Several years ago I menu-planned every week. My life was quite busy with 3 small children. Being organized kept me on the top of the rolling boulder, instead of underneath.
Somewhere along the way, my calm, thought out, once-a-week, menu-plan session, morphed into a caffeine driven, bleary eyed, madwoman on the highway mom, shouting out, "what should I make for dinner?", to the occupants of the back seat of the car, en route to said occupants' school.
Shocking as this may be, this current plan for securing a dinner menu, is no longer working terribly well for me. Life has seemed more chaotic this year than any recent year, and I have slipped to the underside of the boulder careening down the mountainside.
And so, once again, I embark upon a scheduled menu-planning session, every weekend, to see if I can simplify meal prep in my kitchen.
One aspect of menu-planning has never appealed to me -- the idea of planning my meals, then going to the grocery store to buy all the ingredients. I tend to stock my kitchen with good deals, THEN decide what I can make from it all. So, my planning style reflects this.
My three kids help with dinner preparation, weekly. They have one night per week when they work together to make dinner, and each have a night as helpers to me. Kids of all ages can be a help in the kitchen. But once they are teens, they can do so much more than be assistants.
When they are "helpers" I set aside one specific task for each, so they can know what is expected of them, and follow through. If I just have them hanging around the kitchen while I try to come up with things for them to do, I find I often am moving as fast as I am thinking, and just can't come up with tasks that make them feel productive and truly help me. So, you'll see, below, that with each helper, I have chosen a specific task, at their level of kitchen skill.
Dinner prep takes longer for my kids, at this point, so I schedule them on a night when I know they have the time to spare. Most weeks, their night is Saturday, and they begin with dinner prep around 4 PM, for a dinner hour around 6 PM.
When kids or husband help with meal preparation it really means a lot to me. It says that they appreciate what I do for them the rest of the week. A lot like having a spouse who cleans the kitchen after dinner. That is a much bigger "thank you" than words, as you home cooks can attest.
I try to "double up" on work when possible, and make extras to be used later in the week (or even month) in another dish. And about once every fortnight we have a leftovers' smorgasbord. I am trying to make weekend dinners easy for me -- a nice break from the work week.
As I said above, I plan from what I already have in the kitchen. So, this week's dinners are heavy in ham and turkey, as we're using up holiday turkey and ham from the freezer. While we have plenty of fruit in the house, for veggies I'm down to just greens like kale, broccoli, mustard greens in the garden, salad greens under lights indoors, and a handful of carrots and potatoes. My shopping list is brief, however, for this week's dinners.
need to buy: onions, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, eggs
Monday
- ham, broccoli (or kale, depends on what's in the garden still) and cheese quiche, steamed brown rice, avocado-citrus salad (make extra rice for Friday's fried rice)
- pulled turkey sandwiches on buns, carrot sticks, oven-fried potato wedges (cut extra carrot sticks for roasted carrots on Wednesday, out of bbq sauce, will make a substitution w/ ketchup, soy sauce, onions and chili powder for pulled turkey, make double batch of buns with dough in bread machine over weekend, freeze other half of buns for next week)
- ham slices, fruit salad, corn pudding, roasted carrot sticks (ham from freezer, corn pudding made with canned corn)
- pumpkin-ham soup, cornbread (make extra soup and cornbread for lunches next day), frozen fruit cobbler (do double batch for tomorrow's dessert)
- fried rice, with egg, ham, frozen mixed veggies, onion, garlic and cabbage (shred 4 cups extra cabbage for Saturday's cole slaw), plus leftover fruit cobbler
- leftover night -- take all leftover containers from freezer for smorgasbord-style dinner, serve with cole slaw (cabbage for cole slaw shredded by kids on Friday, simple dressing)
Sunday
- turkey-cream cheese-cranberry sauce sandwiches, roasted squash, pickles (turkey, cranberry sauce and roasted squash from freezer)
So, what do you think about weekly meal planning? Is it something that works for you? Do you think it saves money? What do you do when you reach a day when what you've planned just doesn't sound appetizing any more? Or are you a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of cook? Do you enjoy the flexibility of choosing what to eat the afternoon of? I GET both sides, and just want to know where you fall with regards to planning a week ahead.
