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False Start

Friday, January 16, 2009

I know I said I was going to start menu planning again. Unfortunately a stomach bug squashed that idea. I'm pretty sure we're done with it now so I'm trying to get back into the groove. Thing is, my cupboards, fridge and freezer are getting bare. That means everything will take some planning since it'll also take some preparing and cooking. No quick throw together things. Hopefully I'll be going grocery shopping on Wed or Thurs.

I found a tip online that will help me and large family BIG TIME! Using the crockpot as a rice cooker! I found this tip while reading through Steph's... A Year of CrockPotting a few weeks ago. My family can easily use 12 cups of cooked rice for a meal. I could never manage to successfully cook that much rice in one pot without scorching the bottom or it coming out chewy. My solution to this problem has been to not bother with rice much at all. Even when making asian type dishes we'd opt for spaghetti/lo mein instead rice. Today the avoidance of rice is over. I cooked 6 cups of rice in my 4qt crockpot and it came out wonderful! That's 18 cups of cooked rice, all cooked well with minimal attention. The kids that are home have already dug into my first batch and made bowls of candy rice (rice and sugar with milk). Me, I'm looking forward to having rice pudding and fried rice again.

To get a hand up on the prep of things I'm also in the middle of cooking kidney and black beans which I'll throw in the freezer for later. My next project is some flour tortillas. Oh and trying to figure out the meals for the next week. I also have my first shopping trip of 2009 to document. Most the things were to accommodate the stomach bug. I'll try to get those up by the end of the weekend.