Okay, bad pun.

I needed some new clothes and thought I’d sew myself a nice capsule.  This doesn’t anchor well with a lot of the rest of my wardrobe, ‘cept a couple of purple pieces and the new wavy print here.

The brocade was a haori I made a few years ago.

Everything but the jacket was a tried-n-true pattern, so this was very much a quick-n-easy SWAP and it only took me a couple of weeks to sew up.

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II’m four garments in to a nine garment wardrobe capsule. Yes, I’ll post the composite photo when I’m done, but I wanted to talk a bit about the jacket I just completed.

I’ve been eyeing the Saf-t-Pockets patterns for years. The idea behind most of the garments designed by the company is to have an attractive garment with enough pockets to carry your stuff without having to resort to carrying a purse. There are garments with visible pockets, but the one I made has all the pockets hidden on the inside. Yes, I like gadgety cleverness of design even in clothes. Stop looking at me like that. I can’t help it. I was scared of trying it, though, because I was worried it was above my sewing abilities. You’d want a year or two of sewing under your belt before you tried it solo, but I wouldn’t have a problem coaching a beginner through this.

I just wore this gadgety goodness to a business meeting and a few errands.  I am in love with the design.

There are four internal pockets to the Flounce About Jacket. Two of them are fairly commodious. They fit anything from a smartphone and keys to a Kindle with no real problems. Yes, this means you can slip a steno pad in there to take notes! The other two pockets are smaller – about the right size for a business card or credit card.

So, I didn’t need to take a purse to my business meeting.

Now, I’m sure you’re saying, “Yeah, but a lot of pockets make the garment bulky and clumsy. We all know what a cargo vest looks like.”

And you’d be wrong. This is the genius of the design. Yes, those pockets are big and can hold a lot of stuff. But they’re not sewn into the front panels of the garment. They hang from the front band so that the drape of the flounce skims over it without ever making it clear that there’s pockets in there with lots of stuff inside! The pockets also have a nice velcro closure, which makes them useful to carry more valuable things.This is smart designing.

I’ll probably make another one of these jackets in a heavier material as more of an inter-season coat and travel, as this is sheer genius.

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I bought a 10 lb. turkey right after Thanksgiving for $0.48/lb.

What does a family of three get out of a turkey?

I had considered cutting it up and just using it as I would diced chicken, but I’m actually pretty fond of roast turkey, so I actually did just go ahead and roast the whole bird. It’s easy, doesn’t take long and my whole family is fond of roast poultry. I have a family of three – two adults and a teenaged boy. Let’s keep count of how many meals I got from Tom.

We had roast turkey one day. One meal for all of us. I cut up some of the roast meat to use in bentos the next day. That brings it up to two meals.

Then I used my Great Big Crock Pot to make enough Turkey Curry for three dinners family dinners and lunch one day for everyone in the family. That brings the count up to six meals.

Today, I put all the leftover meat and the bones in the Great Big Crock Pot again to make stock. Tonight we’re having Turkey and rice soup with enough left over for two more meals. That brings it up to nine meals. But there was still enough meat left over to freeze to use in a casserole, Turkey Pot Pie or some other meals. That brings it up to ten meals and I still have two quarts of turkey stock left over to use in soups, or whatever I feel like using stock for.

Not bad for one bird.

Here’s some of the recipes, just substituting turkey for chicken.

Chicken Pot Pie

This is an insanely easy dish. It also freezes well, as long as you make sure to drain the veggies very well.

Chicken Curry

This is actually a perfect crock pot meal, for anyone who uses that most wonderful of kitchen implements.  You have to have either a blender or a food processor for this recipe. 

I’ve been experimenting, and this is what I’ve come up with.  I expect I’ll perfect it as time goes on.  This recipe makes a LOT.  It’s good for company or if you like to have leftovers.  If you don’t have a 6 qt crock pot, you should cut this recipe in half. This freezes great.

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I’m going to be teaching a class in Outlook in a few weeks. It’s a lot less general than my usual class, so there needed to be a meeting about said needs.  I showed up to it with my laptop, opened it up and started typing through the discussion.  You know, taking notes, setting reminders about when to work on what for the time sensitive stuff, and all that smack.

Of course, this was seen as pretty much normal behavior at this meeting, and that was cool.  Everyone was taking notes in some way or another –steno pads, laptops and smartphones were all in use.  But I can remember working for people who would object when I started typing the second I got a task request. I was accused of not paying attention to what I was being asked.

