Allen Stephanie - Dream dinners tm

Whats for Dinner?

It is perhaps the most commonand for some, nightmare-inducingquestion posed in households everywhere seven days a week, 365 days a year. If the sound of those three words sends you reeling, or worse, straight to the nearest fast-food chain or take-out joint, were willing to bet that two wordsDream Dinnerswill change all of that forever. It certainly did for us.

It all started with that timeworn working-mother strategy familiar to the more organized of the species: double or triple a recipe, cook it in one afternoon, then freeze what you dont use for later on in the week. The result is one or two nights off from take-out, frozen pizza, and chicken nuggets. And that was how Stephaniea working mother of twoachieved her goal of eating dinner with her children every night. But she took the age-old method and gave it a smart twist. Instead of cooking each entreemeat loaf for eight, sayand then freezing it, a method that is efficient but cuts down on taste, she did all of the prep work and then froze the mostly uncooked entres so theyd be ready to complete later as needed. The result was a freezer full of full-flavored ready-to-cook mealsand liberation from that most dreaded of daily chores: scrambling home after work to pull together a wholesome dinner for the family.

Stephanies surefire method for always having a good meal on the table had become legendary among her friends, who had been angling (and angling and angling) for years to get in on her cook and freeze days. Finally, she gave in to the begging and invited a dozen friends to come into her kitchen with their own pans and dishes and a few bottles of wine. She provided the recipes and enough ingredients for everyone to make twelve freezer-ready dinners, each in proportions to serve six. Soon friends were calling in hopes of making their dinners, too.

Stephanie and Tina had been friends and coworkers for years and were the perfect fit to start this business. Stephanie has a culinary background and Tina a financial and accounting background.

Stephanie and Tina started Dream Dinners because they wanted to make it easier for people to get to the dinner table and enjoy a healthy balance of food and relationships. They wanted to make peoples lives easier and encourage them to eat together as a family at least three nights a week.

Dream Dinners is the innovator in the home-meal-solutions industry, originating the concept of hosting small-group assemble-and-freeze meal sessions. The first to introduce this time-saving dinnertime solution nationwide, Dream Dinners invented the concept that offers convenience and a fun interactive environment. Now franchised, Dream Dinners helps busy families in over two hundred stores across our nation save time and money, and makes it easier for them to share healthy, home-cooked meals at the table. Visit www.dreamdinners.com for the location nearest you.

What Are Dream Dinners?

Dream Dinners are healthy, delicious, fuss-free meals made with easy-to-find ingredients that you assemble in multiples and freeze. No more hassles planning and preparing meals, no more hectic postwork, predinner, mid-homework chaos in the kitchen.

A freezer full of meals may be the obvious benefit to preparing food the Dream Dinners way, but theres anotherno less importantadvantage to having dinner at your fingertips, or at least in the freezer. Dream Dinners encourage families and friends to reconnect around the dinner table. Eating dinner together provides benefits for the whole family, including forming stronger family bonds, sharing important family values, improving communication and problem-solving skills, and saving money.

Indeed, research on the eating habits of families and especially children and teens underscores the impact sitting down together to share a meal can have not only on your familys health but also on their emotional well-being.

Making Mealtimes Matter

Apart from alleviating the stress that comes with racing to get dinner on the table every night, our hope is that the Dream Dinners in this book will make the dinner table much like a round tablefor discussion, laughter, debate, and real, uninterrupted conversation. If food is essential for nourishing the body and love is the main ingredient for feeding the soul, where better than the family dinner table to get your fill of both? Throughout the book, you will find Lets Talk, our strategies for making mealtimes the most comfortable time to engage in meaningful conversation. First and foremost, we use tactics other than raising our voices to get everyone to the dinner table. Once everyone is sitting around the table, there are further strategies for encouraging them to engage.

Getting Organized the Dream Dinners Way

The best cooks, whether they are making a single meal or many at one time, have a system or strategy for preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner that is high on efficiency and low on stress.

Dream Times Three

When you assemble a recipe, it is just as easy to make three batches as it is to make one. Assemble the ingredients, step by step, into three containers. Serve one tonight and freeze the others for up to three months.

If you assemble a times three dinner twice a week, at the end of the month, youll have sixteen dinners in the freezer, ready to serve to your family or guests, or to bring to others as house gifts. Cooking times three saves time, money, and cleanup!

A few advance tips will make this simple method even easier: first, remember to use larger saucepans and mixing bowls when cooking times three. This will reduce the number of bowls and pans you have to clean later. Second, invest in good-quality freezer bags, heavy-duty foil, plastic wrap, and perhaps even foil pans. This will keep your regular baking dishes available and eliminate worries about losing your dishes when delivering frozen dinners to new moms or new neighbors. While cooking, make sure you get time-intensive processes started first (for example, browning meat and cooking rice or noodles) and group similar tasks together for efficiency: chopping vegetables, grating cheeses, browning meat, and so on.