Shortcuts?

[Anonymous]

DH and I love a good salad at lunch. I've started using the pre-cooked/grilled chicken, reheating in a skillet, then tossing into the salad. It's delicious! I've also started roasting a large quantity of veggies on Sunday's to then use throughout the week to make meals faster (roasted peppers and onions went into the taco salad I made today for lunch). Like tonight I've got a curry simmer sauce that I'll add roasted potatoes, peppers, onions, pre-mentioned chicken and chickpeas. We'll put it over rice (I premade a big batch yesterday that I'll reheat). It takes hardly any time to come together and tastes like it's taken hours.

What short cuts do you use?

[Anonymous]

On Sundays, I do a lot of meal prep for the week. Yesterday, I did focaccia dough; crispy chickpeas for school lunches and salads; sheet pan roasted veggies for lunches and salads; stovetop polenta that I mold on sheet trays for air-frying for school lunches and salads, etc. For packaged stuff, TJ has these steamed lentils that we add to many things. They also have pre-cleaned leeks and fennel, which are good for roasted veggies. Dried fruit and nuts can be added to lunches or rice or salads for extra texture. In the winter, slow cooker stews, lentils, etc. Making double batches and freezing, and then defrosting night before. Meal-planning makes you target short-cuts for sure.

[Anonymous]

I'm mostly vegetarian, but once a month after we go to a big farm market I roast two chickens for dinner on Sunday night. We eat a chicken dinner with the drumsticks (one drumstick/leg each for a family of four), roasted potatoes, and roasted vegetables. I roast extra vegetables and potatoes that get made into a quiche or frittata the next day. The leftover chicken meat gets pulled off the bones and frozen, as do the giblets (separately, raw, minus the livers, which I often bread end fry up on Saturday, the day we get the chickens, and eat atop a salad). The remaining giblets get used for chicken stock for next week's soup. This week's soup stock is made from the chicken bones and vegetable scraps. They instant pot is great for making rich stocks.

The chicken meat is used in a ton of stuff, enchiladas, salads, soups, quesadillas, pastas. I try to freeze it in portions that make sense for the various future uses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm mostly vegetarian, but once a month after we go to a big farm market I roast two chickens for dinner on Sunday night. We eat a chicken dinner with the drumsticks (one drumstick/leg each for a family of four), roasted potatoes, and roasted vegetables. I roast extra vegetables and potatoes that get made into a quiche or frittata the next day. The leftover chicken meat gets pulled off the bones and frozen, as do the giblets (separately, raw, minus the livers, which I often bread end fry up on Saturday, the day we get the chickens, and eat atop a salad). The remaining giblets get used for chicken stock for next week's soup. This week's soup stock is made from the chicken bones and vegetable scraps. They instant pot is great for making rich stocks.

The chicken meat is used in a ton of stuff, enchiladas, salads, soups, quesadillas, pastas. I try to freeze it in portions that make sense for the various future uses.

[Anonymous]

Sunday pot of beans (usually every other week; different kind of beans each time); +1 for Sunday roast chicken. DW and DS oddly don't like cold chicken pieces whole (I do!), but they sure like chicken salad and chicken enchiladas/burritos.

[Anonymous]

Also, NYT Cooking had a run lately of quickie (<30 min) weeknight meals. I saved a dozen of them to try out over the coming month or so.