Soccer season is upon us!!! This means three nights a week I am shuttling kids back and forth to practices. What are your tactics to get healthy dinners on the table. I always get slammed and it takes a few weeks to get into the groove of our schedule.
What are your ‘go to’ dinners?
Sometimes I do the prep work like chopping and marinading in the morning so I just throw it all together when we are home.
Not a huge fan of the crock pot…can’t find any recipes we really like with it though going to try a chicken tagine in the CP next week…I am open to trying new things.
Well… I am going to take a completely different approach than the other posters. Not that I don’t think their advice is good, but I know it would never work for me in your situation (which will also be my situation soon because baseball season is almost upon us! I have three playing this year!)
First of all, do you stay home or work? That makes a big difference in what you can/can’t do during the day. Of course, you could still make it work either way, you would just have to plan and do the work more in advance.
Also, with the crock pot. You may just not like what you have made so far. Honestly, I love my crock pot and use it regularly, but I would never make chicken anything in it. CHicken in the crockpot tastes like eating wet cotton to me. It’s soaking wet, but it feels dried out and gross in your mouth. It’s not juicy or tasty to me. Same with lean cuts of beef or pork. I think it’s the leanness that does it. What I do find the crock pot EXCELLENT for is roasts that need long cooking times (like pot roasts, pulled pork, etc), stews, spaghetti sauce or chili, some soups, Salisbury steak, and I am sure a million other things I haven’t tried yet. Everything else tastes much better cooked on the stove/in the oven so I work around that.
I would stay away from anything that I had to actually had to work on after 430. That would mean no breakfast for dinner, very little grilling, no quick pastas. This is how
I would (and plan to) do it:
I work on a two week cycle of meal plans. So I would plan ahead to make a very large cut of meat for Sunday dinner- either two or three roast chickens, a pot roast (great in the crock pot!), a roast beef, a spiral sliced ham, a pulled pork roast, etc. All the usual sides- potatoes, vegetables, whatever your family would want. Then as I was meal planning I would write in on baseball/soccer nights meals that I could make with the leftovers or prepare all the parts of AHEAD OF TIME.
Chicken salad. Beef or chicken pot pie. Sheppard’s Pie. Chicken spaghetti. Scalloped potatoes with diced ham layered in. Chef salads (okay, this might require a little bit of time time to assemble at dinner, but kids can help, too. I would have everything already shredded, diced, cut, etc and in containers in the fridge, though). BBQ sandwiches using leftover pulled pork.
I would aim to have whatever dish I was making put together right after I ate my lunch
during nap/quiet time. I would refrigerate it, clean the kitchen, and even set the table for dinner if I didn’t have any toddlers that would help themselves to the cutlery throughout the afternoon (which I do, so I never set the table that far ahead of time!) All the sides would be made ahead of time, too, either leftovers from Sunday’s dinner or quick fresh sides. Coleslaw, green salads, etc are great to make ahead of time and put in the fridge.
You can keep unrolled pie crusts, homemade rolls, and the like frozen for use as needed to save time.
About 10 minutes before the appropriate cooking time for my dish I would get it out to come to room temp, preheat the oven, and then get it cooking. Then I would spend my time making sure my kitchen was clean (I
HATE coming home to a dirty kitchen after sports practices with dirty kids who need to be bathed and laundry to deal with. Yuck!), making sure my kids had all their appropriate attire and paraphernalia ready to go by the door/in the car or laid out in their room for a quick after dinner change, setting the table, etc. After dinner it should be easy for each person to rinse and load their dishes, me to wash the table and down and start the dishwasher while kids change, load everyone up, and leave.
Obviously, I am a SAHM. If you are a working mom you could easily do all these things but you would have to do them the night before or in the morning before you leave. YOu can even assemble your pot pies or casseroles (depending on the ingredients) on Sunday night as you are cleaning up the leftovers from the big dinner and freeze them, then get them out to thaw and cook on the day you need them. Salad fixings can be done days ahead of time and kept in individual containers in the fridge. A few grilled items, like hamburgers, could be managed if everything else was prepared ahead of time (all veggies, sides, etc) and all you had to do was grill up the patties.
Basically, I would do everything I could do avoid cooking any dinner on a sports evening. It would have to be done ahead of time so I could not be rushed and leave a huge mess for myself later. Those sorts of nights are misery for me.
Here is a link I have found very helpful on cooking ahead. There is actually a whole series on staying on top of dinner and the kitchen. You can find it in the right side bar under the heading “HAPPY HOME: FOOD ORGANIZATION”. You just have to keep scrolling until you find it.
Anyway, I hope this helps!
Everything has to be quick and easy. 
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