Cooking an Evening Meal When You're Exhausted

thriftwizard

Another vote for meal planning; it also makes shopping easier. I do a big shop weekly at our local market, which has some excellent general food stalls as well as a Farmer's Market section, and plan the week's meals around whatever's best value. I also have adult children at home & they get pressed into "catering" service whenever I'm too busy, (two of them are now excellent cooks, much better than me! I don't think it'll do them any harm in the long term) and I make use of the slow-cooker if we're all out all day.
Once in a while it all comes unstuck & I find myself wandering around the supermarket in a daze on my way home, too tired even to make a sensible decision, and resenting anything & everything to do with the whole business, especially the cost of readymade food. That's the times that pasta, quick & easy sauce & salad are made for, I reckon - it's worth having a stash of readymade pasta sauces in the cupboard for days like that. No-one will die of hunger just because I haven't the energy (or willpower) to chop & peel and stand over a hot cooker for an hour... HTH!

rachbc

adult children shoudl be making either a meal for the family, or if they insist on different food and different times, cooking for themselves.

I cooked an evening meal for the family once a week from being 13 or so as my mum was doing a course, my brother did to even if he usually did oven chips and something. My DS is keen to learn to cook so might activate this for him soon!

VJsmum

I have 5 portions of lasagne sat defrosting on the side as i am off to work in a mo and then back to eat it and off out for the evening. One child is off to look at a 6th form with me, the other is footie training and OH is at choir practice so we are all in and out at different times.

The lasagnes were variously cooked in 2 separate goes with the left overs frozen. I always make enough for 8 and freeze half (5th one tonight is for MIL who is appearing on the scene to babysit footballing son!).

My work pattern has changed since september and i have much less time to cook so the freezer has been invaluable. Big portions of mincey things, soups, stews and casseroles, shepherds pie etc - all get made in big batches when i can and freeze the left overs. Last night was carbonara - sauce took as long as the pasta to cook and the whole lot on table well within 15 minutes of getting in and all from scratch.

But sometimes we have bacon and egg, or fish fingers and oven chips, or whoopsied ready meals or fried chicken with a jar of curry sauce or (:eek:) bought pizza :cool:

It can be done, but does need a bit of planning.

YORKSHIRELASS

When I was working full time I had three strategies that really helped:

1. Meal planning. Getting home from work and having no idea what you are having for tea when you are tired and hungry is awful. I now mealplan two weeks ahead so you know you have the right ingredients handy and can take meat out of the freezer the night before if necessary. Maybe sit down and make a list of meals that everyone likes that are easy to prepare first.

2. Batch cooking. I never got to grips with doing loads of cooking at the weekend and freezing it, although I know it works for some people. What I did do was cook double portions and freeze the extra or make two nights meals at the same time.

3. Slow cooking. OK this assumes you are not leaving the house at 6am or something but its worth getting up 15 minutes earlier and bunging something in the slow cooker. Even some diced chicken and a jar of curry or pasta sauce in the slow cooker gives you a great head start.

Doing this doesnt just help you get organised but it saves you money too so its definitely worth doing. Get the rest of the family on board too so they know what you are trying to do. Good luck!

