I made it!
Yesterday, in just about 11 hours, I prepared six recipes to completion, started a seventh based on leftover ingredients, and left the kitchen cleaner than it was when I began the project.
Why?
Because my darling wife loves cooking from scratch, but doesn't want to get burnt out on it, and I haven't done a lot of intense food preparation for a spell. So I offered to spend an entire day cooking as many meals as I possibly could, so neither of us would have to think about it for a few days.
How?
The day before, we bought some ingredients, loosely based on some recipes in Dr. Joel Fuhrman's books, and including some other ingredients that we just like to have around.
The morning of, I transcribed the recipes to paper using the "tabular recipe notation" showcased at Cooking for Engineers. For example, the "Veggie 'Meat' Loaf" recipe:
I then created a rough schedule for the day across two sheets of paper, with recipes in columns and each row containing actions to be taken for each recipe. The rule of thumb: nothing within each row should contend with another thing. If two ovens are needed, defer one of the recipes to a later row where the oven is no longer in use by another recipe.
The schedule was key for keeping the flow going with so much resource contention -- there's only three burners that work well on our stove, and we only have one oven, yet three recipes used the stove and three used the oven.
Here's my schedule, complete with markups as I altered it:
What?
Ingredients available when I started: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, tomato paste, barley, quinoa, brown rice, yellow split peas, garbanzo beans, red kidney beans, blackeye peas, great northern beans, oatmeal, oat flour, whole wheat flour, pastry flour, dark rye flour, lemons, tomatoes, garlic, sweet onions, red onion, yellow bell pepper, red bell pepper, raw sunflower nuts, walnuts, raw almonds, dates, raisins, jalapeños, carrots, celery, green onions, romaine lettuce, cabbage, spinach, apples
Ingredients now available: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, barley, quinoa, brown rice, blackeye peas, great northern beans, oatmeal, oat flour, whole wheat flour, dark rye flour, lemons, tomatoes, garlic, jalapeños, romaine lettuce, spinach, apples
Ingredients untouched by this project: diced tomatoes, pumpkin, brown rice, jalapeños, romaine lettuce, spinach
Prepared dishes now available for us to choose from: tons of Cabbage Raisin Soup, 4 servings Quinoa in Color (already gone!), a Veggie "Meat" Loaf, several snackfuls of Apple Walnut Surprise, 12 Whole Wheat/Rye Burger Buns, 25 Bean Burgers (and some salad crumblings from the ones that fell apart).
On the way: Something with the leftover sunflower nuts and almonds (currently soaking) and walnuts; the leftover raisins and dates (currently soaking); and canned pumpkin. My wife wants to turn it into a pudding of sorts. :)
So?
Both parents needn't worry about preparing food for some time.
I want to do this again, with regularity, helpers, more ingredients, even more food in mind, and perhaps with extended family from time to time.
This time around, I did it alone (I didn't even ask for help from my wife until all the kids were in bed!) since I had never synchronized so many food preparation tasks at once, and thought that keeping the kitchen off-limits to everyone but myself for most of the day would help keep the flow smooth (it did).
It was tremendous fun. Next time I'll have even more fun!