Best Use of Your Time in the Kitchen

Mississippi Mud Pie

Some days I feel like spending hours cooking. It allows me to not think about other things.  Other days I can barely force myself to get a meal on the table.  So I have developed some tricks to keep us from going hungry.

1) Examine what’s in the freezer. Is there a main dish in there, hiding behind the ice cubes?  Sometimes there actually is.  It could be a leftover or an actual main dish, deliberately prepared and frozen when I was in the mood to cook.

2) Are there eggs available? If yes, can I convince Bart he wants an omelet for dinner?  Since this is one dish he knows how to make, I can then suggest he cook that night.

3) Change the menu so I spend less time preparing. This actually happened yesterday.  I was planning a birthday dinner for a young family member and asked him what he would like to eat. “Homemade pizza and a chocolate cake with buttercream icing,” he replied.  I knew I couldn’t change his mind about the pizza, a time-consuming main dish when you’re feeding 6 people.  But I knew he also liked Mississippi Mud Pie, which takes 15 minutes to make, as opposed to the 90 minutes the cake would take.  I asked if he would mind switching to this chocolate ice cream cake, and he said, “Sure.”  By the time dinner came around, he had forgotten what dessert he’d asked for!