Malka Feder shows us how to make delicious food, without being enslaved to the stove

Job: Secretarial

Lives: Monsey

Cooking for: Four (sometimes my marrieds or other relatives pop in, or the grandchildren come).

My cooking philosophy

I

make a menu for four nights of suppers, then print out recipes, and a shopping list of all ingredients for my weekly Monday morning grocery run. Then I don’t have to think. Even better, sometimes my sister and I exchange our four-day menus and shopping lists, so I only have to think of four suppers and have eight. Since I work, I use both my oven and my crockpot on a delayed start timer, so we can have a hot supper ready in the evening.

Average time I spend cooking supper:

Less than an hour. I put all ingredients on the counter, and set the kitchen timer for when I need to come and do the next step in the recipe.

If someone doesn’t like supper:

They are welcome to make themselves a sandwich. But I’ll tell you what my married daughter did when her kids were complaining and picky about suppers — she served only peanut butter sandwiches for a week. Now they eat the normal food again!

The favorite supper in my house:

Meatballs goes down very well, so do fried cutlets, and so does anything with pasta, like penne a la vodka, lasagne, and baked ziti. I do whole wheat pasta, I don’t like to use white.

When I’m too tired to cook:

I buy bagels and sliced turkey. (It’s fresher from behind the meat counter than prepackaged.) But I still set the table with cutlery and napkins, a pitcher of juice and cups. Then it feels like supper! When my kids were little, I used to take a soup out of the freezer and serve it with peanut butter sandwiches for supper on the days when I couldn’t do more, and they remember those suppers fondly.

Sunday: Takeout

I don’t cook. Either we eat takeout, or I get bagels and turkey slices. Add the ketchup and mustard, slices of beef tomato and sour pickles, and you have a delicious supper.

Monday: Chicken cutlets

Soup, fried chicken cutlets, mashed potatoes, broccoli. Or spiced cutlets, potatoes, and green beans in the Betty Crocker, completely ready in half an hour.

Tuesday: Crock pot supper

Either dark chicken nuggets with celery, potatoes, peas, and squash, seasoned with spices and a squirt of salad dressing, or meatballs, with grated squash hidden in the sauce. I just add lokshen after coming home from work.

Wednesday: Milchig /pareve night

Salmon, brown rice or quinoa. Salad. Shakshuka or ziti for the kids.

Thursday: Roast Chicken

Shabbos soup, chicken bottoms with cubed sweet potatoes, farfel, coleslaw. Baked apples.

In the winter, I make big pots of soup when I have cleaning help to help me peel. Then I freeze and can take out a container or two as needed. My regulars are butternut squash soup, vegetable bean soup, and barley soup. During the summer, we leave out soup and go for watermelon, cantaloupe, or honeydew instead. Sometimes I serve a half grapefruit for desert, it’s full of Vitamin C.

I have a shakshuka recipe without sugar — you don’t have to put sugar in suppers! We skip the cayenne pepper, too.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 980)