Lydia Kessler - The Make-Ahead Cookbook

Avon, Massachusetts

Tired of coming home every day and having to get dinner in the oven? Wouldnt you rather spend that time relaxing with your family or catching up with friends? Well, with The Make-Ahead Cookbook, you can create delicious meals that are ready when you are!

Featuring step-by-step instructions for hundreds of tasty recipes, this book shows you how to make a weeks worth of dishes in just one day, so you dont have to worry about whipping up a home-cooked meal right after work or think about grabbing a quick bite at an expensive restaurant. By taking a few hours on the weekend to prepare and freeze a variety of mouthwatering dishes at home, you can fill your freezer with entres, side dishes, and ingredients that you can turn into satisfying dishes in a matter of minutes, making them perfect for families on the go. These flavorful meals will not only come in handy on your busiest days, but theyll also save you money and time in the kitchen. Best of all, youll not only have a variety of plates to choose from each day, but youll also be prepared with appetizers and desserts when company drops in unexpectedly.

Whether youre looking for something light and healthy or are craving tasty comfort food, this book is guaranteed to have a dish that not only satisfies your appetite but is also stress-free and delicious. Each recipe will guide you through the make-ahead process with cooking, freezing, and reheating instructions, so that you can plan your meals based on your familys needs and weekly activities. Youll also find plenty of tips for grocery shopping, prepping your kitchen for cooking day, and keeping track of your frozen dishesall of which will help you get dinner on the table with virtually no effort.

From Pancake Donuts (see recipe in ), The Make-Ahead Cookbook includes easy-to-make recipes your whole family will love. So stop slaving over the stove and start preparing meals that not only taste good but also save you time when you need it most!

Did you know that you can cook on one day and make meals that will feed your family for the entire week? This increasingly popular form of cooking isnt as difficult as it sounds, and it can actually be a lot of fun. Inside this book, you will learn how to use your kitchen appliances to cook and store delicious, healthy meals that you can just pull out and reheat for breakfast, lunch, or dinner in a matter of minutes.

Preparing fresh, delicious meals for your family is not only simple, but itll save you time and money. Youll never have to rely on takeout foods or expensive drive-through restaurants with their sodium-loaded, high-fat foods to get you through the week. With the hearty meals in this book, you will satisfy everyones taste buds and appetites even on your busiest days.

Make-ahead cooking is about making life easier by filling your freezer with prepared meals, side dishes, and ingredients you can mix and match into meals. Its about saving money at the grocery store, and saving time in the kitchen. Best of all, its about reducing stress in your life and giving you more time to spend with the people you love. Imagine opening your freezer door and seeing it filled with prepared meals. You took care of the hard part over the weekend, and now all you have to do is choose a meal, defrost it, and heat it. Doesnt that sound wonderful? Even on the craziest days of the week, you will be able to come home and have dinner on the table in thirty to forty minutes, with virtually no effort. Dinnertime can always be this effortless if you learn how to cook once a week and freeze your meals.

People lead busy lives, and therefore time is a precious commodity. By investing a small amount of time in once-a-week cooking, you reap great benefits. For example, it takes just as much time to make three batches of spaghetti sauce as it does to make one. By simply tripling your recipe, you save cooking time for future dinners. Since you generally have more free time on the weekends, you can spend some of it making meals that your family will love. Then, when busy weeknights roll around and you are short on time, youre able to pull a meal out of the freezer and provide them with a home-cooked meal in minutes.

When faced with a busy day and little time to prepare dinner, the fastest solution is to eat out. This might mean ordering pizza, swinging through a fast food drive-through, or dining in a restaurant. Regardless of how you eat out, every option available is more expensive than fixing a home-cooked meal. A middle-of-the-road approach is to purchase convenience food at the grocery store. This might be precooked and packaged food, or full meals from the deli. While this solution isnt as expensive as eating out, it is still more expensive than cooking at home. The best solution is to heat up a prepared meal from your freezer. By planning ahead, youll save a lot of money by not eating out just because you have no other options.

Once-a-week cooking is a marathon cooking session that involves deciding what you want to cook, making lists, shopping, then preparing and freezing enough meals to last for a whole week. With organization, planning skills, and some food-science knowledge, you will never need to order take-out again. Youll pull delicious, healthy meals out of your freezer and reheat them in minutes.

There are a few ways to tackle making meals for a week. You can cook triple batches of your favorite recipes and freeze them in meal-size containers; you can cook ten to thirty individual recipes and freeze them; or you can buy a large quantity of meats and ingredients, cook a big batch of starter foods, and then make lots of different casseroles and entres from the starter batch. Youll find plenty of recipes and advice in this book that will help you figure out which method and foods are best for you and your family.

Whats for dinner? Chances are youve heard those words a few times in your life because just about everyone likes to know whats for dinner. Including you! Freezer cooking makes meal planning a breeze.

The easiest way to plan your meals is to print off a weekly calendar. Next, make a list of the recipes you want to serve each day, making notes regarding vacation times, times youll be entertaining, holidays, and days when youre invited out to dinner. If you are on a tight budget, choose recipes that contain common ingredients you will use in other recipes. Assign a meal to each day and write it on the calendar. Hang your calendar on the refrigerator so that everyone knows, at a glance, what is for dinner each night. Planning your meals in advance offers another benefit. Because many make-ahead meals need to be defrosted before cooking, you know what to remove from the freezer and put into the refrigerator so the meal will have a full twenty-four hours to defrost in the refrigerator.