krlyr

Making use of a freezer is fab. Agree with meal planning too. OH is an engineer so no set home-time and often comes home late, absolutely starving, so need quick meals mean I can cook it while he's driving home ready for him to eat once he gets in.
Carrying different ingredients over to different meals can help - for example, when I fry up mince to make a chilli, I may fry the whole kilo and then cook in two seperate dishes, one in a bolognese sauce and one in a chilli sauce. Eat some of the chilli for dinner, freeze a couple of portions, and keep the bolognese aside or in the freezer. Can then reheat and serve with spaghetti, pasta or rice, or add a white sauce and pasta sheets to make a lasagne (bolognese sauce tastes pretty much the same as a lasagne tomato sauce). The frozen chilli portions can be reheated to go with rice or on top of a jacket potato (done in the microwave for speed but crisped up in the oven for 5-10 mins) for a dinner that takes less than half an hour. Chicken casserole in a big batch - served one day with mashed potato, and freeze batches to serve with bread, or even put in pastry and make into a chicken pie (as the chicken is already cooked it'll just need 20 mins or so in the oven to cook the pastry). If you want the meals to be vegetarian friendly then swap beef mince for quorn mince and chicken for the substitute chicken pieces.
If you don't mind eating the same thing two days running then you don't even necessarily need to freeze batches, just cook two day's worth.
As well as the normal frozen veg, we buy stuff like frozen diced onion and chopped peppers - stops fresh stuff going to waste (we were always binning half an onion or the last pepper in a 3 pack) and saves on time having to wash and chop it all. You can even buy the little tubs of garlic, herbs, etc. to save on prep time. Alternatively, a more MSE approach, batch-prepare them yourself - freeze into icecube trays.
I agree with getting others to help. I do the bulk of the cooking as that's how we've sorted the househalf tasks (OH does the laundry instead - result, I hate hanging out wet clothes!), but he does pitch in when needed - I go to evening classes twice a week and only get 45 minutes between getting home and having to head out so he helps speed things up by peeling potatoes, putting the first part of dinner in the oven, etc. As a teen, my brothers and I always pitched in with peeling potatoes, making the gravy, chopping veg, etc. because cooking for 6 daily was a bit of a task for my poor mum! Also there were meals that we wouldn't eat and as we got old enough, she took the attitude of if you didn't want what she was cooking, you could cook your own. I actually appreciate the way she worked as it got me cooking from a young age and when it came to moving out I had a few recipes under my belt already.

snowleopard61

Hi McFilly, think I've only got the same suggestions as everyone else - I'm mainly posting just to say I know exactly what you mean. I was fine when the children were both school age and I worked within school hours: everyone sat together at the table and I decided what we ate. It all went pear-shaped as they got older: I worked longer days, one daughter decided she wanted to eat mainly meat-based food instead of veggie like us (but quite often would change her plans and not be in for the meal after all!) and the other started working funny hours so she wasn't home at normal suppertime. I'm one of these people who doesn't like anyone else in my kitchen (and in any event anyone else's meal choices would upset the financial planning) so people cooking for themselves or taking turns would be hopeless. Add to this the fact that I was always worn out anyway by the time I got in from work and it was tough! The main change I made was to buy a microwave for the first time so at least I could put a meal on a plate and it could be heated up easily.

Circumstances have changed now as they're older still and I'm mainly just feeding myself, which solves the problem really ... but you have my sympathy!

BohemianCoast

I think everyone struggles with this. Some tips: I often have more energy after dinner (and coffee) than when I get in. So sometimes I'll set a stew on then and let it cook through the evening. It's done by bedtime and then we heat it up to eat it the following day. Most weeks I do some batch cooking at the weekend, and I try to cook one meal that will feed us twice and freeze half. I discovered some slow cooker recipes where you marinade the meat in the rest of the stuff in the fridge, in the slow cooker dish overnight, so that all you need to do in the morning is put the dish back in the slow cooker and turn it on (which is roughly what I'm capable of in the morning). I try to have one meal a week that's truly trivial (pasta with a sauce that takes five minutes to cook, that sort of thing), and one meal that I point DH at and say 'congratulations, it's your turn to cook'. Kids are still not much use but DD can manage to put baking potatoes in the oven before we get home, which helps.

My kids are younger but DH and I are both omnivores and we have an expectation that the kids will eat what they're given. If they don't we don't fuss or cook them anything else; we do normally let them eat bread or fruit, but otherwise reckon there'll be another meal along soon enough. I do keep single portions of things (mostly leftovers or chunky soups) in the fridge for lunches or when people need to eat at odd times.

lambanana

Agreeing with BohemianCoast above, I often prepare the ingredients for the slow cooker the night before (though I don't get specific recipes, I've not found anything it doesn't work for) and bang the inner pot of the sc in the fridge so it just needs to be put in the outer part in the morning and switched on.

shebangs

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spike7451

Batch cook like others have said & keep a bag of frozen microwave mash in the freezer as well.If you,for example,cook sausages & onions in onion gravy (use veggie sausages for the veggies) & bag them up (make sure you mark the veggie ones tho!) then by using one of them & the frozen mash,you'll have Bangers & Mash cooked,on the table,in less that five minutes!
Same with frozen rice & curry/chili as well.