Consuming Mass Quantities

Oooh! Just discovered a new Ribbit effect!

So, yesterday disappeared on me and I didn't have a chance to give you my Opinions about the cooking preps I did over my Labor Day "holiday." Given that we haven't cooked and/or eaten a single one of those meals, here is my initial impression:

1. The recipes themselves look pretty darned tasty. I mean, they had me at " 1 tsp. fresh ginger, diced." Mmmmm. 

2. There's a lot of variety in the recipes, although as Husband was leafing through the recipes I heard him muttering "Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken..." I'd say that of the 24 Zip-locs now in my freezer, two contain meals that are vegetarian, four or five are red meat, and the remainder are, indeed, chicken. But hey! Not a problem. I like chicken, and I was the cook.

3. There is blessedly little pre-packaged food involved. Several use some kind of canned beans, but since I figured out how to cook dried beans in my pressure cooker without pre-soaking, that's no problem to substitute. Only one recipe called for dehydrated onions, which, ick. Not going there.

4. However, you will use a LOT of onions and garlic. I consider this a plus, not a minus, but the next time I do this I will start out by dicing the entire nine pounds of onions and 37 cloves of garlic before I begin. Nope, not exaggerating. 

5. I had foolishly thought I would save a lot of time by doing these meal pre-preps, but this is not the case. What this process does is gang up all the time needed for meal preps into one long session. Between shopping and chopping I worked hard from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. (with a short break for a blood-gushing finger wound) and still only got 24 of the 31 recipes made. And I didn't have kids around--if the Boys had been little and underfoot, this would have been a difficult commitment. 

6. However, I loved the fact that I could shop and put nothing away. Okay, I put the meat into the refrigerator because otherwise my mother would have haunted me for potentially poisoning her son-in-law, but all the vegetables, dried beans, seasonings, etc., sat on the island and I just reached over my cutting board to grab the one I needed. This did save time. 

7. Finally, I discovered one tiny drawback this morning. I have a really busy day coming up with morning meetings, a lunch commitment, blood donation in the afternoon, and an evening appointment. "Yay!" I thought when I got up this morning. "I have dinner all ready to go except for popping it into the CrockPot!" Well, no. It turns out I'm supposed to thaw the Zip-loc in the refrigerator overnight before cooking, so it will be BLTs for supper just as it would have been before the Great Food Preparation Day. But that's okay! I love BLTs even more than I love chicken.

Have you ever done a Great Food Preparation Day? What were your reactions? And are you impressed that I was able to pull a Conehead quote out of thin air for today's blog title?