Frozen Dinners

One of the things on my long list of to dos has been to find a way to prepare six weeks of frozen dinners for after the babies are born. Basically, Trey only gets 5 days of paternity leave from school and gets no leave from work so we have been trying to figure out ways to streamline parts of life that are somewhat controllable.

Cooking here in general has been an adjustment. When a recipe calls for a stick of butter, I have to think: “let’s see… that’s half a cup, where’s my conversion chart… OK, half a cup of butter is 110 grams… butter here comes in a package of 250 grams… I guess I can just eyeball it… what is the next ingredient?” I know I could get a scale and if I didn’t have to share the kitchen with college students, I might invest in some more useful kitchen equipment. That is the case with a good recipe which contains items available in the grocery stores here. (For those interested in the conversion chart I have been using: http://www.veg-world.com/articles/cups.htm)

Finally, I had decided to start from scratch. It just seemed easier. Buy cooking magazines that actually call the ingredients by the names they use here and give measurements in metric units. That made life so much easier for a few weeks. Then I began hunting for cookbooks geared towards making dinners ready to freeze such as those featured on http://www.savingdinner.com/. I didn’t have much luck.

Finally, I figured I better just start asking because I, apparently, was not putting the ideal search terms into Google. First I tried the dietitian at the hospital. She said that sounded like a fabulous thing for them to know about and she would look into it. The next day we had a meeting with our Pastorate (what they call Sunday School here except it is more like what we call cell groups in the States.) There was a lady who had made a delicious key lime banana pie. The previous meeting she had made these cupcakes that I swear could have come from a store. I asked her if she liked to cook and we started talking. It turns out she had some American recipes which called for “a stick of butter” and was thrilled that I could reveal that a stick of butter was a half a cup. She said she had all of her recipes scanned in and would be happy to email me the ones which were her favorite for freezing. I could have hugged her but we’re in Brittan so I didn’t.

Finally, today I had coffee with two women from the twins club I joined. One was about to pop at 36 weeks pregnant and one was 20 weeks. One of them mentioned they had ordered homemade dinners which were ready to freeze from somewhere called Cooks. Everything went into slow motion. I turned to her and asked her to repeat that information. She said there was a shop where you could place your order online and either have meals delivered or run in and pick them up. They were made with fresh ingredients and you just popped them in the oven for 40 minutes. THIS was the answer. It had to be. We simply do not have the freezer space for six weeks worth of meals anyway. I immediately went home and looked it up and it looks perfect! The website is http://www.cookfood.net/ and it seems like my prayers are answered.

I can't help adding that after our coffee I walked out of the apartment and across the street to Harrods to drool over the handbags from Vogue in person. Even though a diaper bag is the only new handbag in my foreseeable future, a girl can still dream right?