Time for Dinner

This is how dinner works at my house. Every once in a while, I sit down with a cookbook. I have a bookshelf dedicated to these and don't like to reuse the same books too frequently, so they're in constant rotation.

I make a list of several meals that sound good to me, copying ingredients onto my shopping list (which is divided by section of the grocery store). I shop. I prepare dinner. We all eat together when Paul gets home from work.

This system works for us.

Our goal is to eat out one counter service/take-away and one table service meal per week, though we sometimes exceed our budget on food. Food, for those who don't know us well, is where our family likes to spend money. We all loooooove to eat; it's our favorite hobby. But this summer we've been trying to do more of our over-eating at home, rather than from restaurants. (Thank you, unexpected second car payment.)

I do solicit requests for dinners, and Paul cooks when he's home (and the vast majority of all breakfasts) but I get bored, trying to decide on new recipes to try that we'll all like. And I get bored with grocery shopping. And I get bored with dinner prep that lasts longer than about 30 minutes.

Solution!

Some girlfriends and I went to Time for Dinner tonight, and I think I'll be going back! Friends of mine have been before, but I never thought I'd enjoy the experience. I did.

Here's how it works. Every month, there's a new menu. You go online and choose which dishes sound interesting to you, and you schedule a time to go cook. (It can increase your pleasure to go with a few friends, and maybe bring along a bottle of wine.)

At the appointed time, you show up bearing a cooler or laundry basket for transporting food home. You pay and are handed a sheet listing each dish you've chosen to make. You wander through the dedicated food prep stations, creating each of your meals with the pre-prepped ingredients helpfully laid out for you. Then you wander away, leaving clean-up to someone else!

Each dish goes into a plastic bag, then into the freezer, but not until you've labeled it with the prep instructions. They have thought of everything!

Our meals for the next few weeks include:
Apple Butter BBQ Pork
Asian Chicken Stir Fry
Beef and Andouille Burgers
Beef Kabobs
Caribbean Salsa Chicken
Chicken with Artichoke, Lemon and Goat Cheese
Corn Casserole
Honey Ginger Salmon
Pork Tenderloin with Confetti Corn
Roasted Red Pepper and Spinach Quiche (tomorrow night)
Venetian Mac and Cheese
Triple Chocolate Brownies

Since I chose to prepare more dishes than time allowed, they even helped me! (And would have done it all for me, if I'd ponied up an extra $35.) Everything looks delicious. And I made it (some of it) myself! And the cost is comparable to what I would have spent on all those fancy groceries.

I'll have to let you know if it feels lame to eat food from plastic bags every night. I'm thinking maybe not, but that might be because I'm trying to do all this mom stuff and writing stuff and class stuff and summer stuff and visiting family stuff and I'm loving short cuts right now!

Also, check out the new poll (right).