A return to menu-planning for January

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)   

Tuesday (daughter helper with veggies)

• 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)

Wednesday (daughter helper with fruit salad)

• ham slices, fruit salad, corn pudding, roasted carrot sticks (ham from freezer, corn pudding made with canned corn) 

Thursday (son helper with serving dinner while I take daughter to dance class)

• pumpkin-ham soup, cornbread (make extra soup and cornbread for lunches next day), frozen fruit cobbler (do double batch for tomorrow's dessert)

Friday (kids cook)

• 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

Saturday

• 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.

Flavored Water to Make for Pennies

New Years . . . resolutions . . . get healthy . . . drink less soda and more water . . . could do that . . . but water gets boring . . . enter flavored waters

So, those bottles of water with flavorings and vitamins added are all so tempting. Also a bit pricey, if you make them a habit. To get myself and my family drinking more water, while making it interesting in the process, I make my own flavored waters.

This time of year (in the Northern Hemisphere), oranges are a natural for flavoring water. They're economical, readily available, and easy to prepare for a pitcher of water.

I start with filtered water in a 2-quart pitcher.

I wash 1 orange with a drop of liquid dish detergent (you can also do a vinegar soak if you're concerned about any possible residue from dish detergent), and rinse well.

I slice off the ends of the orange, cut into thin slices, and add to the water. I allow the water to sit at room temperature for about an hour, then chill. Serve in about 2 hours. That's it.


And since I'm a waste not, want not kind of gal, when the water is finished, and I'm left with my water-logged slices of orange, I drain them in a strainer for 10 minutes, run through my blender, and make Sunshine Muffins (a muffin recipe that calls for a whole orange, peel and all). I used seedless, navel oranges. If my oranges had seeds, I'd have picked them out before pureeing.

My homemade flavored water tastes lovely, has some vitamin C (from the orange slices), and with my oranges bought on sale for 48c/lb, the two-quart pitcher of flavored water cost about 25 cents, including the cost of the filtered water.

I like to up-cant the waters to bottles with caps. After a few hours of steeping, I use a funnel to pour the water from the pitcher, into a repurposed cider bottle (a wine bottle would also look nice). This keeps my water fresh-tasting (doesn't pick up odors from the fridge) and frees up my pitcher for a new flavor. An up-canted bottle of water, wrapped wine steward-style in a napkin, is lovely enough to leave on the table through dinner.

Orange is my personal favorite this time of year. But there are so many other possibilities for homemade flavored waters. Here's a list of ingredients to start with:

watermelon (cut into chunks)
cantaloupe (cut into chunks)
raspberry (crush with the back of a fork)
strawberry (crush with the back of a fork)
blackberry (crush with the back of a fork)
grapefruit (slice whole)
lemon (slice whole)
lime (slice whole)
pineapple (peel and slice, or use just cores)
kiwi (peel and slice)
cucumber (peel, if waxed, and slice thin)
mint (crush with wooden spoon in pitcher before adding water)
rosemary (crush with wooden spoon in pitcher before adding water)
basil (crush with wooden spoon in pitcher before adding water)
thyme (crush with wooden spoon in pitcher before adding water)
ginger root (peel, then slice thin, crush gently with wooden spoon before adding water)


Try mixing an herb and a fruit, such as basil and lemon, or pineapple and mint. Mix a few fruits, such as crushed raspberries and lemon slices. Add cucumber slices to cantaloupe and kiwi. Fresh ginger root is a delightful addition to lemon flavored water. If your family would prefer, try doubling the fruit, such as two sliced oranges.

A few tips:
Crush berries before adding to the water. Peel waxed cucumbers, fresh ginger root slices, pineapple slices and fuzzy kiwis. If you have a whole pineapple, peel, slice and core to use as normal, saving all the tough cores for a pitcher of water. Crush fresh herbs gently with  a wooden spoon to release the essential oils into the water.

What if you don't have any fresh fruit on hand. Can you use canned fruit? Absolutely! The two canned fruits that work the best for this purpose are canned pineapple and mandarin oranges. Add these fruits to the bottom of a pitcher and crush with a wooden spoon briefly before adding water. The canned fruit isn't as flavorful as fresh, so the crushing extracts flavor to compensate.

Can dried herbs be subbed for fresh? I've only tried this with dried mint. What I did was place about a half-teaspoon of dried mint in a small dish with water, and allowed to sit overnight. The next day, I added the re-hydrated mint leaves to my pitcher of lemon water.

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Homemade flavored water is not only a penny-pinching alternative to commercial flavored waters, but there's less waste (plastic bottles -- see below), and there are no impossible-to-pronounce ingredients. And as a bonus, I can hardly keep up with the demand for this water. My kids drink about as much of it as I do. We are drinking much more water, and much less punch, soda, coffee and tea. (The only downside to all of this water consumption comes in the middle of the night!)

**Americans, alone, buy over 29 billion bottles of water per year, flavored and plain combined. To make all those plastic bottles, 17 million barrels of crude oil are used! And only 1 in 6 plastic bottles make it to the recycling center. Yeah, hard to fathom, isn't it?