Cook Once, Eat for Days

In today's fast paced world, cooking a family meal can be a challenge. Fast food seems to be the normal "quick fix" for supper. Although a good home cooked meal can never beat greasy hamburgers.

Making menus can help with the planning process to ensure you'll always have something home cooked on the table, although time to make meals is still limited. The best way to solve this problem is to cook large amounts of food on your days off of work or on the weekend, and eat leftovers all week. It doesn't have to be the same thing over and over either, but rather different meals with the same major ingredient.

One of my favorite meals to make on the weekends is pot roast. While it takes awhile to cook, a roast can make several meals all week. I usually make these on a Saturday when we have nothing else to do but clean house and relax (Sunday is our visiting family day, so we are rarely home). It may be a different day for you, but Saturday has always worked best for us. This works especially well since we usually need a quick meal on Sundays and Monday.

When cooking your roast, you'll need to plan ahead. Make sure you have a good 4-5 hours where you can keep an eye on it and check it occasionally. Another option is cooking it all day in a crockpot, but my personal preference is cooked in the oven. When you use the oven you have room to put in different types of vegetables like carrots, potatoes, and more. Don't forget to cook other foods in the oven at the same time. Like types of breads for example, if you don't own a bread machine.

After the roast is cooked, you and your family can have a wonderful home cooked meal. For the rest of the week, you can have roast sandwiches, baked potatoes as a meal (with the "fixin's"), quick casseroles, mashed potatoes (side dish), and much more. This also works for other main meats like pork, chicken, etc. The idea is to cook a large amount that can be easily used as quick leftovers. What you are cooking is your main ingredients, then using it in more simple dishes. It cuts down your cooking time and the number of dishes you have to do afterwards too.

Using just one day out of your week when you don't have to be in a million places at once can make the rest of your week much more easy as far as good healthy meals go.