Surviving a kitchen remodel

It’s been busy around here, with one project in particular eating up lots of our time: we’re remodeling our kitchen.

We’re replacing almost everything: cabinets, counters, floor, lights, some appliances.  After a wild few weeks of decision-making – which we survived somehow, even though, under normal circumstances, we could have spent that long deciding about any one thing, never mind picking out everything at once – the builders started working this week.

So, while our kitchen looked like this last week…

… after one day of demolition, this is what we have left:

Goodbye, kitchen. There’s basically nothing left. I always find it a little disturbing to see behind the walls in my house – it’s a reminder that the structure I think is so solid is really just a few boards and some drywall.  Fortunately, they’ve already started patching up the walls, and any day now it’ll start to look like a room again.

Living kitchen-less hasn’t been so bad, though. We put a lot of thought into how to deal with it, and 4 days in, it’s working all right. We set up a mini-kitchen in our living room: fridge in one corner, and next to it, a little kitchen cart holding our microwave, toaster oven, plates, silverware, glasses, and a few useful odds and ends.

We did some cooking in advance to help us through. The weekend before we had to pack everything up, we spent a day baking empanadas (stuffed with potatoes and cheese) and spinach pies. We froze them, and we’ve been reheating them in the toaster oven for dinners. They are super tasty, especially the spinach pies, and filling enough that two count as dinner.

Will we get sick of them?  Probably.  The question is how long it’ll take. The builder has told us it’ll be 8 business days to get it all done.  My ever-cheerful friends and coworkers have used this to make their own predictions, ranging from 10 days to a month.  (If it takes a month, I swear I’ll be eating catfood before it’s over. It had better not take a month.)

So depending on how long it takes, here’s our strategy for feeding ourselves while we have basically no kitchen:

1. Homemade freezer food. So far, the spinach pies and empanadas are just fine. We will eat them until we’re sick of them.
2. Pre-packaged freezer food. We’ve already made a preliminary trip to Trader Joe’s, and stocked up on a few handy, microwave-friendly dinners.
3. Mooching. Last night, we had a great dinner with some friends at their house, which has such great amenities as a working stove.  I’ll make an open offer here: anyone who wants to make dinner for us while we’re kitchen-less, I will return the favor once our kitchen is done.
4. Restaurants. This is the most expensive choice, and the one that we’re trying not to do too much. But as long as we can’t really cook, we might as well enjoy some good dinners out.

We won’t starve. We might even have fun with it. But, in all seriousness – any suggestions of good freezer food we should try?