This post is part of a series on Planning Meals: part 1 | part 2
Okay imagine this scenario: you are completely exhausted from a long day of work, you pick up your kids from school and you are about to eat the steering wheel you are all so hungry. Is there any food at home? Questionable. You drive to the grocery store and walk like a zombie through the shelves. You are trying to plan a meal, keep up with your kids, and probably by now your temper is starting to flare. You check out with a hodgepodge of food, mostly frozen dinners and prepackaged cardboard trying not to think about when the last time was that you stepped into the produce section and actually bought something.
You head home ready to scream, cry, or maybe both and throw dinner together. The outcome is passable, but the overwhelming feelings of frustration, anger, and exhaustion has worn you thin. Where were the happy dinners of your childhood? Where were the romantic encounters of your life before marriage/kids/change?
Sound familiar? Take heart, you are not alone. Most women these days are overburdened and cannot cope with the amount of responsibility placed upon them. Dinnertime seems to be the straw that often breaks the camels back. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can plan meals and eat relatively healthy dinners most nights efficiently without a need for tears or hysterics. How do you accomplish this monumental task? By thinking, planning, and then executing dinner with tactical strategies.
First off lets just think about meals. Grab a pad of paper and a pen and jot down all the foods you are unwilling to eat. There is no sense making food you don’t even like. Next, find each member of your family (when they are not busy) and ask about the foods they won’t eat. With regard to children and vegetables, allow them to pick two or three vegetables that they hate the most and respect those food choices. I don’t think anyone could force me to eat asparagus as an adult, and making me eat it as a kid is just a cruel hazing ritual. Go to your husband too and ask for his food preferences. Most women would forget this step and seem to completely forget that their husbands might be picky eaters too. Just because he is an adult doesn’t mean he will eat everything!
Now make a list of your families favorite foods. It might help to talk about this over dinner when you are all together at one time. Don’t just assume that the meals you have been making have been enjoyed by everyone. I can remember being crushed when my husband informed me that my favorite grilled salmon (that he had seemed to enjoy) was disgusting and he did not ever want to eat it again. My own mother made the nastiest meatloaf in the world and no one ever told her it was disgusting. Instead of hurting her feelings, we just choked desert dry, cardboard like meatloaf down our throats until we couldn’t take it anymore. Don’t take offense to your families feelings. The truth is preferable to lies and how would you feel, years later, to find that your family universally thought you a bad cook incapable of making anything even remotely palatable?
Once you have a list of favorite meals ask your family how often they would be willing to eat that meal. My husband and I love to eat red beans and rice, but we can really only eat that dish once every two weeks or we get sick of it. Try to come up with some standards, like spaghetti or lasagna that you can make weekly with no problem. It helps if these standards have similar ingredients but different tastes. If you can’t seem to find things that are similar, at least attempt to find meals that have the same meat. I like to trade between poultry one week and beef the next. This makes buying meat easier (and less likely to be wasted) because you can buy several packages of the meat cuts you like and then freeze them.
Okay, so now you have a pretty well defined list. Make sure most meals are complete, meaning it comprises at least a meat dish, one vegetable dish, and another side. Not all meals need to be this involved, but it helps to have a complete plan for what each meal involves. Here is an example of my food lists for two weeks worth of dinners:
Week 1
Spaghetti, salad, garlic bread
Red Beans and Rice, bread
Meat and bean Burritos, lettuce and tomatoe, guacamole
Various sides: green beans, corn, mac and cheese
Week 2
Gumbo, bread
Stir-Fry
Roasted Chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans
Grilled Hotdogs, corn, baked beans
Okay, so week 1 for me is obviously my beef week and week 2 is my chicken week. Look at my sides. Notice that I have almost the same sides for both weeks. This makes shopping easier too. Because I am buying pretty much the same produce every week, even if I forget my list I know I am going to need salad, avacados, potatoes, green beans, and corn. I know this seems really involved and maybe even a little overboard in planning. Trust me, it pays off. There is nothing worse than realizing halfway through making a dinner that you need to run to the store for something. My system tries to elliminate that potential.
This post is part of a series on Planning Meals: part 1 | part 2
