Baking day!

A week ago I put my cooking skills to the test when I had a cooking/baking extravaganza on a Saturday morning while Kody was at work. Since both of us get home relatively late, it's nice to have easy, quick things to cook for dinner. But this normally means doing some work beforehand.

Here's the master list of what I accomplished:
- Brown 2 lbs. hamburger meat
- Cut up and cook six split chicken breasts
- Make chicken broth out of chicken bones
- Make spaghetti sauce out of hamburger meat and use the rest for chili
(Do millions of dishes)
- Cut up pineapple
- Marinade frozen chicken tenderloins for later meal
- Make four batches of homemade pizza dough to freeze
(Do lots of dishes)
- Bake two loaves of banana bread
(Do lots of dishes and take a break)
- Make The Pioneer Woman's blackberry cobbler
(Leave rest of dishes to finish tomorrow)
(Sunday - Finish dishes)
(Monday - Finally finish cooking)
- Make healthy blueberry/raspberry/blackberry muffins
(Finally fully clean up the kitchen ... on Thursday night ... with the help of my hubby.)

I've heard these mass cooking days are tiring and I definitely felt it! And food didn't even sound good after I was done making everything!

Here are some of the fruits of my labor:

Two loaves of banana bread

Yummy blackberry/raspberry cobbler still in the oven. I learned what self-rising flour is too!

Four loaves of quadrupled yeast homemade pizza dough. I ran into a little problem when I quadrupled the recipe and proceeded to quadruple the yeast. My little loaves didn't like staying packed into saran wrap or the Ziploc bag I put them in. Instead, they decided to continue to grow and grow and take over the freezer. I think after a week, I have them under control. Lesson learned: Even when you quadruple (or double) a recipe, you don't need to quadruple the yeast.

And lots of action on the stove with the spaghetti sauce simmerin', the hamburger meat cookin' and the chicken boilin'.

It's definitely been nice to have this food around. We've enjoyed muffins and banana bread all week, had delicious chili for dinner and leftovers, making chicken enchiladas for dinner tonight with the chicken, have leftover spaghetti sauce for a future dinner and lots of chicken broth for future soups and recipes!