Ease panic by prepping dinners ahead
TORONTO — Instead of panicking about what to put on the table for dinner, a couple of Alberta moms say they are able to serenely spend some quality time with their families.
Lorelei Boschman and Deanna Siemens have devised a way to spend one day every few months stocking their freezers with hundreds of courses they can simply thaw and bake, grill or slowcook so they can feed their families a nutritious and different home-cooked dinner each night.
The women are the authors of The Big Cook 2: More Celebrated Recipes, published this spring and a sequel to The Big Cook Cookbook, which also included author Joanne Smith. They started making their meals in bulk more than 16 years ago, when the three women had 10 boys and one girl among them, said 45-year-old Boschman, who has since remarried, adding three more children to the mix.
“It solves the dinner dilemma and your supper stress is gone,” said Boschman, a professor of math and education at Medicine Hat College, while Siemens, 47, is a dental assistant for her dentist husband.
“We were right in this busy point of our lives, birthing children, holding full-time careers, wanting to be the best moms we could be,” and they thought there had to be a better way than going home each day and frantically trying to throw something together for supper or resorting to takeout.
They decided to buy bulk ingredients and get together for a day of preparation. The first time, they each went home with 10 meals. “We were thrilled. Because now in our freezer we had 10 meals for those days when we would come home and feel that panic,” she said.
For 10 years they continued their “big cook,” working off their notes, then with other people begging to be shown how to achieve the zen feeling the women exuded surrounding the supper scramble, they put together their first cookbook, The Big Cook Cookbook.
They prepare all the ingredients needed for a meal and place them in a zip-close plastic bag, which is then frozen and can be thawed when needed. The meals are not cooked the day they are prepared — just the ingredients that go in them. You’re not cooking everything, freezing it and eating leftovers forever, Boschman explained.
“We like to say we do our meal prep in three to four days for the whole year. When we do a big cook, we’re going to come home with about 60 meals. We’re going to do that four times a year and that’s it. The other days in the year we’re doing other things with our kids,” Boschman said, adding that at the time of the interview she had 40 meals ready to go in her freezer.
“The concept is never make one of something, then you’re stuck tomorrow. If you’re getting out the ingredients it might take you 15 minutes to prepare one meal, but it only takes 17 minutes to prepare eight of them,” she explained. “Instead of measuring two tablespoons of vinegar, you’re measuring one cup of vinegar. It doesn’t take any longer.”
The first book contains 73 family favourites using beef, pork and chicken, while The Big Cook 2 has 134 recipes and includes vegetarian and sea food selections. Boschman and Siemens — other commitments kept Smith from being involved in the second book — put out a call to their 2,300-member Facebook group for submissions and have included 50 recipes from people across the country in the second book.