From scratch mama's, how long does it take you to cook meals? - Page 3

[townmouse]

Lastly, here are quick and easy snack options for little ones. Maybe there's something here your children will like:

tinkyada pasta with butter or olive oil, salt, pepper, herbs, cheese
Bob's Red Mill mighty tasty hot cereal with milk, nuts, sugar, cinnamon
Brown rice made with chicken broth and seasonings, with peas
Popcorn
Celestial Seasonings (Hain) chips, many varieties. Our HFS has good sales
GF corn tortilla with filling (PB&J, avocado, cheese, deli meat)
johnnycakes with butter and maple syrup
Envirokids cold cereals: for a snack Toby eats it dry. I mix it with nuts and raisins and call is Trail Mix
Baked potato

raw fruit (for my youngest, presentation is everything. grapes chilled and in a pretty dish, banana sliced and dusted with cinnamon and sugar, fruit salads instead of a whole piece of fruit)

fruit leather
larabar
applesauce

baby carrots, cucumber slices, avocado slices, raw mushroom, green pepper

cooked corn, peas, green beans

roasted chickpeas

cheese cubes, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, hard boiled egg

Supper leftovers, reheated and plated nicely

there's a bigger list at www.cookingtf.com/children.html the items I listed are typical foods for my four.

[mamajama]

Sounds like you need a better stocked pantry. We have rice a lot. I just steam up some veggies and cook whatever meat in a nice sauce (bottled or homemade) at least four times/week. I sometimes make extra sauces and marinades and refrigerate them to have on hand. Usually dinner takes about 20 minutes that way. I start the rice, do up everything else while the rice is cooking, and then serve it all at once.

We are not gluten intolerant or anything but rarely eat bread.

Lunches are usually cold trays and sometimes soup with crackers or something. Most often, lunch is leftovers form dinner the night before.

I use quick-cooking oatmeal. And I give fruit and yogurt for breakfast quite often. Sometimes with granola.

On weekends when we're all going to be home all day and I feel like cooking and baking more elaborate meals, I do most of the prep-work in the morning when the kids seem the most easygoing.

The oven is my cooking partner. I do so much stuff in the oven. The only work is prep and that can be done any time. I often throw a bunch of root veggies in a pan with some meat and some kind of sauce, stick it in the oven and forget about it for an hour or so until it's ready.

[mamajama]

sorry for the serial post. I'm just going to go through your post and give some feedback if that's alright:

Assuming were having left overs, 30 minutes at least, usually an hour becasue I have to deal with the kids who won't leave each other alone.

For leftover, I put them in a pan with a lid and heat on med/low for about 15 minutes. Very hands-off. Maybe a stir halfway through.

The other night I made Spaghetti with Garlic bread, 5 FREAKING HOURS to make the french bread (a rare treat), the sauce was jarred and the spaghetti was boxed and I just had to cook it (20 min to boil the water and almost 25 min to cook, gotta love high altitude!) then make the garlic butter (just crushed garlic and mixed it into the butter) then still had to toast it.

Too much bread-baking!

Tonight I made Pizza, chopped the veggies last night, the meat was packaged so I only had to open it, used a mix for the crust (Whole Foods makes a REALLY GOOD GF pizza crust!). Made the sauce from scratch from a fantastic sounding recipe on allrecipes (it was really good on the pizza!

why did this take four hours? From scratch doesn't mean that you need to stand there by the food while it cooks. I use lower temps and put lids on pans so that the food pretty much cooks and steams itself all at once.

[artgoddess]

Originally Posted by Satori

Cooking takes even longer with her "helping" since she's careless and everything ends up on the floor. 2 yr old just makes a huge mess at the sink and makes the floor slippery.

Well if the goal is to get more time with your kids then so what. The 8 year old can clean up what she spills, and you get to spend more time with her. Throw a bath towel on the floor under the sink to catch most of the water your younger one spills.


As far as it taking 4 or 5 hours to bake one loaf of bread. time to figure out what your time is worth to you. If you can buy a loaf of GF organic bread for $5.00 then is your time really only worth a dollar an hour? But the bread. If you can't afford to do that, then give up eating bread.

I have a friend who is GF, and she uses a bread machine and it takes her 5 or 10 minutes to throw everything in and the machine does the rest. maybe you can put side a few dollars a week and save up for one.

[organicmidwestmama]

so your lo cant eat eggs or dairy meat? ay! that must be hard to help a child fill up on non-bready type stuff. but still baking your own breads sounds like a nightmare if your kiddo eats the whole loaf in a day. what foods can your child eat? i was going to also suggest soaking your oats, it takes all of 4 minutes to cook even steel cut oats if you soak them in water and a dash of whey or lemon juice overnight.

[Carley]

Yeah, what's with the long bread baking times? It takes me 10 minutes to knead. The rest is up to the yeast.

[Magelet]

I've seen a lot of good suggustions here. Here's one more. You said somewhere iirc that you didn't like leftovers or freezer meals or something because it got boring? Learn to take one set of leftovers, and turn them into something totally different. I've been working on learning that. I know some people who have the talent, and it is amazing. Leftover quinoa salad, miso dressing, and lettuce= delicious! Vindaloo and Osso Bucco= yum.