What they didn’t see it as (and I used to find it confusing) was an attempt to make very sure I got all the detail.  Also interesting was my own perceived professional status and how I was reacted to when I was doing it.  As a menial, I wasn’t supposed to take notes.  As a professional, it was seen as appropriate and professional.  It’s like the waiter who doesn’t write down orders, I guess.  I’d suck at such a job.

I’m the same person.  My memory for exact detail when spoken to is the same (mostly not great) no matter the job title. But still, it’s a little bitterly amusing to me the difference in perception of the same behavior.

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In my last post about Feed the Freezer cooking, I outlined a plan to make several meals both for dinners this week and to freeze ahead. Because I’m definitely into continuous improvement, after I took a look at the plan, I saw some minor faults.

I’m lazy. If there’s an easy way to do something, yes, that’s the way I’m going to do it.

The fault in my plan? I had planned to make about 24 burritos. It takes about an hour and is the most time-intensive part of this particular plan. Still, an hour of work for several meals isn’t that bad a payoff. It’s just that I’ve got paying work scheduled for tomorrow, and since it’s teaching, I’m going to be on my feet all day. What I really should do is set up a crock pot meal for tomorrow.

So I have.

I went ahead and browned four pounds of hamburger with onions, garlic, hot chili peppers, cumin and other spices. Half of it went into the crock pot with beans, a bit of wine and crushed tomatoes to cook all day tomorrow while I’m slaving away. The other half was made into burritos for dinner tonight and burritos to freeze. This still only took about an hour to do, so in the long run it saved a bit of time.

This week of preparing meals ahead is going really well. I have a couple of family meals worth of spaghetti sauce frozen, two family meals worth of curry, and two family meals worth of burritos. I’ve also got my meat sauce for my lasagna already prepared, so all I’ll have to do on Lasagna Day is mix up the cheeses and assemble the thing.

If you do this sort of thing, paying attention to labeling is important, but it’s not a bad idea to go one step further and write up some instructions on reheating or baking. I used a sharpie to write cooking/re-heating instructions on the freezer bags that I have the meals stored in. Hey, I’m not the only one that cooks and if you’re not making it easy to get it right, you’re being mean and setting people up.

I made something of a mistake in planning that is actually fortuitous. Most of the recipes I am using were scaled for a household of six (my household now has three people) with planned leftovers for lunches. What this really means is that it that I’m making more meals than I’d originally thought I was making.

When I do freezer cooking, I don’t feel bound to use those freezer meals on any particular plan, though. The idea is to have these meals in reserve so that when I don’t feel like cooking – say I’ve had a long day, or I’ve got other things I’d rather do, I don’t have to decide between forcing myself to cook and spending too much money on the Magic Sushi Phone. I like cooking. Mostly, I find making dinner at night a pleasant way to wind down in anticipating of spending a bit of time over dinner talking with my family.

It’s just that I don’t want to be bound to it when there are other things going on that might be more important or more urgent.

While you might not necessarily want to spend an entire day making thirty meals for Once a Month Cooking (and I don’t blame you. I’ve done it and it’s hard work), I can’t encourage you enough to try to make some double or triple batches of meals that freeze well to put away for busy times. It takes about 20% more time than making each meal individually, so you’re talking a real time savings in terms of kitchen time. Sure, sure, maybe you cook to relax and that’s cool. I do. But I have interests and obligations outside of cooking and I know in a week or so, when business starts getting busy again, I’ll be deeply grateful that I did this.

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While I’ve done Once A Month Cooking before, I don’t always do it that way. It takes about a weekend to do a serious OAMC session and sometimes I have other things I prefer to do on a weekend and don’t want to take the time. Sometimes I’ll sneak up on freezer cooking.

I’m anticipating getting kind of busy in the next few weeks, so I want to have some easy meals on hand. I’m also kind of busy getting a wardrobe capsule sewn, a class to prepare for, another class to write… You get the idea. I have a lot to do. I might like cooking, but after a long day, I like the option of not cooking. I could dump some of the chore on my husband, but he’s healing from surgery, so that’d hardly be a kind thing to do. I could also dump some on my son, but I want him to focus on his school and I’d rather he shovel the driveway than me. So, I’ve snatched the easy (for me) job of being the cook.

I do have some cooking software (Mastercook) that has a lot of household favorites that I’d written up while teaching my son to cook. I just grabbed a few of the recipes for the week planned mostly around hamburger (there was a local sale), generated a shopping list from them and heighed me to the store with my son to lay in supplies for my cooking plan.

