One Pot Meals

My daughter was born in October and I'm getting ready to go back to work in 10 days. Who's counting you might ask? Me. And although I really enjoy my job and my fantastically smart and creative coworkers, I, like most new moms, am apprehensive about going back and being able to balance everything I did before with all of the new adventures that come with having a family.

For example, it's always been important to me to provide me and my husband with fresh, home cooked meals a few times a week, then the rest of the week we eat left overs and limit our eating out to Fridays and Saturdays. Now I'm asking myself how am I going to be able to still accomplish this without becoming so stressed I break out in hives?  I've figured out at least two things that will certainly help, without making my weekends rote and errand-filled. First,  organizing my grocery shopping so that it's becomes a brief outing before picking the kid up from daycare will save some time and not cost me my weekends. Second, the more I can combine protein with vegetable and starch in one pot meals, the less time I'll have to spend prepping a meal.


With the 1 pot meal as my guiding light, I made Jambalaya. Using Stephanie O'Dea's recipe for Big Bayou Jambalaya as a foundation, I made some tweaks to fit what was in my pantry and fridge:

Cooking instructions
Take the below ingredients and toss them all into your medium to large size crock pot. Cook on low for 4 hours, serve over brown or white rice.

Ingredients:
1 lb boneless skinless chicken cut into 1" pieces
1 package of Honeysuckle White Polish Turkey Sausage (gluten free)
1/2 bag of frozen corn
1 small yellow onion peeled and roughly chopped
6 tsp of chopped garlic
1-28oz can of crushed tomatoes (Italian seasoned)
1 quart chicken broth
1.5 c of water
1/2 c of spicy brown mustard
2 TBSP of gluten-free Worcestershire sauce
1-3 "shakes" of red pepper flakes (to taste)
2 pinches of thyme
2 pinches of dried parsley
1/3 of a bag of thawed peeled shrimp (add in the last 30 minutes of cooking,)

This recipe garnered me the two servings for dinner tonight, plus 4 servings as leftovers which will give us at least two more meals. A few more meals like that over the coming weeks and eating semi-fresh will be the least of my worries once I go back to work. Not to mention less time at the sink spent washing dishes.