It kind of sounds like you resent your children interupting you and making cooking take longer. (Or maybe the cooking itself.) Cooking with kids takes infinitely longer, for sure, but its fun. Only kids look at a whole fish and say "Can we disect the eye?" And when you give them the head to disect the eye (unsuccessfully. the gal needed a scalpel, not a kiddie knife, but she was 6, and I didn't have one anyways. we did get the pupil to kind of gush out. which would have been gross, except she enjoyed it so much.), end up sliding the head to the dog, resulting in a chase to recapture the fish head for the amusement of the child, all the while fending off vegetarians in the kitchen, and figureing out how to make beurre blanc. hectic, but so much fun, watching her enjoy it.

A little mess might be worth it if it gets your daughter involved in the cooking, and makes it more fun because you do it together. and she can help clean up the mess afterwards. bumber cars with mops will clean up the mess and be fun. used to play that with my sis as a kid.

I'm not gf, but in terms of time I spend in the kitchen, I rarely spend more than 1 hour preparing dinner, 30 minutes on lunch, and 7 on breakfast. 7 minute breakfasts are my rule. soaked oatmeal cooks in 7 minutes. boiling water in the pan makes it take 30 seconds to wipe the pot clean with soapy water then rinse (the boiling releases all the sticky and the starch and stuff). Scrambled eggs (which is sounds like you can't have) also take less than 7 minutes for me, cause I have them down to a science.

Lunch might take 30 minutes, if I go fancy and make something. If I am reheating leftovers, it shouldn't take more than 10.

For dinner, it depends. Its true that the prep-work takes the longest, so maybe you can go through and do your prep-work in advance. Also, mise en place REALLY saves time. mise en place is french for put in place, and basically means you get everything you need ready first. You get out all your ingrediants, you prep everything and put it on plates or bowls or cuttingboards or whatever, then you start to cook. saves a lot of time.

to echo what some pp's have said, the bread sounds like it is killing you. If you can't afford to buy gf bread, I would try going without. It might not be worth all that stress. It sounds like you are REALLY stressing over it.

[sparkly]

We're gluten free too, and I make everything from scratch, and similar things to what you make, and it doesn't take that long...but then again, if I spend 10 minutes cutting veggies, 2 hours cooking them into soup, and 5 minutes cleaning up, I only consider that 15 mins of cooking.

Soak the oats the night before in the cooking pot--it cuts the cooking time down to minutes. Even if I don't soak them, it only takes maybe 10 minutes of simmering (we use BRM gf oats too), and I soak the pot after cooking and the gooey remnants come right out. I know high altitude takes a little longer, but it shouldn't take more than a couple extra minutes.

Bread: we make our own. I keep all my flours together in one pantry, and put them in tupperwares so I can easily scoop out the flour. I sometimes make several batches of the dry ingredients of my favorite recipe and keep them in ziplocs. I throw everything in my mixer, then into the pan, let rise, and bake. It uses one mixing bowl, some measuring spoons, and one pan, and maybe 10 mins of hands-on work.

French bread/pizza: again, maybe 10 mins of hands-on work, a bowl, and a cookie sheet. I don't consider the rising time in my cooking-work time.

I try to make a big huge pot of things like chili so it lasts us 2-3 meals.

So I cook things two or three times a day, from scratch, plus baking for desserts and stuff, but it's not like I'm actually working on it for very long. I try to cut veggies, measure things, etc. when the little one is sleeping, because he;s very, very high maintenance when he's awake (pulling on cats, eating things off the floor, playing with electrical outlets, etc).

[katiesk]

oh my goodness! i would completely hate and probably give up on cooking if i had to go through your daily cooking sagas!

having said that, we do pretty much everything from scratch and i don't spend that much time in the kitchen. i usually use pasta in a box, but for me to make spaghetti and garlic bread takes about 30 min preparation and then it just simmers and cooks itself...

i don't really understand why everything is taking so long for you. i'm really sorry!

one thing that i often do if i know my afternoon is going to be rushed, is start dinner early, like, while i am already preparing lunch. for instance, if it is something like chili, i can get the tomato base all ready and simmering and add in spices, chop and add veggies as i have time. same with spaghetti, pizza, lasagna, etc.

good luck.

[SuzymomofLaura]

"I just feel like I'm moving in slow motion or something and its taking forever to get things done. "

I can so relate, maybe being tired contributes to your feeling this way too. When my LO slept 7 hours at a stretch for the first time in her life, I stood amazed at how much more efficient everything proceeded the next day
We're GF and lactose free and I cook+bake everything from scratch. I've learned slowly (very slowly) to use my freezer in a more practical way. F.e. chop/grate extra veggies while you're at it and freeze them for later use, make triple-and freeze-batches of ready to use cookie dough etc. For the GF bread-thing (it's that mixing and measuring out the zillion ingredients and checking the recipe all the time, folks)(me often ending up forgetting what or how much I already put in, having to recue my screaming LO from the cat or the cat from my eldest DD etc. etc.) I try to find some quiet time when the kids are in bed and measure out triple batches of all the dry ingredients, stack them away with a sticky note attached on the container on which and how much liquid ingredients to add.
For pancakes I mix ingredients (dry, and separately wet ingrdients) the night bfore and in the morning just whisk them together and bake (and bake extra to freeze). It's been a slow turning, but threads like this were/are super helpful to me
Dinner about 45 minutes, breakfast/lunch about 30 minutes. I bake bread once a week and crackers/cookies/muffins or whatever three or four times a week

