Dinner Diaries: Fast, Fresh, and Tasty

Job: Secretarial

Lives: Monsey

Cooking for: Four (sometimes my marrieds or other relatives pop in, or the grandchildren come).

My cooking philosophy

I

make a menu for four nights of suppers, then print out recipes, and a shopping list of all ingredients for my weekly Monday morning grocery run. Then I don’t have to think. Even better, sometimes my sister and I exchange our four-day menus and shopping lists, so I only have to think of four suppers and have eight. Since I work, I use both my oven and my crockpot on a delayed start timer, so we can have a hot supper ready in the evening.

Average time I spend cooking supper:

Less than an hour. I put all ingredients on the counter, and set the kitchen timer for when I need to come and do the next step in the recipe.

If someone doesn’t like supper:

They are welcome to make themselves a sandwich. But I’ll tell you what my married daughter did when her kids were complaining and picky about suppers — she served only peanut butter sandwiches for a week. Now they eat the normal food again!

The favorite supper in my house:

Meatballs goes down very well, so do fried cutlets, and so does anything with pasta, like penne a la vodka, lasagne, and baked ziti. I do whole wheat pasta, I don’t like to use white.