Saturday was our lazy day for the weekend. In the morning I finished the most recent jigsaw puzzle I’ve been working on (I had to go dig around and unpack them once I got a yen to make a few. I’d forgotten just how much I like doing jigsaw puzzles). We lounged around and read books and pet cats. We went out in search of new slippers for me (did not find any) and instead bought a new undercoat brush for the cats because, like the toaster and the battery recharger, this, too, disappeared in the move. We sat at the dining room table with a stack of cookbooks and recipes and picked out a pile to try, and then did a massive grocery shopping trip. We ate dinner out at a little local bistro – wild mushroom pizza for me and a thick cheeseburger for him – and splurged on pear cobbler and flourless dark chocolate torte for dessert.

Sunday was the day for working. The last massive freezer-stocking spree worked out so well we decided to give it another shot. This time around I tried to do better about making a comprehensive grocery list (and yet still managed to completely forget to pick up two things, although this time we simply made do with substitutes from the pantry instead of doing a one-item grocery run). This time we also did a tiny bit of pre-planning. I figured out which items should be done first, by virtue of those being the ones that could be cooking in the oven while we worked on everything else. Richard peeled and shredded a mountain of onions (the house still smells of them, even the next morning) and I peeled and grated a smaller mountain of carrots. And over the course of about four hours, we managed to make 10 different dinners and one odd little carrot cake that called for a can of diet lemon-lime cola, and turned out pretty tasty, for something that more resembled a carroty sort of brownie than a cake at all. For the two of us, that’s 31 meals total (they didn’t all make the same number of servings), which isn’t bad at all for four hours of chopping and stirring and measuring and bagging and somehow, despite the extremely limited counter space in our mostly disfunctional kitchen, to stay out of each other’s way.

We left the crockpot simmering all by itself, and I covered up the one remaining meal to assemble, when Richard’s friend called and came over to see the new house. We all went out to dinner (since all the stuff we just made was already in the freezer) and by the time we came home, hours later, the stuff in the crockpot was finally done. I assembled the bean and rice and cheese wraps (I made only half the recipe, which filled the largest bowl we own and made 10 wraps, good grief) and occasionally put away another stack of dishes while Richard made his way slowly through the mountain of pots and pans and bowls and utensils we’d managed to accumulate on the counter.

In a way, even though it was sometimes tedious and the smell of onions in the beginning had both of us tearing up and leaping wildly to turn on fans and open windows, this was fun. Richard brought out his little set of speakers and his mp3 player and we listened to Jonathan Coultan, and mocked the cats who could not help themselves in their optimistic hope that one of the times they heard the can opener, it would be something for them, and not just another can of tomato sauce or beans. We made a few of the recipes from last time again, since we liked them so much, and tasted all the new ones just to make sure we liked them too. We took a short break to eat the leftover wild mushroom pizza from the night before, and try out the curious carrot brownie creation (surprisingly tasty, even though it is disconcerting to see, but not taste, the carrot in what you are eating). And as I carefully packaged up the contents of the crockpot (an amazingly delicious sloppy joe sort of concoction, but with chicken instead) and double-bagged it in case of leakage, and opened the freezer to put it away, it gave me a nice sense of accomplishment door and see all those neatly stacked bags full of healthy, delicious food that we made ourselves.