It might be easier and less stressful on both of you if you just took the frozen food out of the freezer the night before and put it in the fridge to thaw. It could be warmed more quickly if thawed in the fridge overnight.

Here is my take on some foods to freeze:

rice - freeze two portions in zip bag, lay flat in freezer

pasta - undercook the thicker types, for best results separate pasta and sauce with wax paper

potatoes - do not freeze well except for mashed potatoes

meatloaf - either cut slices of cooked meatloaf, wrap then freeze or make muffin or mini meatloaves, cool, wrap, label, freeze - warm in the microwave

pot pie - make the filling, cool, top with pastry, freeze, then cook from frozen which will cook pastry too

Look in the freezer section of your store for foods that freeze well, then make your own favorite recipes on the weekend. If there is just the two of you, you could make 3 or 4 different recipes of 4 portions each and freeze them. If you do this every weekend, you will soon have a good mix of home frozen dinners in your freezer. We call them "Frozen Assets" and yes, there is a Yahoo Group for this type of cooking.

Soups
Chili
Lasagne
Mac & Cheese
French Dip Sandwich Meat
Pulled Pork
Spaghetti Sauce
Beef Stroganoff (minus the noodles)
Swedish Meatballs
Chicken Marsala

Linda

My situation is pretty similar. I only work 3 days a week, but I'm gone for 14 hours on those days, and I'm a monster if there's no food ready when I get home! The deal is, I won't complain about what he provides, as long as he provides dinner. Sometimes that means he picks up sub sandwiches or wings, sometimes it means Chinese or pizza is on the way, the rest of the time he barbeques and serves up a huge plate of meat with some asparagus on the side if I'm lucky.

Here are some of my solutions:

Slow-cooker carnitas - I cut up the meat and onions the night before and put in the insert with seasonings. It goes in the fridge overnight, he just has to turn the cooker on sometime the next day and warm tortillas and slice the avocado.

Meatloaf - I use Ina Garten's individual meatloaves recipe. They get frozen while raw, wrapped in saran wrap and placed in a Ziploc freezer bag. I thaw out 2 in the fridge the night before, he just has to put the ketchup on top and stick them in the oven.

Lasagna - leftover cooked lasagna gets cut into individual portions and wrapped and frozen the same as meatloaf. It gets reheated in the microwave.

Soups/stew/chili - frozen in Gladware containers. Thaw and re-heat in microwave.

Potstickers - I make a big batch of the Cook's Illustrated recipe, flash freeze them on a pan, then throw them in a Ziploc freezer bag. Hubby helps by making rice in the rice cooker and mixing up the sauce. I quickly cook the potstickers on the stove when I get home.

My husband isn't big on making veggies either, so I often handle that myself. He's comfortable preparing asparagus, so I buy lots of that. Also, if time is more important than money, you can buy the pre-prepped veggies at the grocery store to quickly microwave or saute at the last minute.

Chrissy

I have had terrible luck freezing meatloaf. The tomato sauce ate into the tinfoil loaf pan while it was frozen. So, when I cooked it, the juices ran out. ICK! What a mess.

Meatloaf freezes very well for me....just wrap it in plastic before the foil.
I make a meat loaf, not in a cheap foil pan but in a glass pan.
I drain the grease off and cook, slice and put individual slices in plastic sandwich baggies....then put the slices in a big freezer safe bag and freeze.
I take out as many slices as I want and either thaw in the refrig and nuke and eat...or pan fry the slices...or brown the slices on the grill.
I bet if you can find a way to make veggie cooking "creative" he might go for it....but it seems that men and veggies are not "friendly!"...it was ever thus! They grill the meat, toss a potato on the grill....and "all you have to do is a salad and a veggie"! LOL!
Linda C

Thanks everyone! Chrissy, you really do understand!!
I've tried the "remember honey you can defrost" or taking something out myself before I leave for work... but that doesn't seem to be the same for him... not sure why! I think he really likes Stauffers... more than Bizzos... (But I don't)

He's not really veggie-averse, he's more FRESH Veg challenged... He's very happy to open a can of green beans or corn and cook it on the stove top...

Maybe it's the chopping?

Anyway, I'm going to float some of these ideas by him, and see if he bites!

Thanks again :-)

I won't be much help when it comes to freezing foods since I freeze very few cooked items. Other than something like pasta sauce or meatballs, I don't like foods that have been frozen. They taste like leftovers to me. But I'll tell you what I have been doing to cut down on the time it takes to make a nice dinner on the days that I work.

I get home a little earlier than you, so I don't mind preparing dinner after I get home. Especially if it is something that is going to be cooked on the grill or something that doesn't require a long roasting or slow cooking time. I find my hour or so in the kitchen after I get home, relaxing. We usually eat between 7 and 7:30.

Moe can't cook, but he can put something in the oven or take something out of the oven. So if I want pot roast for dinner I get it browned and in the oven before I leave for work and Moe takes it out when the timer goes off. Or , last night I had a roast of pork that I prepped in the morning. SEasoning it with lots of garlic, sage and salt and pepper and all Moe had to do was put it in the oven around 4:30 so that it was almost done by the time I got home from work. While the roast was still in the oven I fixed the vegetables. Sometimes I'll peel potatoes and prep the veggies in the morning.

