I didn’t sew today (or this week) but today I cooked. More specifically I cooked this afternoon and evening as I went shopping this morning.
Last night I cooked pumpkin with vegetable stock in the slowcooker. This afternoon I cooked potatoes, fried some onion and added the pumpkin mixture. This made 7 large serves of soup. I had one for dinner and here are the others ready to go in the freezer.
With the remainder of the pumpkin I sliced it up, brushed with a mixture of oil and balsamic vinegar and roasted it. I will use the roasted pumpkin slices on pizzas for dinner on Tuesday night. Two trays ready to go in the oven.
Once the pumpkin mixture was finished in the slow cooker I cooked the chickpeas which had been soaking over night to make hummus.
The next thing into the slow cooker was honey soy chicken. 8 chicken thigh fillets, 3 tablespoons honey and 2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce. Once the chicken was cooked I removed the pieces with a slotted spoon and poured the juice into a small saucepan and thickened it with arrowroot. 4 serves ready to freeze.
After the chicken was done I washed the slow cooker then added kidney beans to make refried beans which you can find in this blog post.
I make my own gluten-free pizza bases and normally make enough for 6 bases and freeze them. There were none in the freezer so it was time to make another batch. Here is the dough divided into pieces. The first 2 bases were already in the oven by the time I took the photo.
Here are 6 pre-cooked bases ready to be bagged and frozen. I use opened out cereal packets to separate things that I am freezing. The dividers can be washed and re-used many times.
I picked lemons and made lemon cordial. You can read more about it here.
I also made more butter mixture and 8 serves of chilli con carne (no photo) as well as dividing up the meat which I bought and packing it into the freezer.
Cooking and preparing meals is a never-ending task but it is good to have a few meals and ingredients prepared to make the job a bit easier each evening.
organised castle 
Oh you lucky thing being able to fit all that pumpkin into an oven! It looks lovely and I guess the balsamic gives it a lovely finish.
Yes, I am lucky to have a full-size oven. The balsamic/oil mixture really adds to the flavour of the pumpkin. It is especially nice when using it on a pizza.
So many good tips in this post. Thanks Fairy.
My pleasure. I sometimes forget to mention some of the things I regularly do that might prove useful to others. Thanks for your comment.
I love the idea of cooking and preparing ahead but tend to do more thinking than actually doing, so I am very impressed with your post. I would love your gluten free pizza base recipe if you would like to share. Thanks. Julie
Thanks, Julie. I can tend to think rather than do as well but I just got going yesterday and dived in. I will do a separate post on the pizza bases – hopefully tomorrow.