How I Feed My Family in One (or Two, max) Days

Since I became maidless, I have tried my best to make a lot of things convenient for me. That includes, mostly, closing one eye over a messy house and unfolded laundries, as well as developing thick skin when seeing mak lipat kain while I baring2 dekat living room.

The thing is, I AM embarrassed when mak does the laundry and folding and storing them in my closet. But, my job is too demanding that by the time I get back I just don’t have the brain space to do as much as watch tv. All I want is get a good shower and eat and play2 and sleep (at 930!). I just leave the unfolded laundry in the maid’s room and turn it into a whole messy closet of mine. As in, korek2 je underneath the rubble of baju and I sure will find my bra hidden somewhere. See, that’s convenient for me.

Okay I digress. Sorry.

Back to the story, since I can’t exactly tell mak to stop doing the laundry, I took over the task of cooking dinner. What I’ve been doing since the past 3 weeks is I spend a good deal of my Saturdays and Sundays on cooking dinner for the whole week. There are three major parts of this; Planning, Cooking, and Freezing.

Planning:
What I’ll do is, on Fridays I will plan the menu for the coming week. The most important tips to consider is that the food must be suitable to be frozen. Sotong will come out rubbery and sayur will become lembik.
Then I’ll check what’s available in the fridge and decide what I need to buy (which includes santan berapa packet and daun kunyit and all the dauns). This helps you avoid unnecessary spending.

Cooking:
Since I plan to finish the cooking in half a day, I’ll plan what to cook first. You see, it must be done systematically. Anything that takes longer to be cooked / needs boiling must be cooked first. And while waiting for that one to be done you can cook other stuff. Let’s say I’m cooking sambal ayam, I’ll fry the ayam first, and while frying the ayam I’ll peel the onions, blend them with chillies and use another stove to cook the sambal. I do two things at once. Fortunately I have the luxury of 4 stoves at home so I can cook a lot of things at once or do other things, like clean the sink sekali. One thing to remember about doing a lot of things simultaneously is, you must constantly check up on them kalau tak senang nak lupa and food pun senang terhangit.

Actually nowadays almost hangit tu dah jadi SOP aku. Hihihi.

Some tips:
If cooking udang, make sure you don’t overcook the udang, sebab it will be cooked lagi when you re-heat the food. Udang kalau masak lama2 nanti dia keras, tak bes.
If you have potatoes / any kinds of root veggies in your food, again, leave them slightly undercooked. Nanti masa nak reheat it will soften lagi, just nice, tak terlebih lembik.
Petua orang2 tua, kalau ada potatoes / root veggies in gulai, selagi potato tak empuk jangan letak garam, nanti dia lambat empuk. So, save your garam until serving time.
According to favoritefreezerfood.com, telur tak best frozen nanti jadi rubbery. Boleh refer to that website utk other tips.

Freezing:
I wish I could cold-blast the hot food and freeze them immediately to keep them bacteria-free but I don’t have that thing to do it. So the best thing I could do is I just let them cool, transfer to tupperwares and simpan lah. Kalau boleh tuppperwares tu biarla yang empat segi, save space. =P

To make it easier for mak to choose her dinner I usually label the tupperwares.

Why I take the time to do all this:

The pros of doing that is you’ll have worry-free week (in terms of dinners), you’ll save your time and you can actually feed your family good food. Too much of outside food pun tak healthy, you don’t know how much MSG they’re feeding you!

But of course ada cons dia. Doing the cooking ahead of time means limited menu, because not all dish can be frozen, like, sotong goreng tepung or ikan bakar. And it also means you have to sacrifice a little bit of your weekend for a peaceful week. It’s your choice.

I choose to have a peaceful week. And a full freezer: