Comments on: Monday Q&A | Cooking, Dishwashing, and Piano Teaching

By: Connie

Connie — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:34:25 +0000

I love your website!

I too taught piano. I found it very effective to expect my students to play each piece 1x for each year of their age. ex. A seven year old would play their piece 7x, a ten year old 10x etc.

Warning! This somewhat dampened their enthusiasm for birthdays… I could never figure out why? LOL!

By: The Prudent Homemaker

The Prudent Homemaker — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:29:04 +0000

I love the numbers you ran! We don’t eat out at all. I can fed my family of 7 for $2-$5 per meal; eatng out would be really expensive for us!

I plan for leftovers; that really helps with time.

By: Katie

Katie — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:25:54 +0000

Just wanted to mention that I went through the Alfred piano books, I took piano lessons from when I was 10 to 15, and I really enjoyed them all!

By: Mrs. Scrimp

Mrs. Scrimp — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:23:17 +0000

Really great points on the reasons for why to keep going with cooking at home. I, too, found that planning out meals really, really helped me deal with cooking fatigue. Turns out a lot of my stress had to do with trying to come up with a creative plan on the fly every night.

Because there’s just the two of us and neither of us are easily bored by food we like, I tend to make at least two meals a week that will feed us for two days in a row.

I’ll be linking back to this post from my blog.

By: Janknitz

Janknitz — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:41:53 +0000

The dishwasher can be very efficient if it is properly LOADED. We are a family of four and only run it every other day (during the week, when nobody is home at lunchtime). The key is to use every slot and space. This means that you should put like objects together (large plates with large plates, bowls with similarly shaped bowls, etc.) so that the space is used efficiently. When I’m done in the kitchen, the dishwasher is well-packed, but not so much that the spray can’t reach the dishes.

We handwash pots and pans because they take up too much room (and often don’t fare as well in the dishwasher anyway).

My only regret is the racks in our dishwasher are kind of far apart–I could go three days if we had better racks! Of course, you have to have enough dishes and silverware for that, too.

We do not rinse (wastes water) but we scrape–I always tell my kids we have no need for dishwasher cleaned rice and lettuce!

By: Trudy Garvey

Trudy Garvey — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:09:19 +0000

One word for the cooking blues – CROCKPOT! It’s so simple to throw something, go to work, and then come home to a already prepared meal. And bonus – you can use/better off to use the less expensive cuts of meat in them so it’s very frugal as well.

By: Annette

Annette — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:08:43 +0000

Planning out meals once a week has made all the difference in the world to me! It seems to have been the missing link…changing what used to be drudgery into something that I actually look forward to.

Thank you also for the piano advice. The idea of practicing the song a certain number of times rather than playing for an allotted time also changes the entire feeling of the experience. It focuses the activity on the actual moment rather than watching the clock. I love ideas that can actually change the way we look at things!

By: hiptobeme

hiptobeme — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:17:45 +0000

Sometimes, I cook two meals at once. Tonight I made sausages rice and peas for dinner. Then in another pot I made beans with a tomato based sauce (left overs) and three of the sausages. Sausages + beans = something totally different for dinner. That’s a big pot o’ lunch for tomorrow, which will be busy. The Olympic torch is coming through our town and we are going to check it out! Vancouver 2010~!

By: Angela

Angela — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:45:47 +0000

Kristen- Thanks for writing about the huge savings of cooking at home. Sometimes I can’t believe I have to convince people of this. I enjoy eating out, but I want it to be special, not just throwing away money because you don’t feel like cooking.

I applaud you for feeding your largish family homecooked meals every night, but for my husband and I, here are some ways I manage to cook less often, which makes it less of a chore for me (I think this could work for couples with just one or two kids as well):
1. I make one meal that will be leftovers: soup, chili, lasagna, etc.
2. My husband makes pizza or pasta one night.
3. We generally go out about once a week- either to a restaurant or a friend’s house for dinner, or a party.
4. We usually “graze” one night- which could be sandwiches or Trader Joe’s meals, or just a baked potato if we had a big lunch.

With this method, I usually only end up cooking 3 times a week, which makes it much more fun and creative and much less of a chore or drudgery. I realize it wouldn’t work for everyone, but it works quite nicely for us.

By: Franci

Franci — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:10:02 +0000

I second Left-over Nights. I usually cook a bit more than we need, and either freeze it or eat it later in the week.