It’s always a shock, that moment when the long, lazy days of summer suddenly morph into the breakneck pace of our family’s fall schedule. We find that often it’s the sit-down, home-cooked meals that get cut from the end of the day, and sadly, we’d find ourselves just grabbing a bite to eat. Maybe it was bean tortilla chips and cheese dip for dinner, or possibly dinner was handed to you through your car window.
Since healthful, home-cooked meals are a priority in our home , this year we came up with a solution: cook once eat three times. We pulled two vegetable-packed recipes from our forthcoming book, The Chubby Vegetarian: 100 Inspired Recipes for the Modern Table (Susan Schadt Press, 2016). Both recipes yield 6 to 8 hearty servings and freeze beautifully.
For presenting our Sweet Potato, Kale, and Black Bean Enchiladas, a Le Creuset Covered Casserole made our dish look so beautiful.
We filled the enchiladas and placed them snugly in the casserole dish, enjoyed a couple of servings for dinner, and froze the rest in separate serving-size Snapware Airtight Containers. Our container set allowed us to store portions of each of our make-ahead dishes for easy reheating or transport; in addition, the array of container sizes offered an organized way to arrange the stacked containers at eye-level in the freezer.
We used a Lodge Soup Pot for one of our favorite make-ahead meals, Vegetarian Mulligatawny: An Indian-Inspired Vegetable Stew. It’s the perfect large size for a big batch of stew or simply blanching greens.
Never ones to skip dessert, we made the dough for a good-sized batch of Energy Cookies, cooked a few on our Silpat Non-Stick Baking Mat and froze a couple of rolls of dough for later use. Cookies, we believe, are best when they’re made and eaten the same day; it’s sad not to have time to make a batch on a weeknight once an intense craving hits, so making your own cookie dough rolls ahead of time solves that challenge. We always try to realize we’re never going to check off all the things we want to accomplish on a weeknight, but it feels so relaxing to at least bake something great without any effort.
How nice it’s been to start to wonder what’s for dinner at home or for lunch at work and choose something good in a flash! Make the dream of a no-effort home-cooked dinner happen at your house, too, by cooking a couple of things over the weekend and setting aside half of what you made for later.
We now love checking out what’s available in our freezer and have found that there’s nothing better than catching up on the day’s events over a meal you didn’t have to come home and figure out on the fly.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the oats, almond flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. Set aside. Combine the honey, coconut oil, eggs, and vanilla.
Microwave the raisins, cranberries, and rum for one minute, let them cool a bit, microwave for one more minute, and set aside. Combine wet and dry ingredients and then add the fruit and rum mixture, coconut, ginger, and walnuts.
Shape into large, flat cookies and place on a silpat-lined baking sheet. Bake for 10-15 minutes until edges are lightly browned.
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