Double work makes life easier?

I picked up The Working Wives' (Salaried or Otherwise) Cook Book (Theodora Zavin and Freda Stuart, 1963) in part just because I like the way the title nods to the way our society tends to undervalue care work. Work is hard-- whether it's paid or not! Of course, I also wanted to see how the gimmick played out, as this book tells how to make dinner the night before so there's not a lot to do when the titular wife and/or other family members get home. The writers are skeptical of the "quick" cookbooks, as they note in the introduction, because the books attempt to solve the problem of mom coming home at the same time as everybody else by relying heavily on recipes that "revolve around canned cream of mushroom soup to which you add meat, fish, or chicken. The dishes are quick and economical, and they lend a certain harmony to your cooking. Everything tastes like cream of mushroom soup." For me, that line is worth the price of admission alone-- and that's a good thing because the recipes are, for the mot part, pretty boring. A lot of them simply consist of cooking a roast or chicken with vegetables (or sometimes canned fruit) in the evening while/ after the family eats the dinner prepared the previous night, popping the precooked food in the fridge, and then reheating it in the oven for dinner the next day. Unsurprisingly, there is no cream of mushroom soup-- usually just meat and veggies with a gravy made of the drippings, or sometimes a tomato-based sauce. That's why today I'm doing one of my Menus of Mayhem-- with one of the more interesting main dishes, plus sides.

If the cook is not interested in cooking yet another slab of meat with potatoes, carrots, and onions before heading off to bed, there's a recipe for Tropikabobs.

The night before can be a craft festival and give the oven a rest! Just thread ham, canned pineapple, and canned oranges onto skewers and cook up a little sugar-juice-mustard sauce to go with them. Then the next night, all you have to do is broil the skewers and baste them with the reheated sauce. (Of course, the skewers are supposed to be served on  a big platter of rice. No word on how that magically materializes for the harried cook.)

The authors note that as long as there's a solid main dish, it's fine to serve canned veggies as the side. Acknowledging that canned veggies are not particularly appealing, they offer a few ways to perk up the soggy, vaguely metallic mush.

Just throw some buttered bread crumbs, crumbled hard-cooked eggs, crumbled bacon, or sautéed onions and/or mushrooms on/ in them. Problem solved!

The family probably expects bread with dinner, so there's even a night-before recipe for Mushroom Biscuits.

Chiseling the tops out of frozen biscuits with a grapefruit knife is the perfect companion activity to threading ham and fruit onto skewers! (I have to admit that biscuits with a buttery mushroom sauce baked right in sound pretty good.) Good luck baking the biscuits at the same time the Tropikabobs are broiling, though, unless you're lucky enough to have a double-oven kitchen!

I'm not entirely sure that the answer to the dinner rush was to make two dinners a night-- reheating the one from the previous night and putting together tomorrow's-- instead of just one. I've got to give Zavin and Stuart creativity points for trying to make life easier by doubling down on the work, though.