We cooked for now and later, too

I'm tired and a little chilled, so I'm heading to bed quite early tonight. But first, I shall boast! of family kitchen accomplishments!

Saturday night I cooked pasta and fixed our simple seasoned tomato sauce to go with it. The twist was that I realized beforehand that with very little additional work I could make FOUR dinners that night. So I cooked up two pounds of ziti and that other stuff with the angled ends -- the name is escaping me -- whatever. Anyway, I also grabbed from the freezer some leftover seasoned sauce and a good amount of shredded Mozzarella and let them thaw while we ate. A while after dinner I mixed together the rest of the pasta, all of the sauce, and several handfuls of Mozzarella, and divided it among three pans for the freezer. Voila! Three future dinners!

Sunday night I made Mexican-style red rice for our standard burrito dinner: flour tortillas filled with refried beans (I used leftover homemade bean dip from our party!), my rice, and cheese for those who like cheese (not me). Later I put Son2, who will be five next month, to bed and returned to a completely dear-husband-cleaned kitchen AND a dinner pan filled with a layered Mexican-leftover casserole! WOW! Another future dinner!

Tonight I had the bright idea of making breakfast for dinner. Dear husband would cook eggs and I would flip pancakes. The thing with pancakes is that I make a quintuple batch (yep, multiply by five) so we have lots of pancake leftovers for breakfasts and pancake/peanut-butter sandwiches. Tonight I also decided to fix a recipe for baked oatmeal, so we could taste test it tomorrow morning. Soon the kitchen smelled great: cinnamon and vanilla from the baking oatmeal dish, and the eggs and pancakes sizzling.

What I didn't think of was 1 item in oven needing counter space to cool, plus dear husband being generous and fixing eggs 2 different ways and me using 2 pans to cook pancakes in batch style. We worked it out, got everything cooked and everyone filled with good food, and now we also have a big stash of pancakes that will last maybe three days. LOL!

I did try an oat/whole-wheat/regular flour pancake recipe on the side, which was another reason I used two pans. I often try other pancake recipes alongside our standard in my search for a yummy whole-grain pancake, but as usual with these things it was deadly heavy. I threw out most of the batter and kept the 12 or 15 pancakes of those I'd cooked up. I'm sure I can manage to eat them with vanilla yogurt or something. I'll probably toast them to make them hot and crackly; that'll help too. Sigh.

Anyway, after three days we have FOUR dinners and maybe 3-5 breakfasts, NOT EVEN counting the baked oatmeal, 'cause we haven't even tried it yet. Woohoo! By the way, these dinner pans are the GladWare OvenWare 8x8 pans extras that I bought along with the ones for my MOMS Club frozen dinner exchange group. The lids snap on and then they slide very nicely into a one-gallon zip bag as another layer of freezer protection (and to hold a label and date, or recipe, between the pan lid and the bag). Just a little tip there.

Just a little happy kitchen dance (shuffle, shuffle)!

Must. Go. To. Bed.