Getting Ahead in the Kitchen
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 11:15AM
These little guys...
...they are the reason that I officially announce March as the month of the “Make Ahead Mom.” It’s my new job. My new title. I guess I’ll call it my month, too. As one well-traveled RD in my professional community likes to say, it’s all about #MeFirst. I guess today’s my #MeFirst moment. Being mom to the ones shown above, I don’t usually have many of those - what mom does? But I digress....
Anyway, becoming the Make Ahead Mom is not really the kind of job you sign up for... frankly, I was pretty happy with my job as “Make Dinner On The Fly At Five” mom.
But now that we have added #2 to our flock and as #1 has gotten older, life is requiring a different approach. As innocent and peaceful as they may appear above, sometimes an image does not tell the full story (no matter how many words it is worth.)
These are busy little men with tummies that start rumbling every afternoon around 4 o’clock and even busier bodies that start knocking around the walls of my kitchen simultaneously. What used to be my unwind-over-a-simmering-sauce time has, in recent months, turned into a cacophony of laughter and crying, begging and bartering and general abandonment of organization during the evening hour.
Enter my friend Robin Plotkin.
Robin, a fellow RD, blogger and popular food commentator, jolted me into a new system of approaching daily meals with her regular conversations about what she was making ahead in her kitchen. I had always viewed “make ahead” as something only suitable for an entire dish (which often sounds heavy on advance prep time that I just don’t feel like I have).
But what Robin taught me (sometimes I need a little hand holding, I guess) was that it didn’t have to be that complicated. You just get all your “stuff” ready for the week, so that assembling dinner in the coming days no longer feels like you’re juggling fire batons (And if you’ve ever cooked on a gas stove with a baby on one hip and a preschooler pretending he is a karate champion on the other side, you get the picture.)
To read more about my introduction into this world of making ahead, as well as a few tips to get started, please see my post today on My Recipes. In the coming months, I will share more about getting ahead in the kitchen, so that you can get on with your life.
