3 tips for getting dinner ready in a flash- Twittermoms blogging for Samsung

I know I've posted about and for twittermoms before (see right sidebar to join! you won't regret it) but today I am especially excited.

There is a great opportunity for bloggers- a chance to win a fabulous award winning Samsung French Door Refrigerator, something I have had on my wish list since I first saw it. *drool*Gorgeous, isn't it? I claim this baby! Not really- but by blogging about this I do get a chance to win it and you can have a chance too. Here are the deets.

All I have to do is share 3 tips for getting dinner ready in a flash on my blog. Y'all know this is something I've blogged about before- giving my family healthy delicious meals and making it as easy on us as possible is something of a passion. Sure, we get take-out or order pizzas or rely on convenience items sometimes, who doesn't? but I love to make delicious meals for my friends and family so I've blogged about it both here and for Pink Lemonade.

The 3 tips I am going to share with you today seem almost like common sense to me any more but I'll be quite honest it wasn't so common to me when the girls were smaller- then, I always spent the better part of an hour getting a meal on the table, now, I know better. Live and learn.

Plan your menus ahead of time. For the longest time I thought this wasn't for me, I mean how did I know what I wanted to eat in a week, but by doing what works for my family and planning a very loose menu as in we have these ingredients we'll eat these meals during the week I made it work for us. Now I save both time and money by doing this one simple thing. If I know we have late rehearsals or a lot of appointments I can say oh breakfast for dinner or slow cooker meal that day. Works beautifully. Even when you are on 4 different schedules which we frequently are.

Prep as much ahead as you can. We tried the cook for a day eat for a month plans and it was exhausting and we ended up with either foods my family didn't care much for or the textures changed with freezing or for whatever reason it just really didn't work well.

What does work for us is to double or triple favorites that do freeze well so we have easy meals when they are available and also prepping only parts of other meals. Making huge batches of all-day spaghetti sauce, for example so the hard part is done and we have the base for many other recipes. Preparing the trinity (in Louisiana where we lived for 10 years this is the starting point of many a meal- onions, green peppers and celery) and freezing it in meal sized portions then I just dump it into the roux or whatever I happen to need it for. Browning up 10 pounds of ground beef or turkey and freezing that in meal sized portions that make getting tacos or sloppy joes or a casserole take just minutes. Making a gigantic batch of meatballs takes time but again you only have to do it once and then you have them ready for half a dozen or more meals. It also means you have just one mess to clean up instead of one mess each night. These are just a few examples of the things I do- if you think about it and get used to it you'll find any number of ways you can do this for your meals.

The third way we save time in the kitchen is judicious use of prepared foods. No, we don't want a ton of ingredients we can't pronounce or foods that have lost most of their nutritional value, but buying pre-peeled baby carrots instead of having to peel them each meal, for instance or frozen pearl onions saves a lot of time on those busy nights. New or thin skinned potatoes that you can scrub instead of peel means that much less time getting your recipe together. Frozen vegetables and fruit often has as much if not more nutritional value as their fresh counterparts since they are often days or weeks from when they are picked to when they reach your table.

What works for you? How do you get meals on the table without meltdowns? Anything you can share with us? We're always happy to get new ideas.