Happy Tuesday!  Well I had a fun Monday… not!  So I show up to work with huge plans to get some work done.  I am working away attacking my to do list and all of a sudden at 9:00am… the power goes out.  Oh dear, what can I do?  No internet, my cell phone battery is dying, and my laptop battery is on it’s last bar.  It was not shaping up to be a good day.

Anyway, I hear there is a fire at the main power sub station so we are in for the long haul.  I putter around the office for a while trying to pretend that I have work to do but really I don’t.   So after a couple of hours at the office I make my way home in hopes that the power is on there.  The good news is “the power was on” bad news is “I have a tonne of work to do”.  Off to work I went.

The weather has been nice lately and it seems like it may be a barbecue week.  I thought I would show you my barbecue and how I prepare my barbecue for the season.  Most winters I store the bbq in the garage but due to laziness I left it covered on the deck this year.  So with that said… I had to determine a good way to clean the barbecue and get it ready for grilling.  Below are some of the steps I do to ensure the grill is good to go.

When it comes time to prepare for the summer season, it’s time to start thinking about the cleaning the barbecue grill.

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Our society has forced alot of us to eat on the run or have very little time to prepare meals.  Whether your in the corporate world, busy parents with kids or just plain busy – having tips to prepare healthy quick meals is a big help.  I put together a few simple ways to be effective and cost efficient that you can try when preparing your next meal.

1. Prepare Food Immediately from the Grocery Store

Whether your chopping green peppers for stir fry or seeding and slicing a cantalope – Doing this right way and storing in ziploc bags can save you valuable time during meal preparation and also allows you to make healhier choices when you have a huge munch on.

2. Make a weekly meal plan

Check family members’ schedules before deciding which nights to cook. To increase family involvement, ask everyone to pick and schedule one family meal a week. Having a plan also makes writing shopping and “to do” lists easier.

3. Cook once, eat twice

Double favorite recipes, freezing extra servings in easy-to-thaw portions. Freeze extra cooked chicken breasts for quick salads, quesadillas, enchiladas, and soup.

4. Streamline shopping

Keep a running grocery list of items needed by category, such as breads, meats, and produce to reduce “emergency” trips for missing ingredients.

5. Get children involved in making dinner

Besides benefiting from the obvious creative aspects of cooking and the boost to their self-esteem, there are the more practical bonuses of developing math skills and learning how to eat well. Also if they are helping you with meal time – then you are not being distracted and things will move quicker.

6. Time is money

Take help where you can get it. “Sometimes it’s worth the added cents to choose raw deveined shrimp over shrimp you have to clean, or chicken cutlets over the breasts you would have to trim and split,” I also uses canned foods, such as beans, tomatoes and stocks, because of the time savings in certain situations.

7. Plug in the Slow Cooker

Although it might seem like a contradiction, slow cookers actually make quick work of getting a meal on the table. Just toss the ingredients in the cooker in the morning, and dinner is ready when you get home.

8. Keep your pantry stocked

The pantry being the building blocks of fast meals: basics such as pastas, rice, broths, stocks, canned tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, and canned beans.