Okay. So I have a disclaimer right off the top: the practice shown in this Works For Me Wednesday post is actually not a practice for me. Not in the "past" practice sense. This is my first time doing it but I can see how it could/will work for me. So with that said, my WFMW post is about preparing in advance. (Is that redundant? Can you just pare?)

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, April (and hopefully subsequent months) is a personal Make It Instead challenge for me as far as the kitchen goes. This current week, I also have a meal plan in place. Given those two challenges (I’ve fallen off the meal plan wagon before), I decided to mix up, in advance, the dry portion of two of the things I will be making this week and in the future.

I have found a wonderful bread recipe over at Everyday Food Storage*. I love this recipe so much that I plan to never buy bread again. Ever. That’s a baby-step goal though. One loaf at a time. I’ve made this recipe a handful of times and have learned that one loaf at a time is enough for me. It’s just my son and I here so one loaf easily lasts the week and, since it’s not hard to whip up a loaf of bread, I prefer to make each one fresh instead of baking two and freezing the second. This morning I decided to make that even easier. Actually, I decided the other day but only executed that plan about an hour ago.

L - R: whole wheat flour (open tub), white flour, non-instant dry milk,
sea salt, wheat gluten, and potato flour.

I used zip lock freezer bags because I didn’t have the freezer space (or the containers) to put the portions in anything else. I can re-use the bags when mixing up more too; no need to toss them after a single use. I mixed up one loaf in each of the bags, labeled them, flattened them out, and put them in my small deep freezer. I chose the freezer instead of the cupboard because, while I do keep a bit of my whole wheat flour in the tub pictured above, the large bag of it is in my freezer to keep it from going rancid. Also, I keep the jar of wheat gluten in the freezer as that is what is suggested on the back of the package. So it made sense to put the mix in the freezer as well.

Seeing as I already had the flour and measuring cups out, I also mixed up a double batch of the dry ingredients (flour, salt, and baking powder) for the tea biscuit topping I’ll be putting on the chicken pot pie that is on my meal plan for Friday. And since I was standing near the stove, I put on a pot of brown rice, which I’ll need for supper at work tonight (with my leftover chicken from Monday) and for the sweet and sour meatballs that I plan to have tomorrow night with the meatballs that I made up on Monday night. I find that my biggest challenge is finding the motivation to do the preparation, that "get off your ass and do it" thing is often a hurdle for me but once I do get off my arse, I love the results.

Try it (if you don’t already). It’s not a new concept but it does work. Or, I can definitely see how it will. And head over to We Are That Family and check out what works for over 215 other people.

* It seems that every other blog post I put up has a link to her and a resulting trackback on her site. At what point does it get annoying?