Being my own personal chef

I spend an inordinate amount of time cooking... my choice. I enjoy time in the kitchen, playing with flavors, watching meals come together and all of the sensory pleasures what come from working with food - the textures, sounds, smells and, of course, tastes. But lately, I've been feeling the time crunch when I am torn between spending after-work hours preparing the kind of meals Rob and I want to eat and spending that time working on the house or one of my many jobs.

This weekend, I finally convinced myself to spend a good chunk of Sunday preparing our meals for the week. Because our primary grocery source is the farmers' market and our CSA (Consumer/Community Supported Agriculture) bag, menu planning is an ingredients-down task. It ended up like this:

• Bunch of kale
• I made polenta and will saute the kale in olive oil with sun-dried tomatoes, golden raisins, red pepper flakes and lots of garlic
• Beets
• I roasted these in my toaster oven. Some will be shredded for a beet tzatziki to serve with tuna (Healthy Eating for your Heart). The rest I will either eat on salad or as a snack.
  
• Carrots
• Most of these went into carrot and cashew sandwiches (Vegetarian Times) and the rest were sliced as a salad topping
• Fennel
• I'm not a fennel fan but am eager to become one. I sliced these bulbs thin and did a quick rice vinegar pickle. We'll eat it with the tuna tonight.
• Yukon gold potatoes
• These were boiled and made into an herbed potato salad with kidney beans (Fresh Indian).
  
• Salad bag
• Yup: salad. Any veggies left over from the above dishes were chopped, sliced or otherwise prepped and used as salad topping.

The trick to being your own personal chef is organization. Organize your recipes from most complex and time consuming to least, then make a list of additional ingredients from the grocery store and another of what ingredients need to be prepped including how much and in what way. (Be sure to group ingredients together - if you need a cup of chopped onion for one recipe and a half a cup for another, chop them at the same time and set it aside in a little bowl).

Then clear a few hours of a day and cook. For the best flavor, only cook things partially so that when you heat them at mealtime, they don't become overdone. I made the pieces of the tuna dish but didn't even unwrap the tuna. Likewise, I boiled the potatoes and prepped the veggies but didn't make or add the dressing.

Finally, when working from the market, i.e. shopping once a week, be sure to keep in mind the shelf-life of different ingredients. For example, we'll eat the tuna tonight because it is the most delicate/perishable.

My fridge is now packed with well-labeled containers (e.g. "chopped scallions for potato salad") - now to see how footloose and fancy free weekday evenings become...