is SO nice to effortlessly grab a frozen casserole out of the freezer to heat up for dinner.
Let’s hear it! What are you going to make to get ahead for dinner? (Or do you prefer to call it supper?)
So a couple caveats: if you’re OK with aluminum foil pans and you’re in a phase in your life where you toss them after you use them or you just need some and you live in the northeastern US, Ocean State Job Lots has them on sale starting today (Thursday). A square cake pan size is just 19 cents. And lest you think it’s strange to wash out your foil pans, I grew up with a very thrifty mom who did just that. We had one Pyrex rectangular baking pan and everyone with a family knows that sometime it isn’t enough. Hence the foil.
We typically cook a goose once a year and anyone who knows how much fat a farm-raised goose produces can empathize with me when I say, I get a foil turkey roaster and throw it out at the end of cooking. We also end up with about 3-4 quarts of saved goose grease which we give to a friend who likes to cook with it.
Do you completely cook the chicken fried steak fingers and then freeze them? And then do you just reheat in the oven?
I actually froze them raw, then cooked them from their frozen state. You could cook them first and reheat them in the oven though if you prefer.
I just made double recipe of chili yesterday. Gave my son’s family enough for their meal last night along with baked potatoes to have chili cheese potatoes. Froze 2 containers for my son that lives out of state. Have enough for my husband a couple meals.
I have an organic whole chicken in the slow cooker now. Will make chicken and rice/noodle soup and some chicken salad.
Starting tonight by baking and freezing mini pizza’s with the extra pizza dough and toppings from dinner. I plan to make a few casseroles and hopefully some loaves of bread. Last night we had a chicken, broccoli, and rice casserole that was in the freezer – it was perfect for the end of a week of traveling and eating restaurant food.
Loved your previous dinner/supper post ha, ha. In my house growing up, dinner referred a big noon meal, such as when my Grandma would roast a chicken. But the evening meal could be referred as dinner or supper. It still confuses my husband to this day.
Don’t know if it’s considered getting ahead, but I am stocking up on just butchered lamb at the farmers market this weekend to use for future winter meals.
What has helped me the most is PLANNING. If I don’t have a goal, then its always crazy at 5pm!! I used to go to the store like 2-3 times a week and now I only once, if I don’t have enough, then oh well, I have to wait til next week or make something else. It is definitely keeping down the cost of food and waste:) Not to toot my own horn, but I am so proud of myself for sticking to it:) It goes along with your guest post about celebrating with people in their victories as well as the hardships:)Thanks again:)
I always double or triple whatever I am making and freeze what I don’t use so that things are always going into the freezer for a busy day. It makes it less stressful than setting aside time to “freezer cook.” This method has worked well for me! I also love cooking chickens, shredding them for future use and then making the broth from the carcass. You can get so much food for future dinners that way. :)
What is kind of funny is that I’ve been freezing meals and portions of meals for about three weeks ever since Laura got us going on this! The e-course was wonderful! Because my freezers are so full now, we need to “coast” for a week or two and eat some of the meals already stowed away. But then, I’ll get back to preparing some “make ahead meals.” Thanks, Laura!
As empty nesters just about everything I cook gets me ahead! Just about every recipe makes too much for us. A batch of soup is 4 meals. My homemade pasta sauce is 6 meals. Pulled pork sandwiches makes enough for 2 dozen or more sandwiches. (I freeze BBQ pork and sloppy joes in muffin pans. One ‘muffin’ of meat is a sandwich. Pop them out to ziplocs and you can pull them out anytime.) My freezer is always stocked and I typically only cook from scratch 2 days a week. I am loving it!
I can’t wait to have meals ready to go. Especially on weekends I have to work. Which lately been every weekend. Today I need to get the kitchen back in order. We went camping left friday night and I work and camped. Now back home until the weekend.
I am just getting started on freezing meals, and due to space problems we can’t freeze much. (We get a lot of venison from family, especially in the fall.) However, one thing that I’ve been doing for quite awhile is batch cooking meat–cook a few pounds of ground venison at a time, then freeze what we aren’t going to use for that meal. I also buy whole chickens, then cook them in the crock pot. Once I sort out all the meat, I throw the skin/bones back in the crock pot with the juice from the chicken, add another 5 or so cups of water, and make broth. I freeze that in one-cup sections, so we have quite a bit of chicken & broth in the freezer most of the time!