In general, anthropomorphizing household objects grates on me. When people insist on calling furniture “she,” I resist joining their frivolous fun. However, there are two objects for which casually personifying has always stood me in good stead—and many other homemakers. When the freezer gets regular meals and the kitchen has an evening winddown and bedtime routine, life in the home runs more smoothly. Dare I say effortlessly?
Feeding the Freezer
Many a homemaker before me has sung the praises of batching tasks in the kitchen to produce excess, which can be frozen or canned to benefit you on some future day with readily available food. If you are chopping an onion, why not five? If you are cooking a pound of ground beef, why not three? If you are baking a loaf of bread, why not four? The incremental increase in effort for each additional loaf, pound, vegetable, etc., is generally not much of an additional burden.
Leila Lawler calls it “save a step” cooking and Carol Joyce Seids offers encouragement in batch cooking. Erstwhile blogger and mama to many, Jamerill Stewart has hundreds of hours of video footage of “mega mama meal” preparation. Some people shudder at the thought of frozen food. Having the unpleasant experience of consuming freezer burned food might give the faulty impression that preserving edible victuals in this way is not possible. But so many experienced homemakers cannot be wrong. Revise your personal freezer process rather than abandon the method recommended by so many.
What is so good about it? Today, while you engage the task of food preparation, you can give a gift to your future self. On a day later this week or next week or at the end of the month, dinner is done! All that’s needed is a modicum of forethought to defrost and reheat. It’s amazing what you can freeze! Chili, soups, stews, curries, and sauces of many varieties, meats (whether cooked or marinated to be cooked later), there are so many options.
Once “feeding the freezer” is an activity that occurs in your kitchen with regularity, you will likely notice opportunities you didn’t before. If leftover soup hasn’t been touched for a couple days, freeze it! No sense risking the sad waste of food spoilage when the freezer can be fed, securing a meal on a night with fewer options. If your family is not yet won over by the wonders of a flavorful dal, you can still cook up a big batch and freeze the remainder in small portions for future lunches. Feeding the freezer, whether you call your freezer “she” or “it,” is a good way of life.
A word of encouragement to those lacking a big, giant, standalone freezer: The regular freezer compartment of a fridge/freezer combo is sufficient for many frozen meals. Pack things economically and keep a steady rotation. Vast frozen real estate not necessary to a cook once, eat three times lifestyle.
Putting the Kitchen to Bed
I never understood the passion with which women in middle age would speak of washing all the dishes every night. They would not, they claimed, go to bed with dishes in the sink or piled on the counters. What’s the big deal? As it turns out, just as fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so the clearing the kitchen sink is the beginning of order in the home.
Putting the kitchen to bed means that the morning holds the gift of not facing the detritus of yesterday’s life.
Anchoring a tidy(ish) kitchen to bedtime introduces a powerful lynchpin of evening habit stacking. All of us have to go to bed at some point (or face mental and physical deterioration if we shirk the obligations of sleep and restoration). By placing the kitchen tidy in conjunction with our own winding down, it can become a pleasant evening ritual, predictable and no longer necessitating a decision. We always tidy up before bed; once it becomes part of who you are, you don’t have to decide if it will happen or not. That is likely the reason for the passion of those women describing their dishwashing habits.
Depending on how the baby is sleeping and the peaks and troughs of your general state in life, “putting the kitchen to bed” may be crawling across the finish line by sort of shoving most of the dishes into the dishwasher and calling it a day. When you are flourishing in a window of good health and efficient routines, the clean sink can ripple out into spotless counters, a nightly drawer or cabinet decluttered, a chapter of a book read, an evening magnesium supplement taken daily, whatever good habits you put your mind to.
As an added bonus, when the evening tidy is paired with a hungry freezer, great things can happen. As part of putting the kitchen to bed, those excess food stuffs are put where they belong and you might think ahead to the next day, strategically moving items from the freezer to the fridge for the next day.
