Friday, November 6, 2015

In preparation …

If you're following along, you know that after months of painful walking, I stopped in July, saw a doctor in August, and have finally made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon to begin the process of fixing my right hip, which is currently cartilage-free. Sometime next year I'll be having a total hip replacement.

In a previous post, I had set a date of November 1 to go back to primal eating. So far, I've only been able to eliminate sugar. And that's all I'm going to do, most likely until I'm completely recovered. Meal preparation is just easier if I can include dairy, legumes and grains. Sugar is my opiate, adds no nutritional value to my diet, and is physically – if not mentally – easy to ditch.

I've been thinking about how to make that recovery period a little easier on my husband. He's more than willing to do whatever it takes and offer whatever I need, but I'm the chief cook and bottle-washer around here. I've been exploring the idea of preparing a bunch of freezer meals, and yesterday I got down to work, turning these:

into this:


There are now six individual and two large chicken pot pies, labeled and wrapped in my freezer. And one for tonight's dinner in the refrigerator.

Today's job will be to make a vat of chicken-and-rice soup with the rest of the chicken meat. I only used the white meat for the pot pies.

What's kind of silly about this is that we never eat pot pies. I may have made it one other time during our marriage. But the recipe looked good and it will certainly be easy for my husband to pop them in  the oven.

And that's what I'm looking for: EASY.

Other freezable meals on my list are ham-and-cheese quiche, vegetable soup, and chili (which I will freeze in gallon-sized bags and store flat to save freezer space – that's your handy-dandy tip du jour). I'd love other suggestions, if you have any. Leave a comment!

I think you can surmise that keeping grains, legumes, and dairy on the menu will make this whole freezer meal project a lot simpler. (See that line above about looking for easy.) We don't eat a lot of pasta, so I wasn't planning to do a big mac-and-cheese casserole, but I might. I'm thinking I might need a little comfort food disguised as dinner once I get back home.

At any rate … the ball is rolling. I picked up my X-rays yesterday to take with me to the surgeon. I'm looking into the best health insurance plan for 2016. I often say I don't want to wish my life away, but I wouldn't really mind if the next few months kind of flew by.

3 comments:

denise said...

My brother used to cook meals ahead for my grandfather and also for my Mom before I moved home. He bought a bunch of the disposable plastic containers (ziplock/Glad makes them). He would cook some kind of meat - chicken, pork, or water - a vegetable and some kind of starch - potatoes or rice - put a serving size of each in the container and then freeze it so that it just had to b taken out and microwaved for a meal.

That seemed to work well until a) my grandfather didn't want to bother heating them up and b) my mom either got tired of them or just decided she didn't like whatever he put in there and would eat only a small amount of it and throw the rest away.

Of course, you need more than one serving size as you will both need to eat from it, so it might not be as easy to do that or might take up too much room to be making so many individual meals. But it does allow you to have some variety. One person could have fish and another chicken if you have individual servings so it does offer maximum flexibility.

Good luck with it!

di said...

Hi. How did your replacement go? I am having done in one month. Bit nervous��

Debbi said...

I've done very well, di … you can read more about the surgery and recovery on the blog. I kept a record as well as I could and updated just a few days ago after my one-year post-op doctor's appointment. I'm going back for more physical therapy. I should have kept up with it better at home.

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