We eat dairy Shabbat morning and meat for seuda shlishit, so I have to make kugel and two meat entrees + side dishes every shabbat.

Every Friday night we have couscous – very quick to make. I microwave a combo of carrots, kishuim, onion, and cabbage to go with it. We also have either scalloped potatos or microwave baked potates – cut in wedges and seasoned with garlic powder, paprika, pepper. I roast the chickens whole and cut them after they are cooked.

Fresh vegetable salad at both meals.

We have been economizing lately so instead of a selection of purchased salads for Shabbat lunch, I now serve egg salad, plain grilled eggplant and ready-made humus (still a bargain at 10 shekel a kilo at Rami Levi).

In the summer I make potato salad and chicken salad for lunch which is actually more time consuming but refreshing after a long walk home from shul in the heat.

My children also come to me starving an hour before Shabbat starts – the problem is they (and their father) want to eat the Shabbat food!

That is funny. My kids always come into the kitchen at a crucial time looking for something to eat. When I complain about it, they say, but we haven’t eaten since breakfast (and it’s 4 o’clock). It’s sometimes really annoying to have feed your children, isn’t it?

Also, when I don’t have time to clean whole chickens, I put “basar adom” (dark turkey meat) and chicken breasts together in a pan; pour some sort of sauce (e.g. mushroom sauce) over the meat; and bake covered. (I use both types of meat, because my family is made up of both dark meat eaters and white meat eaters…)

Challah is something that I make once every 3 to 4 weeks, depending on whether there’s anyone at the meal besides family to contribute to the challah consumption, thus needing to defrost more than a loaf. I’m not a great braider, so I make my challot in the pull-apart style – one round ball surrounded by 5 to 6 smaller balls of dough in a round tray. We serve it sliced rather than pulled-apart, though.

I bake every other week or so. I prefer plain home-style cakes to bakery cakes, and the bakeries charge a fortune for challah and cake. It would sort of pain me to buy these barring a major time-pinch, and I enjoy baking.

Cooked vegetables for the night and salad for the day will vary with the season and what’s on sale, and I’m lucky to have a husband who truly loves chicken. I don’t always make chicken soup, but when I do, I freeze a couple of containers and also freeze parts of a doubled batch of matzah balls. Other soups I make are a Russian-style borsch (a hearty cabbage-beet-carrot-potato soup with a tomato base), sometimes others like carrot soup or a wild mushroom soup. If the kids ate a good bowl of soup before Shabbat starts, I’m not as concerned about their too-tired-to-eat-well state later on – it’s a meal, and mine are young so they go to bed early.

By not cooking every item every week, I find that it’s a real time-booster. If I had an extra freezer, I’d throw myself into this approach in a more regimented way and have the space to plan ahead even more!