Welcome!

Hello! Welcome to "My Make Ahead Meals"! Stupid title, but you get the idea. My name is Karen. I'm wife to a picky eater and mom to a toddler who will eat just about anything I throw at her, as long as it isn't meat (and I will be enormously grateful for her non-pickiness for as long as it lasts).

I started this blog because I refuse to believe that I'm the only home cook in the world who has this issue - I make dinner around 10:00 every morning, and then we eat it around 7:00 every evening. See, it's like this - my husband works mornings/early afternoons, and I work late afternoons (that way one or the other of us is always home with our daughter. A beautiful schedule if you can't swing life on one income). I get home an hour and a half before he goes to bed, so dinner pretty much has to be on the table when I walk through the door. And he doesn't cook.

So this blog will serve two purposes: first, to give me a single place to keep all of my recipes and menu plans that are specifically centered around make-ahead cooking (my other blog, Living the Life, has lots of recipes but they aren't necessarily make-ahead friendly). Second, to provide you, my readers, with tips, tricks, recipe reviews, and other helpful information gleaned from my experiences.

This isn't a freezer cooking blog. I'd love to do once a month-type freezer cooking, but I'm pretty compulsive at the grocery store, so my freezers are generally packed full. I do, however, subscribe to the "cook it once, eat it twice" philosophy of life, and I'll note in the recipes where this is easily done.

This isn't a crockpot cooking blog. I love my crockpots, don't get me wrong (I have three), but for us, they are only suitable for certain applications.

This isn't a diet blog. Some of my recipes are very healthy, some are very, very fattening. Most fall somewhere in the middle.

This is simply a journal and a journey through nightly dinners at my house. I hope you enjoy.