Hello from the kitchen, where both of us love to cook. My dear darling is much more inclined to experiment in the kitchen and I tend to stick to the tried and true recipes.

I don’t know about you, but when young children are around it isn’t always easy to cook meals everyday. I often wouldn’t plan ahead and thaw ingredients or a pre-cooked casserole I had in the freezer.  I also couldn’t think of what to cook. I’d look in a full pantry, refrigerator or freezer and come up blank. I found myself to be too tired to even think about cooking and didn’t want to clean up the mess. So I had a wonderful solution! We would go out to eat!

Eating out, quickly became a habit. We justified it in many ways like thinking it was giving us more time in the evening to spend together (not cooking or cleaning up) or thinking we were saving money we’d get inexpensive meals, like subs or burrito bowls, and eat the second half for another meal. We thought it was easier and that it would give us time to communicate. Then when we got to a point where we were struggling to make ends meet, it was the first thing we realized we could let go to give us more breathing room.

When we were not gathered around our own private table, we found that eating out was keeping us from connecting as a family. The time to get to the restaurant, order and wait for our food ended up taking more than half of the evening, not saving us any time. Also we would go, sit and often stared at each other with nothing to talk about because we were in public. Then there was the need to discipline children to keep them from disturbing others around us. We sometimes would even leave because of the children misbehaving; this added stress to our night as well. We’d come home and expect our children to be ready to settle down and go to bed, so we could salvage some of the evening for ourselves. In the end, we decided that all of our reasons for going out really were not helpful and instead added to the destruction of our family not strengthening it.

So we came back to having meals at home and I turned to my many, many cookbooks for quick easy solutions to dinner. I thought I’d share some of the meals we have come to love so you will find them in the recipe category. To save myself time, I usually cook extra and freeze them or package the left-overs for my sweetie’s lunch sometime in the coming week. We still enjoy going out, but have decided to make it a special treat once in awhile.

She rises also while it is still night and gives food to her household… Proverbs 31:15