So, this is my plan for the week. It will generate 16 dinners (yes, with repeats) in six days of cooking:

Sunday

I’ll be cooking a turkey I got really cheaply just after the holidays. I’ll cook that up, and we’ll have a turkey dinner tonight. Then tomorrow I’ll get all the leftover meat off the turkey and package it up to use like I’d use chicken in meals.

Monday

Spaghetti. I’ll be hauling out my Great Big Crock Pot and make an enormous pot of marinara sauce. Some of this will be frozen for spaghetti sauce.

Tuesday

The GBCP will be in use again as I make a really large curry. Instead of the chicken I usually use, I’ll put a couple of pounds of turkey meat into it. We’ll have curry for dinner, I’ll freeze enough curry for another dinner, and use some of the rest for lunches.

Wednesday

And again, the GBCP will prove its worth. I’ll make a huge chili. We’ll enjoy chili for dinner, then we’ll freeze some for meals.

Thursday

The GBCP gets a rest today. I’ll make a double batch of burritos – enough for two dinners and two bentos for the family.

Friday

Lasagna. It’s just as fast to make two lasagnas as one, so I’ll make one, then freeze one. A lasagna is enough for a couple of dinners and lunches in my house and we’re not freaky about making sure we have to have a different meal every single night, so this is a good Friday meal.

Saturday

I’ll go shopping again this weekend, but will plan my meals around another meat. I’ll probably see if my son is interested enough in having a pizza to make one and I will show him the wonders of having some sauce frozen and ready for him to use. (Bwahahaha! Yes, I’m going to be teaching him my mad cooking skilz). The next week, I’ll probably make up a series of poultry-based meals using up the turkey I made. The carcass (which will have been carefully frozen) will be thawed to make stock, so certainly one of the meals I make will be a soup.

I do freeze ahead meals for a couple of reasons. One, this kind of thing, especially when incorporating the crock pot, saves time. It doesn’t take twice as long to make two lasagnas as it does one, nor does it take any more time to make up a huge pot of spaghetti sauce or curry than it does to make a small one. That means that for the time it took me to make one meal, I get two. Cooking up some rice or pasta takes no real time at all.

But the other reason I do it is that this really saves money. When you plan meals carefully and cook in bulk, you wind up saving 30-50% on your food bill.¹ My shopping trip today (even taking the turkey into account) to make two weeks’ worth of dinners didn’t cost any more than I’d spend on food for one week were I not doing the freeze ahead thing, and planning with such care.

But to really make this work, you do need to do two mores things

Wrap and Label Your Food

You’re not going to remember what you have in the freezer, and if you’ve wrapped it properly, chances are slim you’ll be able to tell what it is you have in that block of ice. Do yourself a favor – wrap the food well so that you don’t lose all that hard work and planning to freezer burn. Sharpies are cheap. You can write what you’ve frozen, date it, and even add some cooking directions if you want for household members who won’t necessarily remember how to prepare what you’ve got there. (A good rule of thumb is to add 50% cooking time to a casserole, ferinstance, if you’re not taking it out to thaw in the morning).

Keep a Freezer Inventory

Even if you do label everything like you’re supposed to, if you’ve stored lots of meals in the freezer, playing Freezer Tetris to find what you want to cook because you’ve forgotten everything you have in there is a pain. An easy thing to do would be to have a little printout with the food you have in the freezer. Other people who do freezer cooking have a small whiteboard on their freezer doors and just write down what they have. This also works great and had the added advantage of not killing trees. But however you do it, if you do any sort of freezer cooking, do make sure you keep a freezer inventory so that you can know what you have on hand.

If you have periods in your life where you’re busy, or know you’ll be very busy, I can’t encourage freezer cooking enough.

______________________________________

¹ Unfortunately^, yes, this does fall under the Vimes Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness*. I have a car with a large trunk to buy in bulk, a good place to store the food, money enough to tie up a fair amount of money in frozen food, good kitchen equipment (Big crock pots and good knives) to make this sort of cooking reasonable. No, I don’t have a huge freezer, but you don’t need one. No, I’m serious, you don’t. You just need to play a little freezer Tetris.

*The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.  – Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett

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I’ve talked about buying whole chickens before. Cutting them into parts is not a real big deal, but you may get parts you don’t ordinarily use for much. Sure, sure, we all like the chicken breast to make our lovely meals, or roast the legs on the grill, but what the heck do you do with the backs and necks?

Make stock?

Of course, but there’s a fair bit of useable meat on a chicken back.

Make soup?

