Good food on a tight schedule

Most of us could eat better (and more cheaply!) than we do, even on a tight schedule.  It just takes a little thinking ahead to increase your food self reliance in that step past growing your own.  Some of it is bulk cooking a head, some of it is just planning.  All of it helps keep busy folks who are also looking to increase or maintain their self reliance from falling back on fast food restaurants and expensive packaged prepared foods.

The first thing that leaps to mind for me is crock pot breakfasts, mostly because it’s how we do breakfast six days a week at home.  I’m only feeding two…well, one really, because I’m just not a big breakfast eater, so we use a four cup Crock-ette.  Most mornings when we get up the automatic timer on the coffee pot has arranged for fresh coffee and the little crock pot offers a hearty, healthy hot breakfast with no focus or effort for bleary-eyed people trying to kick-start the day.

Another breakfast favorite around here is home made breakfast burritos…make up around a dozen of them with your favorite fillings over the week-end; wrap each in a bit of cellophane or slide into a baggy and stack them up in the fridge.  They’re good cold, and you can throw them in the nuker if you’ve time and inclination.

Grab-and-go foods stacked up in the fridge are a huge savings in time, money and hassle—not to mention the ability to adjust the way they are made to meet specific tastes, dietary needs and budgets.  Rice patties are an excellent fridge standard, and are so simple and cheap to make!  Another one of my favorites are falafels; I love cold falafels with Miracle Whip (or the cheap knock-off thereof), or with yogurt…or tzatziki sauce!!  Of course, if you put tzatziki sauce on shredded newspapers I’d probably eat them, LOL!  LOVE the stuff.

My honey is a strong proponent of stacks of French toast in the fridge for fast, reasonably high protein go-food.  It’s simple enough to grab a slice of cold French toast and wrap it around a peeled banana, or slap some preserves between two pieces, then out the door you fly.    For what ever reason, I prefer cold hotcakes, usually with almond butter as I don’t care for peanut butter.  Either of those are a more involved version of tortillas, really; there’s not a lot nutritionally to tortillas, but they make great wrappers for almost anything lying about—a couple of handfuls of a nice mixed greens salad with a bit of some sort of cheese, a drained ladleful of goodness of the bottom of a pot of soup, or the traditional refried beans and cheese rolled up in a tortilla is fast, easy and healthful.

Back in my misspent youth when I used to watch television a lot, The Frugal Gourmet was one of my favorite shows.  As part of keeping a frugal kitchen, he recommended that perhaps once a week the “head cook” cook off a large pot of basic white rice, a large pot of spaghetti noodles, and a large pot of some other basic pasta, being sure that the pasta was just barely al dente.  This provided a fairly instant basis for a wide variety of meals without the time consideration or extra hassle and pot on the stove while taking ten minutes to put together a nice, sturdy, welcoming sit-down meal at the end of a harried day.  If your noodles are already cooked and you’ve been simmering spaghetti sauce in a crock pot while you were gone, you can be ten minutes between sitting your keys down and sitting down to the table; put a large enough pot of salted water with a lid on it to boil on high; when it boils, add enough of your pre-cooked noodles to make that meal.  It takes maybe 90 seconds at a full boil for them to be heated through…drain, put the sauce on and serve.  Makes it really difficult to justify going out to a restaurant just for the sake of getting you and yours fed!

Another time saver that might encourage a body to eat good food at home even if their schedule is tight is to prep your groceries when you bring them home.  This is best done, of course, if you have one regular shopping day a week (or a month!), and a planned menu is also very helpful.  Even if only one or even neither of those points are the case at your house, you are probably aware of how you use the food you bring in.  For instance, we go through green onions as if they were a food group of their own…probably eight bunches a week, given my druthers.  I almost always use them sliced fine, so when a couple three bunches of green onions come out of the shopping bags, they get sliced up as I know I’ll use them, and put in a container in the fridge.  Keeps them from going limp, slimy, or crunchy and when I want to add them to something I just pop open the container and grab a handful rather than having to stop other food prep, set up the cutting board, cut up the onions, wash up the cutting board and knife, wipe down the counter and go back to what I was preparing.

Do you already use any of the above tips?  Have other tips about how you run your kitchen, diet, budget or schedule that you feel increases your food self reliance?  Do you think you eat at restaurants and fast food joints out of necessity, or out of appreciation for professional culinary expertise?