Convenience Food

When one has two children under the age of three, one must constantly think of expediency. And even when this one was sans children, she was still thinking things like what will save time and what will make life easier.

One way to accomplish this is with convenience food. I don’t mean the kind wrapped in plastic you pick up at the gas station or in the frozen food aisle. I’m talking about planning ahead, working a little harder initially, and finding it utterly convenient in the long run.

My mom used to practice this method of homemaking. She would buy large amounts of meat and veggies once a month. When she got home from the store she would chop, cook and freeze everything in individual meal-portion packages. Then throughout the month, when she needed chicken or browned ground beef or sliced bell peppers, she would just unthaw a package.

I’ve also heard of people taking this idea of convenient food way further. If you’d like to read more about this method, I refer you to one of Heather’s posts a few weeks ago. I am not quite as organized (or ambitious) as she, but I did recently take a page from the book of Mom.

About two weeks ago I was in the grocery store and noticed that the massive packages of ground beef were discounted. On the menu for the upcoming two weeks were several beef dishes. I wouldn’t use the entire package for these meals but since I’m all about a bargain, I got the beef. Usually, I would have just frozen the unused portion in a giant block. Rather unceremonious yes, but convenient in the moment. Not so convenient however, when I have to break out the chisel of get the amount I need for a meal dislodged from the rest of the block - not to mention having to thaw and then cook the portion after chiseling it free.

So this time I decided to be a bit proactive. I divided the beef up into the portions I would need for the planned meals as well as several other meal-sized portions. I cooked each portion separately (spicing it according to what it would be used for) and even labeled them before I stuck them in the freezer. This was NOT convenient. Show me a woman who thinks standing in front of a stove for hours cooking ridiculous amounts of ground beef is convenient and I’ll show you a better woman than me.

Least you begin to wonder at the title of this post, I’ll get to that now. A few days ago, after staring at one too many cans of condensed soup and wondering “shouldn’t lunch be more than this,” I remembered my moment of wild and abandoned proactivity. I went to the freezer, seized one of the unspoken-for packages of pre-browned ground beef and within ten minutes was sitting down with my boys enjoying hot beef stroganoff. Now that, my friends, was convenient.

The End.