Cooking is Hard Work

My pretty peppers and onions

My husband and I have decided to cook the rest of the meat sitting in the freezer before buying more. For the last several years, we have been eating out more and more, but our buying habits haven't changed. So we needed to get rid of odds and ends in the freezer, including fish hubby caught on a deep sea fishing trip a while back.

Even my husband's own taste buds haven't convinced him you can't bread and fry tuna as if it were catfish, so as you can imagine nothing I say will convince him either. As a result of my cooking all the remaining chicken tenders and him making Southern Fried Tuna, we had a lot of chicken and tuna leftovers sitting in the fridge. I decided to use one of my Friday afternoons off to get a little ahead on cooking by turning the leftovers into tuna patties and a chicken rice casserole, and freezing them to have easy to make meals for the next week. I bought a pack of yellow, red, and orange bell peppers for the patties, but otherwise I was making use of what was on hand.

I do not know how the people on the Food Channel chop veggies without cutting their hands off, because it takes me a long time. Onion and pepper chopping must have taken me a half hour. Then there was making the sauce for the chicken casserole, with onion-flavored milk leftover from making onion rings and grated cheese leftover from cheeseburgers. Since I had so many peppers, I decided to use half of the pepper/onion mix instead of the carrots I had planned for the chicken casserole. That saved me a little time. It still took me two hours to turn already cooked food into a whole two meals. Who takes two hours to cook leftovers? Besides me, that is.

I made a third meal that night of pan sauteed trout (not from the fishing trip) and shrimp fried rice. The trout was a little (okay, a lot) freezer burned, but the rice was nice and filling.

We're now buying meat (and catfish! which tastes great fried!) again, and eating in more and out less. There are still two tuna patties in the freezer for a quick fix. I have learned something from this experience: I'd rather eat out than cook.