[Storm Bride]

I don't spend that much time, but I'm not as purely from scratch as you are. We don't make pizza. If we make spaghetti, I make it from scratch, but I buy the garlic bread, usually. I make my bread in a bread maker, and I do end up buying an occasional load, because I run out and don't get a new loaf made in time. I still feel as though I spend my whole life in the kitchen.

In my case, I think I need to get more organized about batch cooking and freezing - things like that. I already spend too much time in the kitchen, and as I move more and more to scratch cooking, it gets worse.

[savithny]

We're not GF but we do make our own bread, pizza, pancakes, waffles etc.

DH makes the bread using the Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day recipe, or we use a bread machine. He's got the schtick down either way ... generally he either is pulling dough from the dough bucket or loading the bread machine after dinner while we clean up from dinnner.

Breakfast: Toast, cottage cheese, or freezer pancakes (DH makes pancakes on the weekends, does a huge batch and freezes in single-serve bundles. They just go in the toaster oven). We dont' make our own cottage cheese though -we're not that scratch. We also do cereal (Grape nuts) some mornings at kids request.

Lunches: Pack sandwiches for school for the kids. Usually sandwich, some fruit or veggies, and a cookie or two (homemade oatmeal; I make a big batch, scoop, freeze on a tray and then tip the frozen dough balls into a bag. We can cook 6-12 at a time in the toaster oven as needed). DH and I do leftovers from dinner (make extra on purpose) or sandwiches as well.

Dinner: Varies a lot - stir fries, bean curries (indian style), tofu curries (thai style). Meatloaf, sauteed meat with greens, what have you. Dinner generally takes an hour-ish of acctive time and maybe longer in the no-work time. We make homemade pizza almost every week, certainly every two weeks.

I've gotten really good at getting everything moving through the process -- it all goes much faster if you don't try to assemble everything at once before beginning, despite what the TV chefs do. They have Prep Cooks! Dinner usually starts by chopping an onion, which takes maybe a minute. Tip that into a skillet with some fat and start it browning. While it does that, grab the rest of the veggies and chop. Start any rice that needs making, or fill a pot with water for the pasta.

I'll often cook extra of something and "repurpose" it for another meal. If we have sauteed chicken breasts with rice and greens (really common meal) I cook an extra breast or two and we have it the next day sliced in tortillas with beans, cheese, and some pepper or shredded spinach. If I make pepper and onion burritos, I make extra pepper/onion saute and use it on eggs as an omelet or huevos rancheros. Meat loaf can be diced up and used like meatballs on pasta.

[Storm Bride]

Originally Posted by savithny

I've gotten really good at getting everything moving through the process -- it all goes much faster if you don't try to assemble everything at once before beginning, despite what the TV chefs do. They have Prep Cooks!

I find it slightly quicker to prep on the fly, but I hate doing it. I'm much more stressed, and far more likely to overlook something. Especially when I'm cooking Indian dishes with layered spicing (eg. butter chicken), I like to have every step laid out ahead of time, or I get into frantic mode...

DH is much, much faster than I am.

[frontierpsych]

When I am cooking dinner from scratch it is usually 1-2 hours. I don't have to do any special diets though. I also stick with pretty simple recipes.

[shelley4]

i have 2 GF and 3 non-GF people in our house... we often just all eat GF so i'm not making 2 separate meals. i cook 90% from scratch... i totally understand, GF takes alot of time/patience. we are all vegan too!

my meals take about 1 hour tops to cook. here's what i do..

i have a 2 week meal plan.. 5 or 6 meals planned out in advance, so that we eat something different everyday, and we don't get bored. so the first week, i cook off of my "week 1" plan, and the next, i go onto "week 2"... it really helps, since i don't have to spend time figuring out what to make, i have it all planned out for me. makes groceries easier too! the other night or two is for leftovers or ordering in GF pizza!

i prep when the kids are in bed, or when the big guys are occupied and the baby is napping. i have no problem letting them play a computer game or watch a TV show so that i can chop veggies up. i find that the chopping takes me the longest. if i have everything chopped ahead of time, i can have supper on the table in 30 mins, usually.

i have my GF mixes stored in containers.. i have a cookie mix, a pancake mix, a bread mix, etc... all homemade (store bought is an option, just expensive)... that way, i can just scoop out a cup or two of whatever i need. taking out, measuring, etc 4-10 flours is a pain!!!!

i buy my GF bread frozen. i only make homemade GF bread as a treat. it is more expensive like this, but i find it's worth my time/effort. also GF tortillas.

on weekends/when i have other adults to help with the children (maybe once a week).. i make GF muffins, pancakes or other snacks, and freeze them all in portions. that way, i can just pull some out to thaw the night before, and reheat in the morning.