Now where did I put my mojo?

It does funny things with you, motherhood. I used to be super-organised, never-late, ultra-ambitious. These days my attitude towards work is often lacklustre, the flat is a perma-mess and I can never find my keys (although my toddler swiping them might have something to do with that). Worst of all, I feel like I’ve lost my cooking mojo. When half of your blog is themed on food, that ain't good news. 

Lack of sleep has an awful lot to do with it. First we had weeks of teething and illness keeping us all awake. Now we all seem healthy again (shhh don’t jinx it!) but the Bean is still sleeping badly. For the past week he’s been awake at 3am every single night, bouncing up and down with excitement for up to an hour. I’m finding it rather hard to share the sentiment. Especially when he's then raring to go at 6am. Whatever juice he gets, I want me some. 

I’m hoping it’s another phase, and have resigned myself to spending my days propped up by tea and chocolate biscuits. In other aspects of my life, however, I feel I could do a bit more to help myself. I get to decide my own hours, forchrissakes. 

So here’s what I’m going to do: batch cook. 

Batch cooking is a good idea for all sorts of reasons. You have to plan it so you waste less food, save time, and have a better chance of making nutritious meals instead of reaching for any old crap when you’re knackered and out of ideas. And hopefully it will also help me get to bed (even) earlier in the evenings.

The first thing to do was to plan the week’s meals:

Asparagus soup, to eat together with Sunday’s leftover roast chicken
Pasta with butter bean, courgette and rocket pesto
Filo pie with feta, rocket and almonds
Aubergine and beef curry
Mushroom soup, to eat with poached eggs and toast
Pasta with pancetta and broccoli

Then yesterday I:

made the asparagus soup
made a start on the pesto
cut the massive hump of stewing beef I found at a reduced price into chunks and froze them (half will be used in the curry)

And today I:

finished off the pesto and froze 2 portions for another day
made the mushroom soup and froze it (half for Friday, half for another day)
chopped, steamed and froze the broccoli (it was threatening to go yellow)
mixed up a batch of muesli (so we stop eating expensive and overly-sugary cereal)

The first two meals have gone down a treat, and it's been great to have time to do other things before bed. Like, erm, blog. Hand me my mojo and my smug-mum badge!

Asparagus soup

Three portions of pesto, one to eat fresh (with Parmesan and olive oil added in) 
and two for the freezer (Parmesan and olive oil left out)

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In the hope that I'll stick to this, I'm linking up with At Home With Mrs M's Meal Planning Monday. And maybe next time I'll actually manage to post on a Monday.