I think it's high time I made a non-book post, lest people start thinking that all I ever do is read. Don't worry - I've still got some great book reviews in the wings - but now is the time to talk about something else for a minute.
(If you don't have the time or patience to read my rant, go ahead and skip to the big bold underlined part that says "This is what I ended up doing.")
Food. We humans spend an awful lot of our lives dealing with food. I think the stay-at-home-mom spends more time on it than most other people. We shop for it, working to get bargain prices whenever possible, matching coupons with sales, working the case lot sales and so on. I do this every week. Then we prepare it, serve it, eat it, and clean up after it. Then we do it again. Three times a DAY, sometimes more. It does get old sometimes. And that is an understatement.
To keep the food cycle in my life from becoming an utter drudgery, I try new recipes constantly. There is something really exciting to me about trying new things, even if it's only slightly different from something I have tried before. Trying new recipes all the time has also made me into a not-so-shabby cook! Trial by error proves to be a very effective teacher. And I'll tell you what, a few that-was-really-weird-and-not-yummy's are totally worth the eventually resulting THAT-WAS-AMAZING!!!'s. To me, they are, anyway.
Thank goodness I have a husband who will eat anything, but who is also very honest and will tell me whether a certain recipe was a keeper or not.
So this all brings me to the point of my post today.
Meal planning.
I have never been good at it. Growing up (and still, I'm sure), my mom was the queen of meal planning. Meals are planned a week in advance - what meal, what recipe, what day. Me and my siblings would joke that mom could completely mess us up if she were to make the wrong breakfast on the wrong day of the week. Seriously. Monday Wednesday Friday - oatmeal. Tuesday Thursday - pancakes. Saturday - waffles. Sunday - oatmeal, with cold cereal as sort of a "dessert." For dinner, my mom works off of a list of certain recipes, rarely deviating from that list. Some dishes we would eat at least once a month, others not quite as often. The advantages of that include something very important: the fact that if you make the same things all the time, you always know what ingredients you need to stock up on, and you are able to have almost everything you need for almost any of your recipes at almost any given time. (I use all the almosts, because there are always exceptions here and there).
There's nothing wrong with that. But I guess growing up that way, that's how I thought meal planning had to work. And try as I might, I could not think of a reasonable way to incorporate meal planning with my love for trying new things.
For years - almost seven now, if I think about it - I have stumbled through this routine of shopping the sales (so I have lots of ingredients that were a good value, but generally don't have lots of relationship to each other) and then every day at 4 or 5 pm, scrambling to find a recipe that uses the ingredients I have on hand. Obviously it didn't work too badly, because otherwise I wouldn't have kept it up for so long. I have learned a lot about substituting ingredients during that time, which is an excellent skill to have.
Still, the bigger my kids get, the busier I get, and the harder it is to find time every day to figure out what exactly I'm going to make for dinner and how I'm going to get it on the table. Around the beginning of this year, I realized it was time to change my habits.
I went to pinterest for inspiration. I didn't find what I was looking for. There are a million cute meal planners out there, with cute printables and adorable ways to display it in your kitchen. But they ALL work off of the principle that you must have a list of 30 or more recipes which you use to plan your meals with. Tacos - Monday, spaghetti- Tuesday, pizza - Wednesday and etc. I have to have more flexibility than that.
A really smart and efficient lady who used to be in my ward had a cool idea of keeping a list of your recipes on the inside of your pantry door, keeping all of the ingredients you need for those recipes stocked up at all times, and then you can just make whichever of those you want any night of the week, no advance planning needed. Definitely more flexible and more my style. But I still had the problem of - how do I put recipes I have never tried - and even ones that I don't yet know exist - on a list like that? And then when I do use a new recipe, and don't like it, I have to cross it off the list, and then what? The balance of the universe is fried! The plan has failed! Right?
I needed something which gets me organized without overwhelming me.
This is what I ended up doing:
I have two lists.
List #1 = Meals. This is a checklist. Every time I see a new recipe that I want to try, or think of an old recipe I want to make again, I put in on the list. If it's a new one, I add where the recipe was found so I can find it again.
List #2 = Groceries. This is a shopping list. When I add a new recipe, I look through it to see what ingredients I do not already have in the house or will need to replace in the pantry and add them to the list.
Every Tuesday, I take some time to sit down and go through the lists. If I don't have seven meals on the meal list, I go through my cook books, magazines, and pinterest to get as many as I need.
Then I update my shopping list accordingly.
Then I compare my list with the weekly grocery store ads and add all of my pantry staples that are on sale to the list.
Wednesdays, I go shopping. Sometimes I can put it off until Thursday.
Every morning (or evening, as it may be), I look at my meal list and choose something from it that will be for dinner that night, knowing that I will have the ingredients I need on hand even if it is a new recipe. It is completely flexible, so if I want to, I can change my mind fairly late in the game. There is no monday, tuesday, wednesday on the list. Only meals. If I start thawing out meat for a certain recipe and a friends calls and invites us over for a barbeque, I can throw the meat in the fridge and make the same thing tomorrow without disrupting the balance of the universe.
After I have made a recipe on the meal list, I cross it off.
Some weeks I plan for 9 meals so that the next week, I only have to do 5. I'm thinking about trying to do even more than that.
If I need to buy an uncommon perishable ingredient for a recipe, I try to either use it all in one night, or use another recipe with the same ingredient that week as well.
The ingredients that are on sale that week help me to choose recipes for the next week. Mushrooms are on sale? Well, I'll buy some now and then next week we'll have some kind of stir-fry one day and loaded chicken another day. I can use recipes I already have for those dishes or find new ones.
I make these lists on my phone. I have a shopping list
app for the shopping list (crazy how that works), and a simple checklist
app for the meal list. That way, they are always with me when I go
grocery shopping. Now, there is no reason that you have to do this on a
phone. They could be on the fridge, in a notebook, whatever. But they
have to be accessible and portable, and if you do have a smartphone,
there's no reason to not make good use of it.
It is all flexible, and kind of spontaneous without being crazy. I can rest my mind knowing that I'm not going to be banging my head on the pantry door tonight trying to figure out what to make for dinner. I can stop nagging my husband (sorry hun, love you) to give me an idea of what sounds good to him. (He always says "anything is good" which is great, but not helpful). There is peace and order in my life, all without giving away my freedom to try new things. It really is a major breakthrough for me. I am having fun with my food while being organized, without conforming to the world's view (or at least the American stay-at-home-supermom-blogger-lady view) of what a menu plan should look like.
I know that works for a lot of people. If you are one of those people, good for you. You get to use super cute menu plan printable thingys if you want! I don't. It's a personality, right brain/left brain kind of a thing, I think.
What can I say, I'm such a rebel.
And after reading all that, you're probably just thinking, "whew, I always knew that girl has issues . . ."
But seriously. If anything I have said here helps even one person even one little bit, then I have accomplished my goal in writing it down here.