Same with baked potatoes. Moe loves those, so I rub them with oil and sprinkle with salt and all he has to do is put them in the oven about half an hour before I get home and by the time the rest of the dinner is ready so are the potatoes.

Yesterday morning I roasted a chicken and made gravy from the drippings and tonight I'm going to make hot chicken sandwiches. All I will have to do when I get home tonight is make the fries. And if I have time before I leave this morning I will cut the potatoes for the fries to save on time tonight.

Ann

When I bring home 5 lbs of potatoes (for twice-baked), I bake, stuff and freeze them for ''banking'' meals for the future. We make complete meals out of them by adding chopped broccoli, ham or bacon, cheese, a little sour cream and cooked onions. Since they're already cooked, we put them in the oven to heat/warm through the second time.

We also freeze cooked meatloaf slices, along with ham, brisket, pork and chicken. If you want to leave it raw so it can be thrown on the grill, in a skillet or the oven, pounding the meat flat helps it thaw faster, and putting a marinade in the bag helps things along.

A staple for us are individual casseroles of broccoli, cheese and rice (with onions), adding ham, bacon or chicken for a complete meal.

There's always a loaf of sliced and buttered garlic bread in the freeze ready to go. I do put small squares of parchment paper between the slices, so I can pull off the amount I need and pop it in the toaster, or the oven.

We freeze croissants and bacon, which makes a BLT easy to prepare.

Weekends finding us cooking a lot for the fridge and freezer, whether it's home-made waffles or pancakes for popping in the toaster, pasta salad or a casserole for the oven. That's when I cut up melons, and prep all my veggies for the week, washing and spinning the lettuce dry, and cutting carrots, celery and peppers. They're ready for tossing into a salad, or making a stir-fry, since the prep work is done. I think about how I'm going to use it for the week and cut it accordingly. (This is where meal planning for the week ahead really helps.) Here's one picture of my veggies for a week. What's nice about it is we eat it all, since it's ready to go, and nothing ever goes to waste. Forgive me for showing this picture again, for those of you who've seen it. This really works for us, when meal time rolls around but energy is flagging.

{{gwi:1539263}}

I prepared the week's meals for my in-laws for three years, and to be honest, I froze EVERYTHING. I put it all in TV type trays and froze them so they only had to thaw and heat. Even things that are not the best frozen (pasta and potatoes) were fine. I only gave them bowls of the side salads fresh for them to portion out for the week.
I have done meat loaf, spaghetti, soups, pork chops, tenderloins, sausages, just anything.
Good luck. Of course it is not as good as fresh made, but you do what you have to do. I am in the same boat. I get home late (6:00 pm or later) so hubby now does all the cooking. Fortunately, he has grown quite adventurous in the kitchen. He makes me Weight Watcher meals from my 9 WW cookbooks, but he experiments with the spices.
Maybe your hubby will get more adventurous if you spend some weekends with you and him cooking together until he "gets the hang" of it.

Anything that could be made ahead and frozen could also be (and in most cases would be better) made the night before and refrigerated, to be warmed up before serving. And even for those foods that don't suffer from being frozen, most will be better if you defrost them slowly rather than cooking them frozen. It's a lot easier to cook (or teach someone to cook) after dinner, when not hungry and under time pressure.

Cooking skills take training and practice. It's hard for inexperienced cooks to connect between cooking techniques and results. Even if they were standing next to you while you cooked, it doesn't mean that they were paying attention.

Even when an inexperienced cook can manage one or two things at a time doesn't mean that he can do several. My DH used to hate to cook because he thought he had to get several complicated dishes to the table at the same time. Once he realized that he should do no more than one dish that requires timing and learned how to assess which dishes can be kept warm, cooking became a lot easier for him.

While I was waiting for the surgery (knee, so I was barely mobile before it and really needed help), I taught DH a bunch of techniques for fresh vegetables. I showed him how peeling and cutting up vegetables affects the outcome. By keeping cooking techniques simple -- either microwaving (with a sensor, so you just hit the fresh vegetable setting) or sauteing. That way he could see what it looked and smelled like when it was done, and that you don't need to grill to brown foods to enhance flavors. I showed him how to vary the seasonings. For example, for fresh broccoli, how just changing a small amount of oil from olive to sesame can make it taste different. The important thing, especially with men, is to focus on a result and then show them how to achieve it rather than give them a list of steps. While I was recuperating DH reached the point where he was experimenting with herbs!

However, learning to cook creatively may lead the OP's DH to cook to his own taste. If all she wants is someone to follow orders, she is safer if he stays ignorant.

When my children were younger, my Dad lived with us. I was travelling a lot and hubby was working 12 hour days. To be sure everyone ate healthy meals; I spent most of my weekends at home preparing meals for the week. My Dad was in his early 80's but was always looking to help so he volunteered to help by cooking dinner. He loved to cook on the grill but his other cooking skills were lacking. Vegetables were blaspheme and microwaves were new fangled gadgets. My solution was I would prep the fresh vegetables for the week, blanch them, then wrap in foil in varying combinations plus herbs/spices and a little olive oil, butter or broth. I marked all the packages "Veggies". The only instruction Dad had to follow was "Grab a veggie pack out of the freezer and throw it on the grill when you throw the meat on." The kids loved the surprise of mystery veggies and Dad loved the convvenience and not having to choose a vegeatble for dinner.