Being Sara

I have been obsessing over food lately - not cravings, just recipes. Our family has a pretty good weekday schedule laid out. On Monday nights after we all get home, Zach goes grocery shopping. I’ve already prepared a list that includes meals for dinners for the coming week. It takes him about an hour, so he’s usually home around 6:30pm. Then we have to unpack the groceries and cook dinner. Understandably, dinner on Monday nights is usually later than I’d prefer, which sets the rest of the evening later for Xander and for us. Lately I’ve been on a quest for good 30-minute or less meals. For quite some time now I’ve been using Betty Crocker’s website. They have lots of features that I find useful - a virtual recipe box for me to store my favorite recipes, a one-click system to add items to a grocery list, and their site is simple and easy to navigate. They have however phased out some features that I really enjoyed in the past - there used to be a button to click if you wanted to double the recipe - it would automatically double all the numbers for you, and add them correctly to your shopping list. They also used to have this cool feature where you could select all of the food items you currently had in your kitchen, and Betty Crocker would show you the recipes you could make with what you already had. I really miss that feature… Unfortunately, I haven’t found many great 30-minute meals at Betty Crocker, and I find that the ones they estimate should take 30 minutes or less often take me an hour or more (chopping, slicing, measuring, etc.)

I began to get tired of the recipes I found on Betty Crocker and started to branch out. I found some interesting meal ideas from a Martha Stewart Blog. I can’t remember how I got there originally, but I found similar recipes under the “Quick & Easy” section. We tried a few, but didn’t find anything overly spectacular.

Then I remembered that Campbell’s Soup used to have some good recipes, so I tried their website. This week we’ve eaten a few meals from their 30-minutes or less menu. The claim that the meal prep is 30 minutes or less is actually accurate, which is nice. However, the food was less than exciting. Although, the pork chop recipe we cooked last night was a hit, so I think we’ll keep that one.

Yesterday I stumbled on a recipe catalog within parents.com.  This has some good options, though some of the spices and sauces they suggest don’t always sound that “kid friendly”.  They do have some good sorting tools - and some good links “your kid will eat these veggies“, “10 slow-cooker faves“, “kitchen to table in 30 minutes“, etc.  There is a recipe box, and the saving feature works better than the one on Betty Crocker’s site - with Betty Crocker, you click the “save recipe” link, and it automatically takes you to your recipe box, with the newest entry.  Then you have to back up to get back to where you were searching in the first place.  the Parents.com site leaves you where you are, and just changes the text from “save it” to “saved”.  It’s much easier for browsing and saving recipes.  I have not yet had a chance to try out any of the recipes from this site, though I did find several interesting ones, so we’ll see how they stand up to the family’s taste approval…

For a little while I tried using Connoisseur - a Mac based piece of software that manages recipes iTunes style. You can add your own recipes, browse recipes online, scale recipes, etc. The software worked ok, but I didn’t find lots of recipes within Connoisseur that I found interesting, and I never found the time to type in recipes that I already have. However, I think if I could someday find some time to invest in customizing Connoisseur, I could be quite happy using that exclusively.

So, on continues my search for good tasting 30-minute meals. If anyone out there has a suggestion for other sites that have good, quick and easy meals, I’d love to hear about them!

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