I enjoy baking desserts!  In fact, I love baking desserts!  I like eating them as well but my favorite part is the baking.  Maybe, I take so much pleasure in it because I do it for special occasions and company rather than on a daily basis.  But, when it comes to cooking dinner, it seems more like a chore rather than something I love doing.  So, Mr. Right and I look for ways to make dinnertime preparation easier and more enjoyable for us. One of the most useful ways we make dinnertime c ooking easier on us is to cook in large batches.  When we cook chili, spaghetti, chicken pot pie, meatloaf, chicken salad, chicken broth, homemade pizza, tacos, etc., we cook enough at one time to make about 8 – 10 meals for our family.  We eat a little of the food that night for our meal and freeze the rest divided up into dinner size portions.  Then over the course of the next 3 months, we have that meal in the freezer ready to reheat and eat.  It seems easier to cook a larger quantity at one time rather than cooking the same meal from scratch 8 different times.

To make batch cooking easier for us, here are three tools we use:

1. Stock Pots.  We have 2 large stock pots that we use when we are cooking large quantities of food.  Sometimes we have both going at one time. 
2. Foodsaver (vacuum sealer).   Before using a Foodsaver, we were forever trying to get all the air out of Ziploc Freezer Bags to store the food.  Now, we put the food in the Foodsaver bags and let the machine vacuum it airtight.  It is so awesome.  As an added bonus, my husband loves this tool so much that he usually bags the food for me.  And, to reheat some of the meals you can just drop the frozen Foodsaver bag right into a pot of boiling water.
3. Deep Freezer.  If you’re making a lot of batches in advance, the freezer that’s attached to your refrigerator won’t be big enough.  You’ll need an additional freezer.  When we were first married we had a chest freezer that we purchased second-hand for $20.  That lasted us about 5 years.  After that we purchased an upright, which is so much simpler to put food into and out of.  If you are looking for a deep freezer, I suggest you get the largest one you can afford. 

What tools make your life easier?  Leave your comments below.

This post was written for the Mommy Zabs “These 3 Things” Group Writing Project.  Check out the other entries. 

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