Batch Cooking

Tonight for dinner we ate a jar of the chili that Steve canned last week.   It was part of our ground beef cooking extravaganza, brought on by our recent discovery of a real, live, local, independent butcher a few towns over AND of my determination to batch cook our faces off so that I can spend less time preparing meals in the wintertime and more time taking the kids to the natural history museum and lying on the couch at home with kids draped over me, which, it turns out, is the only way to survive in negative temperatures--get out of the house or do very little work when you're in the house.

Last week Steve brought home 12 pounds of ground beef from the butcher, and I made a quadruple batch of my mom's meaty spaghetti sauce, a single batch of bierocks (they're like piroshki and they're delicious and perfect for single lunch servings), and two meatloaves to put in the freezer.  Steve made 11 pints of chili.

There was enough meat left over for slow cooker cabbage rolls, one of my favorite easy winter meals, for dinner.  (There's a notable difference if you use dried parsley instead of fresh and it must be eaten with lots of delicious sour cream.)

Obviously to get that all done, I had to plug The Bairn into the iPad to watch sawmill movies and I had to trap Ellen at the sink to play in the dishes, the things they love best.