Sunday, August 9, 2009

Weekly Food Preps

Aside from a really busy weekend painting (half the interior of the house has been painted with half left to go...weekend by weekend the big job is getting accomplished), we did what we usually do each Sunday: prepare food for the upcoming week. This serves quite a few purposes such as getting food ready for lunches on the go, making food that is a bit time intensive and that otherwise we wouldn't have time to make during the week, cleaning out the fridge and pantry before a big Sunday afternoon shopping trip to restock, and rotating food from our emergency food stores. Here's what we do each Sunday (we meaning the spouse and I because I bake and the spouse cooks which is good. If it was the other way around we would probably starve but that's another post...):
  • Make yogurt. Making yogurt is one of the simplest things in the world. The ingredients are milk and a couple of tablespoons of the last batch of yogurt and the yogurt can be mixed with fruit, made into a smoothie, mixed with granola, made into a salad dressing or Greek tzatziki sauce, etc.
  • Make granola. Most breakfast cereals are horribly overpriced and full of sugar; much better to make your own cereal.
  • Boil a dozen eggs. These will be used for everything from a hard-boiled egg breakfast, egg salad sandwiches, potato salad, etc.
  • Bake bread. Making a couple of loaves of bread is also one of the simplest things to do and again, homemade bread doesn't contain all of the chemicals and preservatives that store bought bread does.
  • Cook up some beans. Soak then boil beans then store them in the fridge for quick chili, baked beans, refried beans, soup, etc.
  • Occasionally we work on a bigger food project such as making hundreds of tamales or lumpia which keep well in the freezer, make tortillas, bake pies or cookies if there is an event happening during the upcoming week, etc.

This may sound like a lot of work but with two people working, it doesn't actually take a lot of time to do all of these things, many of which are cooking/baking/boiling simultaneously.

3 comments:

  1. How do you make tamales? That sounds excellent.

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  2. Simple recipe from friends in Mexico:
    --Cook meat. Stew beef, pork or chicken until it is falling off the bone tender. I throw in what ever looks good: meat, onions, water, can of tomatoes, spices (salt, pepper, garlic, cumin, chili powder), maybe add some salsa. Cool meat then shred it then stir fry it with onions, chili powder, garlic...the object is to make some tasty, spicy meat filling for your tamales.
    --soak corn husks until pliable.
    --make the masa dough. I use two cups of Maseca flour (masa harina) mixed with a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, and half cup of lard mixed until crumbly. Then add broth (reserved from the meat you cooked or canned broth) until the mixture is spreadable but not runny. Some people add spices to the dough such as chili powder to make it taste even better.
    --spread masa dough in the corn husk, put a glob of filling in the middle of the dough, roll up so the masa dough completely surrounds the meat, then tie the little packet up.
    --cook the tamales by steaming them. I use a Chinese steamer but there are specialized tamale steamers available.
    --enjoy.
    Here's a specific recipe for tamales from Good Eats http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/turkey-tamales-recipe/index.html which is much more accurate than mine. I tend to throw whatever looks good in and they seem to come out just fine however I have no specific measurements for the ingredients.

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  3. First time here...u have nice space and really inspirational stuff... I'll be back soon.

    want to learn?

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