Shabbos in One Hour

A few weeks ago I prepared our entire Shabbos in less than one hour.

shabbos_one_hourAs usual, our menu was super simple. I pulled some stuff out of the freezer and bought some. As soon as I got home from work I started my cooking. The kids stayed up a little later than usual and all the food was in the oven or on the stove by the time I put them to bed.

This was our menu:

Friday Night:

  • Gefilte fish
  • Turkey legs
  • Zucchini in tomato sauce
  • Potato kugel (store-bought)

Shabbos Lunch:

  • Gefilte fish
  • Chicken cutlets with BBQ sauce
  • Broccoli kugel (freezer)
  • Sweet potatoes

And here’s how I did it.

I started with cooking the things that take the longest first.  In this menu it was the gefilte fish.

  1. I put up the gefilte fish on the stove to cook.
  2. Then I made the sweet potatoes.  All I did was wrap them in foil and put them in the oven.
  3. Next I cut up my zucchini, dumped it in a pot with tomato sauce.
  4. While the other dishes were cooking I put some BBQ sauce on my chicken cutlets and put them in the oven.
  5. Last, but not least I prepared my turkey legs and put them in the fridge.  I figured we could have them fresh out of the oven on Friday night.

With the potato kugel and broccoli kugel already made- that was it.

While the food cooking I was able to put my kids to bed, shower and prepare school lunches for the next day.

I couldn’t believe I was able to pull this off in such a short amount of time, so I wanted to share it with you. Now that I’ve done this once, I’ve been challenging myself to make Shabbos in one hour every week and hope to share my plans with you.  It’s not as hard as I thought it would be!

I hope this inspires you to find a way to prepare for Shabbos in one hour.

How long does it take you to prepare for Shabbos every week?

Until next time,
Shaindy

6 Comments

  1. Really love this post. I always wonder how people actually make their Shabbos menus happen. Doing everything in an hour (or less!) sounds impossible for me, but I’ll take as close to that as I can get. What about dessert, by the way? Did you skip it?

    • Unlike you, I really don’t ever bake… wish I did! Don’t worry- we never skip dessert, it’s just usually store-bought cake or pareve ice cream.

    • Unlike you, I really don’t ever bake… wish I did! Don’t worry- we never skip dessert, it’s just usually store-bought cake or pareve ice cream.

  2. Wow, a year or so back I hosted a Shabbos dinner for the first time, I started preparing the Sunday before (I work normal business hours) and by Thursday called my mother crying. She had to give me a pep talk on how Judaism is very democratic and has room for all kinds of people and next time I should buy the challah at the store. This is impressive!

Comments are closed