Sure. There’s no reason not to. But another thing you can do is make chicken-n-dumplins. It’s not only a really frugal meal, it’s great comfort food in the middle of the winter.

Chicken-n-dumplins

For the soup, sauté the carrots, onions and celery in butter until the onions are translucent, then add the stock and the rest of the soup ingredients. Cook for about 20 minutes. While this is simmering, make up your dumplings. Stir together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt bowl. Cut in butter until crumbly. Stir in milk to make a soft dough. Bring soup to a boil, then drop by spoonfuls into boiling stew. Cover, turn down the heat and simmer 15 minutes without lifting lid (the steam is what makes the dumplings fluffy, so you don’t want to let that escape). Serve.

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Yes, that's a recycled Yankee Candle jar. Well spotted!

I’m fond of hot chocolate, but I’ve never been into the instant cocoa you find in stores. Keep your Swiss Miss, and your 99 other brands of watery crap.

While I do normally make hot chocolate with milk, chocolate powder and sugar (combine the chocolate and sugar, add a few drops of milk to make a paste, then you can pour in the rest of the milk and it’ll dissolve properly), I like the convenience of being able to hand my son a single serving of it quickly after he gets home on a very cold day, or if he’s shoveled the driveway or something. This isn’t entirely being an indulgent mother. You see, something warm with calories helps combat hypothermia, so I’ve got a more noble motive than feeding my kid chocolate.

I tried something recently that I’d heard of, but never done – making my own instant cocoa.

This makes a much richer, more chocolaty cocoa, and one I’m pretty fond of. It’s also insanely easy.

Combine:

3 c. powdered milk

1/2 c. powdered sugar

1 c. powdered baking cocoa (the darker the better. I use Ghirardelli Unsweetened Baking Cocoa)

Then when you want a cup of cocoa, add two heaping spoonfuls to 8 oz hot water. Using the powdered sugar makes it so that it’ll mix well with no clumps.

You know, in a pretty jar, this would also make a nice gift. I’m putting it on my list of ideas for next year!

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Christmas is over, the decorations are put away. If you were lucky enough to have time off between Christmas and New Year’s, you’ve got to transition from free time back to the daily grind. Depending on where you live, you have a few weeks to a few months of winter to get through. If that seems bleak, try these suggestions

1. Eschew the New Year’s Resolution in Favor of Real Goal

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for self-improvement. But going from partying to a Spartan attempt to change all your “bad” behaviors to “good” ones may be a bit much. I do set goals for every single year. What I do not do is try to go from the celebration of Christmas to any sort of bleak self-improvement thing. That sort of whiplash will depress you. My goals are about accomplishment, not resolutions of self-denial that are Just Too Much in the face of months left of winter, the cold and a house suddenly empty of Christmas cheer

Don’t try to quit drinking, quit smoking, start working out and go on a diet all at the beginning of the new year. Instead, think of real things you want to accomplish and make plans to achieve them that don’t involve yearly post Saturnalia self-punishment. Make it something you’re excited to do. Have a goal of learning a new skill, making a target income, or whatever, but make it something to gain rather than lose.

2. When you take down the tree, put all the decorations away!

Don’t procrastinate. Get those decorations stored away. Don’t leave piles of Christmas storage boxes lying around. Not only will you be depressed because all the decorations are gone, you’ll be depressed at the constant reminder. Put ‘em away. Right away.

3. Look for something new to enjoy

This one is my husband’s. Part of his self-assessment for a year is to look back and list what he’s done that year that he’d never done before. No, not original to him. He got it from his grandmother. Is there a book you’ve never read? A food you’ve never tried, a location you’ve never visited? Whatever it is, big or small, try something new.

4. Swap out the Christmas decorations with some other appropriate theme.

For Offler’s sake, don’t put out the Valentine’s Day decorations in the beginning of January, but sometimes a pretty wintry-themed centerpiece can be just the thing. I don’t do it every year, but one year I made a goal of putting out a differently themed centerpiece in my dining room every month. I made it to Easter, so it didn’t last. My mother, however, does put out the seasonal decorations. There’s a lot to something small to change, add interest and make the march of seasons feel good and appropriate.

5. Reach out

Did you get a Christmas card from someone you didn’t send one to? Reach out for that person. Call ‘em, send an email, send them a Just Because card. Maintaining contact with people is an excellent way to combat the blues. Is there someone you didn’t see or talk to over the holidays? Now’s a good time. Reach out!

And if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, at least the days are getting longer! We can all enjoy that.

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My husband sent this to me, thinking to amuse. It did.

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