A New Scheme: It's Cooking Day

In my never-ending slouch towards nirvana, I have cooked up a new scheme (pun intended).

I have been feeling for awhile as if I don't get nearly enough time during any given week to do things I really want to do ... not things I 'have to' do like cooking and cleaning and laundry, but the things I really want to do, like working on my SCA projects, or gardening, or playing music. The reason for this is that, by the time I get home from work, chill for a few minutes, make dinner, then eat dinner, it's usually 7:30 or 8:00. Yes, that leaves me a couple hours before bed (since my wonderful boyfriend is in charge of cleaning up after dinner, so I don't have to do that), but I'm usually too tired by then, or it just feels too late, to get involved in anything much.

On the weekends, Saturday had turned into errand or chore day ... we'd go to the grocery store in the morning, come home and put all the groceries away, and often had some place else we needed to go, or some unexpected house project that needed done. By the time we got done, most of the afternoon was shot, and it was time to start the dinner downward spiral through the evenings.

That pretty much left me only Sundays, and for years I've been trying to make Sundays my one day a week to do nothing I don't want to do - totally devoted to whatever personal projects I'd like to work on. I didn't think one day out of a whole week was too much to devote to such 'frivolities.' But it has never really worked out that way, because all the stuff from earlier in the week that I didn't get done starts piling up, and I feel compelled - with a whole day free - to take care of it on Sunday (knowing I'm not going to have time to get to it during the upcoming week). So I'd end up spending large chunks of Sunday doing laundry, or cleaning or bill-paying.

And the next thing I knew, it was Monday morning and time to start another week, and I'd had no time for the personal projects I'd really wanted to get to. And week after week, they languished. And I was getting angsty from lack of creative outlets.

So ... I have A Plan. The worst time-eating thing during the week - and the only one I really have any power to modify - was dinner. But, we have to eat, and I'm determined to continue to try to have at least semi-healthy meals, so resorting to TV dinners wasn't an option.

I decided to take a clue from our Pennsic meal plan in the past. I made up table /calendar document, and planned out an entire month's worth of meals in advance (actually, two of them, so we can swap back and forth and have more variety). I populated the menu plan with as many meals or parts of meals as possible that can be cooked in advance and frozen, like in Seal-A-Meal bags or whatever works best. Then, for a large number of weekday evenings, all I have to do for dinner is boil a pot of water, toss in a Seal-A-Meal bag (or pop a pan of something in the oven), and wait for it to heat. Way better than spending an hour or more in the kitchen cooking.

There are several nights during the month when I will actually cook a whole meal - because there are some things I'm not willing to take out of our dinner rotation that just don't lend themselves well to being cooked in advance. But that's okay - if I only have to do it once in awhile, instead of every night, it's no big deal. I don't actually mind cooking ... I was just getting frustrated with the amount of my evening it was taking all the time. And even the nights I'm cooking something from scratch (like baked chicken) I can still have other things that are made in advance and frozen (like rice).

That will free up much more of my evenings, to either spend some time on a project, or to get other chores done like laundry or bill-paying, which will then trickle down and free up more of my weekend.

We also shifted our grocery shopping day to Wednesday after work, so we don't have to do it on Saturdays; and I'm going to work on getting any errand-running done on the way home from work one evening, rather than Saturday.

The result should be more free time during weekday evenings, and much more free time on Saturdays and Sundays.

The one tricky part to all this is, all that food has to be cooked and frozen sometime. So I decided to take one Saturday a month and make it 'cooking day,' when I cook and freeze all the stuff I need for the month's upcoming meals. This weekend is cooking weekend, although I had to move cooking day to today because we had other things going on yesterday.

While I don't particularly want to spend an entire day cooking, I figure a couple things. First, it's not really that hard, and it may not even take all day if I'm productive about it. Second, while some things are cooking that don't require constant monitoring, I can still do other things, like sit and work on an embroidery project. And - it's only one day a month, to have all that time freed up throughout the entire rest of the month. So it seems worth it.

So that's my plan ... this is the first month I'm trying it, we'll see how it goes. And on that note, I'm off to start cooking.